Puerto Sherry (Cádiz)
Updated:30/08/2021 13:01h
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In the past, when time passed, the old and obsolete was despised and in most cases it is eliminated, with the passing of time, these practices came to an end because the old always has a component that adapts to current times in most of the cases have a positive part that is very useful and above all advisable.
This is what the Spanish Classic Sailing Foundation has done, it has united the tradition of the Gipsy ketch to innovation with its new source of financing, with the launch of a gin, the 1927 Gipsy Gin, from whose annual accounts part of the financing comes From the foundation, coincidentally, the flagship of FVCE and the gin have the same name, this is the exciting and romantic story of the Gipsy.
In 1927 the Juan Sebastián de Elcano training ship, construction number 15 of the then Cadiz shipyards of Echevarrieta and Larriñaga, later Spanish Shipyards and now Navantia. It has just been launched and immediately, with its remnants, the construction of a new sailboat begins, number 16, which they were going to call “Marinchu”, this cangreja ketch sailboat, was owned by one of the owners of the shipyard, Horacio Echevarrieta , a great Basque businessman, based in Cadiz, owner of many companies and, among others, founder of the airline Iberia. The Juan Sebastián de Elcano, was a project by the British architects Camper & Nicholson and built on behalf of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and its initial name was Minerva, but it was at the indications of Echevarrieta, who suggested Primo de Rivera the name of the famous Basque sailor, leaving the reference to the Greek goddess on the figurehead of the Spanish schooner brig.
The Gipsy is assigned its design to the Englishman Colín Archer, although the reality is that the plans disappeared in the terrifying fire that destroyed the shipyards in the explosion that occurred in Cadiz on August 18, 1947, when the powder magazine where the army had stored thousands of mines and depth charges, nestled almost in the center of the city destroying all the surrounding peripheral neighborhoods that the shock wave found in its path. It may be that the design of the Marinchu, which does not follow the basic lines of Archer that have made them famous, had something to do with the director of the shipyard Juan A. Aldecoa or Echevarrieta himself at that time given their good relations with the naval industry German of the time.
The truth is that the Marinchu, was built between 1927 and 28 and had a cost of 80,000 pesetas of the time. When the construction was finished and without launching it, it embarked on the Cape Roche of the Ybarra company bound for Bilbao, where after its launch it was used for the summer navigations of its owner. In those years Echevarrieta had acquired a 50-meter schooner, which he baptized with the name of Maria del Carmen Ana, the old Kaiser’s ship called Meteor IV, with which Horacio Echevarrieta won the first edition of the Plymouth – Santander regatta held in 1929 .
The “Marinchu” had technical advances very rare in sports boats of the same type at that time. How to have an auxiliary engine, habitable interiors, radio communication equipment with the coast, etc.
In 1924, Horacio Echevarrieta, overwhelmed by debts, sold the Marinchu to two partners, the Norwegian Olle Loevick and the Spanish Enrique Hortet, who transferred the ship to Barcelona and renamed it “Gipsy”. -the legend begins-. In 1936 the Spanish civil war broke out and General Mola created an espionage service called SIFNE, from which prominent figures from the oligarchy, as well as from Catalan literature, science and letters formed. Among them the owners of the Gipsy, who made the ship available to the newly created intelligence and espionage service. They invent a fictitious sale to an English citizen and flag the Gipsy with the “Union Jack”, and the Gipsy goes to war propelled well under sail and by the auxiliary engine and with the radio set installed on board working perfectly. . Under its “disguise” as a sailboat, it processes the merchant traffic that sailed in the area between Marseille, Genoa and Cape La Nao with the SIFNE.
The Gipsy sails under the command of its owners and also an expert sailor of the time, such as Pedro Riviere, who in addition to being a sailor is head of the SIFNE station in Marseille, Manuel Arquer and Miguel Sans, all of them members of the RCN of Barcelona, During this “spy ship” period, the Gipsy was machine-gunned on several occasions and until the restoration of 1969 the ship kept shrapnel from those shots on its hull and rigging.
After the fight, the Gipsy returned to its mooring in the docks of the RCN in Barcelona again under the Spanish flag. After a few years of use and enjoyment by the Hortet family, it was sold to Jose Maria Segarra, who in 1951 sold it for 500,000 pesetas to Jose Luis Rubio (known as Camisón) and Estanislao Sevil, who established the base of the Gipsy in Tarragona. In the years that the Gipsy was in “Tarraco” one of its regular crew members was the then lieutenant of the ship Marcial Sanchez Barcaiztegui, a great promoter together with Eduardo Velarde from Cádiz of the Naval Regatta Commissions of the navy, an entity that arrived more afternoon to direct from Mallorca.
The Rubio and Vilar Rubio families use it as a cruise ship. In the 70s, classic sailing regattas began to be held given the enormous thrust presented by the fleet, both in the north, the RCM Gitana Trophy and RSC of Bilbao, and in the Mediterranean where Jose Ramón Bono created the Conde de Barcelona Trophy regatta. The Gipsy, which had received a good rejuvenation treatment in 1969, triumphs in its class in the first edition of the nautical sports event that brings together the elite of classic Spanish sailing in Palma. He also does it in the first Puig Vela Clásica regatta and in the 2017 Mare Nostrum trophy and was second in the Copa del Rey de Clásicos de Mahón. And a few days ago in this year’s edition of the Club de Mar Trophy, he was again second in his class Época Cangreja.
In 2017 the Gipsy turned 90 years old and was honored as it touches, and that in 2027 it will celebrate its centenary, a fact that very few boats can boast and register in their logbook.
At present, the Gipsy is still in the hands of the Rubio family, and sails under the tutelage of the Fundación Vela Clásica de España, of which we say is its “flagship”, with the fireproof and beloved Petete Rubio at the head of this precise Colín Archer, who has many more miles of sailing ahead of him, hopefully almost always with good winds.
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