Preserving Caymans Maritime Heritage £1 at a Time

I am a former Cayman resident living there between 1994 and 1999. Having recently chatted with Paul Deegan and Chris Rowland, I agreed to help raise funds to restore the SV Fair Weather.

A Brief History of Fair Weather

Fair Weather was built in Jamaica by renowned Caymanian shipbuilder Arnold 'Cappy' Foster of Cayman BRAC and Cayman Boats Ltd.

The reason for Jamaica is simple. In 1947 National Bulk Carriers came to Cayman to recruit Caymanian men to work on their ships as Caymanians were regarded as some of the best and finest mariners on this planet.

What wasn't known about this relationship was that it basically was the death knell for Cayman's shipbuilding industry. As the local shipbuilders struggled to find labourers, slowly but surely, the shipbuilding industry died a slow death.

So in 1947, Cappy Foster, along with Sir Anthony Jenkinson and Lester Hemingway, started up Cayman Boats Ltd, which was registered in the BRAC. Sir Anthony was very good friends with a Royal Navy officer called Ian Fleming. With Flemings's help, Cayman Boats Ltd managed to secure a lease on the unused Naval Dockyards near Kingston, Jamaica, and the business of building boats began with the use of a few of the remaining Caymanians and local labour and supplies.

Fair Weather's keel was laid in 1947, and she was launched in Jamaica and registered in George Town in 1950. She was, at the time, Sir Anthony's private yacht. She measured 55 feet on the water and 72 feet overall. She was gaff-rigged and could fly six sails, as seen in some of these photos.

After a few years, Sir Anthony decided to lease her out as a fishing boat, so they quickly gutted her insides and converted most of her luxurious interior into fishing holds.

The Adams' decided that they would sail around the world with zero sailing experience, so in 1959, Suttie Adams, along with her husband Bill and children, set out and basically headed WEST!!!

After three and a half years and 104 different ports, Suttie successfully circumnavigated the globe and became one of the first female captains in the world to do so. Her exploits can be found in the book The Cruise of the Fairweather.

After Suttie and his family returned to California, she sold Fair Weather to an American adventurer called Stephen Hornet, who wanted to repeat Suttie's voyage.

Unfortunately, money was tight and maintaining a wooden vessel wasn't cheap, so in 1982, he was forced to sell Fair Weather to a Spanish nobleman, the Count of Caralt, who invested his money into the complete restoration of a now very dilapidated vessel.

After a much-needed refit in the boatyards of Montecarlo in Monaco, Fair Weather was left to cruise the Mediterranean for a few years. It didn't take long for the Counts' interest to wane, and Fair Weather again started to show her age and slowly was basically left to rot on the island of Majorca in Spain.

In 1998 Mr Luis Perez Solerno Puig saw her, and being a former Spanish naval officer, he decided that it was a good idea to buy Fair Weather and to restore her back to her former glory. So with lots of painstaking love and lots and lots of money and with the help of his wife and three children, Fair Weather was fully restored and was left to sail the Mediterranean until very recently.

During CoVID, we came across Fair Weather online, so we approached Luis and his family to see if they would be interested in selling Fair Weather so that she could return to the Caribbean and once again sail these blessed waters.

A deal was done in mid-2022, and finally, in late 2022, we managed to purchase her and move her to Gloucester in the U.K., where she is currently undergoing another refit so that she can return to Cayman which is scheduled for late 2023 or early 2024.

Once here, Fair Weather will be part of the not-for-profit foundation called The Fair Weather Foundation. She will be used as a historical/cultural vessel to educate our children in all the schools about how our forefathers built boats and crossed the seas in order to survive in Cayman.