In the beginning..........

Tenacity is a 31 foot Miura. This tough little yacht was the first Miura to circumnavigate and did the round trip twice with her first owners, Keith and Marion Fletcher. We bought her in 1999 and she looked after us well as we learned to sail in Hout Bay.

We began to conceive the idea of long term cruising and realised that we were too old and too large for such a small yacht.We then bought a cold moulded wooden Roberts 44 which was in

an appalling condition but had an excellent engine, rigging etc.



We took her out of the water and transfered her to our garden where Rod started stripping the ply off to uncover whatever was beneath!

Well the pic speaks for itself!! Doom and gloom!!

Only one solution - scrap the hull and keep the good bits.


We started looking for a hull, deck and bulkhead of a size that could carry the equipment that we were stripping off the Roberts. To our joy, we found our dream boat in Acheson's factory - a Shearwater 39 designed by Dudley Dix from a brief given to him by our close neighbour, Gerfried Nebe who went on to build the first Shearwater from which the moulds were made. And so begins the tale of Sheer Tenacity.