From Russia, with Carbon-Fiber Hull

Sitting in Puget Sound’s Quartermaster Harbor is a 75' sailboat with a storied past: built in a Sputnik factory in St. Petersburg, financed by wealthy Soviets dreaming of the 1992 America’s Cup, then scratched from the race and abandoned in San Diego. Now, nearly 15 years after it first arrived in the United States, the Age of Russia—complete with hammer, sickle and Cyrillic lettering—is about to begin another chapter in its remarkable life. Tyone Raymond, a free-spirited fisherman who lives in a cabin on the north end of Vashon Island, hopes it will become his ticket to the wayfaring life he once shared with his father chasing tuna on a 56' Roberts ketch. “We had a lot of adventures together,” he says. “I’d like to go out to sea and have a lot of adventures again.” Raymond saw the boat listed for sale on the Internet and bought it on Vancouver Island a few weeks later. It had no interior furnishings, no heat, and in Cup fashion, no engine. “It’s like sailing in the belly of a whale,” Raymond says. He and a friend sailed it from Vancouver Island to Vashon in January 2007. With short days, little wind and no motor, it took six days. Along the way, the crew got crossways with immigration officials by leaving the boat for a bite in Friday Harbor without first clearing customs. “They said, ‘How do we know you didn’t smuggle something into the country and deliver it to someone last night?’” Raymond recalls. “I said to them, ‘I have a 75' red Russian sailboat with a hammer and sickle on the side, and you think I’m going to dock at customs and deliver smuggled goods to someone?’ ... That’s when I got some laughs out of them.” The original deck was unadorned—just a flat, streamlined expanse. The boat’s carbon-fiber belly was low-ceilinged and confining. Raymond has since installed a 100-hp Volvo diesel, an electrical system, fuel tanks and a cabin top that has made the interior more spacious. The boat is also easier to handle than a race-equipped Cup boat, with a shorter mast and reduced sail area. Eventually, Raymond—who hasn’t sailed much since his father settled in Fiji—says he hopes to resume the life he and his father once led. “I’ve already sailed around the Pacific a lot and I really love it,” he says. That could mean visiting the Galapagos Islands and Marquesas in French Polynesia. “Or I could go the other direction through the Panama Canal and towards the Caribbean.”

 

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