History
Sparkman & Stephens Design No. 1212
It is rare for a yacht owner to have known his vessel for almost half a century, but it is so with AQUILA. In 1976, when she was named OTIAS and owned by Peter Reiner from Nantucket, he was part of her delivery crew for a transatlantic passage to the Azores, and then purchased her in Greece the following year. After extensive Mediterranean cruising he sailed AQUILA to the West Indies and sold her in 1982.
But AQUILA held a special place in his heart and he again purchased her in 2014 at Seal Cove Boatyard on Penobscot Bay, Maine, where she had been stored and maintained for the previous 20 years, five or six of them inside. Since then she has enjoyed his shipwright skills in maintenance and blue water experience in use, sailing extensively: down to the Bahamas and further south in 2014 and to the Bahamas again in 2018.
In testament to her oceangoing abilities, for a reasonable fee the present owner is prepared to deliver AQUILA to her new owner.
The story prior to the mid 1970s is a little unclear. At some point in her life she was named FARAWAY - but she is believed to have been commissioned as AQUILA by a member of the Ellis Drier Co. family of Chicago; possibly Hubert C. Ellis, a member of Chicago Yacht Club. A previous AQUILA owned by Ellis was the 1929 Tore Holm designed and built 30 Square Metre Skerry Cruiser known (also as AQUILA II in Toronto) on the US and Canadian lakes before and after the Second World War, which could explain the fact that the Sparkman & Stephen yawl was built, perhaps for old times' sake, at Tore Holm's yard at Gamleby, 250km south of Stockholm. Certainly, through the 1950s many designs by Sparkman & Stephens and other American architects were built by Scandinavian yards, partly because it made sense financially, and also allowed owners to do Europe and then, via the Atlantic trade winds, take in the Caribbean on the way home.
AQUILA's design is clearly a development of Carleton Mitchell's impressively successful and influential 1954 keel centerboard S&S yawl FINISTERRE, winner of the 1956, 1958 and 1960 Newport to Bermuda races - the first of the beamy centreboard yawls that were so competitive in US offshore racing through the 1950s and 60s and into the 1970s, while offering previously unprecedented space and comfort for cruising and passagemaking. This lineage together with her build pedigree by one of the very best Scandinavian yards combines to make AQUILA something very special.