Jeshan
Vessel numberHV000782
Builder
Julia Hazel
Owner
Julia Hazel
Designer
John Hurst
Date1976
DimensionsVessel Dimensions: 8.55 m × 6.76 m × 1.5 m, 5 tonnes (28.05 ft × 22.18 ft × 4.92 ft, 4.92 tons)
Terms
How did this start? Julia was interviewed for the Australian magazine in the late 1980s after her world trip:
"I remember a chance introduction to sailing and how I immediately loved it. I was already longing to travel to faraway places, so why not sail off to see the world? It seemed such a romantic idea. Problem number one was how to get a boat. I had nowhere near enough money to buy one nor the patience to save up for years. There had to be some other way. Beg?Borrow? Steal? Unpromising, all of them. But at about age six I had learnt that one way out of the I-want-but-no-money dilemma was to make things myself. I had made clothes for my dolls then, and for myself later. I had built some simple bookshelves. Why not build a boat? Steel, I had read, was the cheapest and strongest construction material, so I decided I would simply order some and begin. But the ordering was quite difficult.
Suppliers kept saying things like. "Just get your husband to give us a call, love, and we'll get it all sorted out". Husbandless, I persisted, and ended up contemplating an insignificant bundle of steel in the middle of a rented patch of gravel. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I realised how little I knew about my new tools and materials. I wished I had borrowed my brothers' Meccano sets instead of playing with dolls."
Once the decision to be an owner-builder was made, "Problem Number One" was overcome in stages. First came finding a suitable design. Julia had tried to find a steel design under 30 feet from an established designer, but none were available. In the end JESHAN came from the board of Australian John Hurst. John Hurst, a long-time friend of Julia's, had been studying yacht design informally, and designing boats as a hobby for many years. She searched though his pile of blueprints and particularly liked a '36-foot yacht' lines plan he was preparing for himself. Julia continues:
"John, if I scale this design down to 28 ft, will you re-calculate the keel and sailplan for me?" With his agreement, I laboriously calculated 28/36 for all dimensions, then lofted the lines full size, ordered a small pile of steel and began building frames. Not the recommended way to go, and I knew that at the time. Looking back, I'm just thankful it all turned out well! As for that first small pile of steel, yes it did get bigger, but only very slowly. Surprisingly, there was a steel shortage at the time. Perhaps it was related to the slow transition to metric scantlings for flatbar. However, Jeshan's plating was still pre-metric: keel sides 3/16", hull 1/8", deck '12 gauge' in the old sheet metal system, about 2.66 mm. The latter was fiendishly difficult for a beginner to weld neatly!"
JESHAN demonstrates that full steel construction (deck, hull, keel) can be used successfully for a vessel considerably smaller than the traditional lower size limit for steel sailing boats. The strategies used by Julia to reduce weight included using thinner steel plate than the conventional standards for construction at that time, light transverse frames, omitting chine bars and eliminating potentially heavy cabin structure. There was no engine and no freezer. When launched, JESHAN floated to its designed waterline.
Despite the scepticism of bystanders, who all predicted rapid rusting of JESHAN’s thin steel plate, the boat has survived harsh conditions and performed very well over more than four decades of active use and remains in good condition. This very simple, amateur-built sailing boat, with solo-skipper Julia, successfully circumnavigated the world during the 1980s. After leaving Australia, JESHAN crossed the Indian Ocean, passed south of the Cape of Good Hope into the South Atlantic Ocean, crossed the Equator and beat against the North Atlantic trade winds to reach European waters where highlights included mooring in Norwegian Fiords and across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. After traversing the Dutch, Belgian and French canals from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, JESHAN crossed the North Atlantic again and explored the East coast of the USA, then transited the Panama Canal. The long crossing of the Pacific Ocean was interspersed with stops at many idyllic small islands before JESHAN finally returned to Sydney. JESHAN and Julia (mostly solo, occasionally accompanied by a friend) have completed many additional voyages in the South-Western Pacific and in Australian waters and now cruise out of Townsville in northern Queensland.
JESHAN represents a largely undocumented and short-lived boom in Australian do-it-yourself yacht building. Although amateur construction had a long history, the backyard boat builders of earlier decades were few and most of them built small craft for use in sheltered waters. During the 1970s, increasing numbers of would-be boat owners were dreaming of ocean voyages and started building their own relatively large craft around Australia.
While the amateur builders of that era came from many different walks of life, they typically had little money, no privately-owned land, no professional construction experience and no yacht club connections. They often clustered together at under-utilised industrial sites where outdoor working space could be rented at a modest cost. Steel or ferro-cement were the favoured materials, being readily available, economical, suitable for open-air construction and relatively straight forward for an amateur to master. Numerous vessels were started in a burst of enthusiasm but the path to completion invariably proved longer and more challenging than expected. Some partly-built vessels changed hands several times and some were ultimately abandoned. Nevertheless, over time many amateur-built yachts were completed successfully and went on to cross oceans, anchor in exciting and remote places and realize the dreams of their original builders, as JESHAN did for Julia.
SignificanceJESHAN is a steel yacht built in 1975-76 at Waverton, New South Wales. It was built to a modified design prepared by Australian John Hurst and made from scratch, entirely hands-on, by a young Australian woman in her 20s Julia Hazel. It is one of the earliest ocean-going yachts (and possibly the first) constructed by a woman in Australia and perhaps even world-wide. Since launching in 1976, JESHAN and owner-builder Julia have sailed the world, completing a circumnavigation and numerous voyages in the South-Western Pacific and in Australian waters. JESHAN remains in its original configuration, in excellent condition and reflects the original thinking and the light, unconventional construction that enabled the project to happen on a restricted budget.
c 1934
1935
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