Perfect Composition

- Stefan Meyric Hughes

On an April day in 2005, Jordi Cabau drew back a plastic tarpaulin on a makeshift wooden hangar among the Mallorcan pine trees, to see what lay inside. The forested interior of the largest island in the Balearic archipelago must have veiled many secrets over the years, but this one was extraordinary. Inside was the 1937 masthead sloop Sonata, drawn by Carl Alberg of the Alden design office. It was enough of a find in itself, but what made it doubly interesting was the similarity to the yacht Jordi and wife Heidi had found on the same island, where they live, five years earlier.

That yacht was Mercury, designed by Sam Crocker (a fellow disciple of the Alden office) and built in 1938, to the same construction method and with the same rig, offset companionway and double carvel build method, at just 70cm longer. Both boats were built in Boston, Massachusetts, a few miles away from each other. The Cabaus bought Mercury and had her restored by local shipwright Mateo Grimald, and she was re-launched in 2002. We covered the story of Mercury in 2013, after sailing aboard her with the Cabaus at the Puig Vela Clàssica regatta in Barcelona. I had always wondered what would possess a family to own two boats of such striking similarity, and vowed to return to learn about the second boat, Sonata. And so it was that this summer, I shipped once more aboard with the Cabaus, motoring out of Barcelona’s busy inner harbour to the Catalonian coastline, for a day of racing on Sonata. This time we sailed unreefed in 25 knots of wind, and for those of us switching from weather rail to weather rail as we tacked upwind, it was a hell of a ride, all of us completely soaked, but happy enough in 35 deg C of heat.