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132 Divers took on Kurt Boyle as a partner in 2001. Boyle was looking for a comfortable cruising yacht for his young family of five. Within two years,Boyle had caught the racing bug and now is a keen competitor in the Stewart 34 Championships as well as rum racing,Ponsonby R&R races and the Coastal Classic. He is currently the President of the Stewart Association. Boyle bought out the Divers in 2005 when they moved to the South Island. Boyle fitted Pelagian with a new Gray Dixon rudder in 2006 and reckons it has improved the performance of the boat significantly. Kurt’s wife Inger is beginning to take the helm of Pelagian for some racing and the Boyle family still enjoys cruising. Pendragon Sail No. 5134 Builder: John Rea Launched: May 1983 Construction: Cold moulded triple skin timber Pendragon was the last all-wooden, and arguably one of the finest Stewart 34’s built.She was also the most controversial. For more information on this, please reffer to the chapter titled The Pendragon Affair in Part 1 of this book page 41. Ken’s son-in-law Andrew Cochrane writes: “I have been sailing Pendragon for the past 15 years or so and racing her regularly in Sydney Harbour, as well as in coastal races north to both the Gold Coast and Coffs Harbour. Nothing particularly special about our boat, except that after all these years we are still beating bigger and newer boats both over the line and on handicap.We have updated our sail wardrobe considerably and (as we aren’t class racing) now have North 3DL sails and asymmetric spinnakers which really take the boat’s performance up a few notches. We have had many great results on the race track. Lots of podium appearances from everything from twilight races and winter series handicap races to ocean races, but perhaps our best result was a first overall in the 2005 Sydney – Gold Coast race. This was sailed against all the latest boats including the canting keel Wild Oats 10, amongst others and we smashed them. In the old days when I was younger and sillier I used to deliver the boat back from ocean races with a few friends, however after a good race this is about the last thing you feel like doing and finding willing parties to join was (understandably) difficult. As the wind is also almost always on the nose this took any gloss off such deliveries. So after a particularly brutal series of southerlies along the coast a few years back (when we were trying to deliver the boat back from Coffs Harbour), I decided to truck Pendragon home after races. Now she (and the crew) travel in much greater comfort home from ocean races and regattas and we can put all our effort into achieving good results and we have found that we can now have her from race trim to on the truck in 3 hours. A testament to the simplicity of the boat. With sailing there are lots of exciting moments but for us most of these were achieved when we were younger and greener, such as having a wild broach on the start line and almost taking out the start boat in a winter series race that for some reason started down hill, to sailing north in a very windy Gold Coast race where we hit a top speed of 22.84 knots; nice to talk about afterwards, not always at the time. We will keep on doing what we have and keeping the good results flowing for the mighty Stewart 34’s from this side of the Tasman. Interestingly we have gained a great deal of respect over the years from those on bigger and faster boats (who are often on the receiving end of our good results) and always manage to get plenty of good crew who want to sail with us, which a great compliment to the boat and its designer all those years ago.” Pendragon smokin’ up Sydney Harbour Andrew Cochrane Collection