ALPHA—one of nine pilot cutters racing in the Pilot Cutter Review off Cornwall, England, in 2025—was built in 1904 in Lancashire in North West England. Her cutaway-forefoot keel profile is very different from that of most pilot cutters built for working on the Bristol Channel.
It was a cloudy day with gusts of up to 28 knots for the last leg of the Pilot Cutter Review in St. Mawes, Cornwall, England, in May 2025—more like a chilly autumn morning than late spring day. Racing would have been canceled had this been an AMERICA’s Cup challenge, but of course pilot cutters are famously hardy boats, designed to be sailed by “one man and a boy” in any weather. The Pilot Cutter Review would go ahead come what may.
My ride for the day was the 1904 Bristol Channel pilot cutter ALPHA, looking stunning after her recent restoration by Ben Hopper Traditional Boats in Falmouth. Although one of the heaviest boats there, she had a secret weapon: her cutaway forefoot, which is unusual for a traditional Bristol Channel pilot cutter. In theory, this makes her more nimble than her contemporaries, and her heavy displacement means she can stand up to a strong blow.
ALPHA had done well on the 23-mile passage race from Fowey to Falmouth two days before, finishing second, but not so well in the two Saturday races (finishing seventh and fourth), so the pressure was on to do better on the Sunday race, known as “the long one,” the last race of the series. After checking the forecast and consulting with ALPHA’s owner, Willem Scholtes, Ben briefed the crew on the race ahead. “We’ll fly the medium topsail, which has a topsail yard but no jackyard, and full mainsail,” he said. “If the wind increases any more, we’ll take a roll in the main and fly the medium topsail over a reefed main, rather than try to change the topsail. Let’s focus on trim, sailing the boat fast, and making perfect maneuvers rather than lots of sail changes and any mishaps.” Given the strength of the wind, the strategy seemed a good one to me.
“Remember, mobility can win the race on these boats,” Willem added, with what turned out to be uncanny prescience. He himself was having the day off and watching the race, having just completed a 24-hour passage from Cowes to Falmouth in his new steel-hulled boat.
The Bristol Channel on the West Coast of England, where ALPHA plied her trade for two decades, is a notoriously dangerous stretch of water. It has the second largest tidal range in the world—up to 46′, beaten only by the Bay of Fundy in Canada—with currents of up to 8 knots. On top of that, its V-shaped coastline acts as a funnel for the prevailing southwesterly wind, channeling big seas straight in off the Atlantic. Add to the mix shifting sand banks and a remarkable shortage of all-tide harbors on either side of the channel, and you’ll see why ships negotiating these waters are well advised to have a pilot aboard—which is exactly what they’ve done for the past 500 years or so.
TALLULAH, a 44-footer, was the sixth of nine pilot-cutter-inspired yachts that Luke Powell has built at his boatyard in Gweek, Cornwall.
According to legend, the first pilot to guide a ship out of the Bristol Channel was one George James May who, in May 1497, piloted John Cabot’s MATTHEW out of Bristol at the start of his voyage to Newfoundland just five years after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Bahamas. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution some 200 years later and the growth of the British Empire, the volume of shipping on the channel increased dramatically, and the type of vessel needed to carry the pilots to and from the ships developed accordingly.
The requirements were clear: the boats had to be seaworthy enough to take whatever the Bristol Channel might throw at them, for days if not weeks at a time. To be economical, they had to be easily handled by a crew of two or three: the skipper (aka the “westernman”), “a boy” (usually an apprentice pilot), and the pilot when he was aboard. To be competitive, they had to be fast, for the first boat to reach the incoming vessel got the piloting assignment. An extra half knot of speed could make the difference between winning a job or having to continue “seeking,” the local term for staying out at sea until finding another ship that needed a pilot.
The boats that evolved to meet these demanding criteria were gaff cutters, usually between 40′ and 50′ long. Their hulls were built of oak, elm, and pitch pine, and their interiors were made of mahogany or teak. The rigs were kept deliberately simple, with no running backstays or crosstrees to get tangled up, just oversized spars that were strong enough to withstand the forces imposed by heavy flax sails with minimal standing rigging. The mainsheet horse had big buffers at each end, the better to take the impact of a standing jibe without having to haul the sheet in. It’s no coincidence that roller-reefing (aka Appledore gear), another labor-saving device, is said to have been invented on Bristol Channel pilot cutters.
Sail handling aboard ALPHA, such as hoisting her powerful gaff mainsail, is done by manual labor.
At their peak, in the late 1800s, up to 300 pilot cutters are estimated to have been at work in the Bristol Channel. Predictably, there was intense rivalry to reach the incoming ships. One pilot even went as far as having a tan topsail made so his cutter could pass off as a fishing boat and sneak ahead of her rivals undetected. Another cutter is said to have had a head built into a corner of the cockpit in case the crew got caught short while at work.
Once a ship was spotted, a price would be negotiated for the job, and the ship would heave-to. The cutter would sail into the lee of the ship and the punt—usually a clinker-built (aka lapstrake) boat about 13′ long, often painted white to be more visible at night—would be hoisted over the pilot cutter’s side. The boy would then row the pilot over to the ship, while the westernman managed the cutter on his own until the punt returned and was hoisted back aboard. The cutter then sailed to port in company with the ship or, if she were carrying another pilot aboard, went seeking another job.
Despite gusts of up to 30 knots off Pendennis Point, ALPHA hung on to all sail, including a topsail.
It was dangerous work, and many men were lost at sea during the transfer. Capt. George Buck, a pilot from Pill, recounted that when he was an apprentice his “skiff” (as the pilot cutters were often called) was swept onto a ship while he was picking up the pilot and was almost swallowed up by the churning propellers. When the cutter was dried out and retarred a few weeks later, the crew found scour marks ½″ deep in the underwater planking, made by the offending blades.
“When boarding ships at night during dirty weather,” Capt. Buck wrote in a trade magazine called The Pilot, “we were always glad when we had the punt back on board. In the daytime we took little notice of the weather and it had to be very bad when we could not board, and it was not very often we had to run for shelter. The skiffs were fine craft and in bad weather would heave-to with the foresheet to windward and the helm lashed a little down, and they would work to windward off a lee shore.”
It wasn’t all work, however, as gatherings called “reviews” were held at all the major ports on the Bristol Channel throughout the summer. There, the pilot cutters raced not only among themselves but also against yachts, which they often beat, especially if it was windy. Their exceptional performance didn’t go unnoticed by other sailors, particularly those yachtsmen who gazed at their elegant elliptical sterns after being overtaken during a race. And it was this advanced functionality, fine-tuned through decades of real-world development, that was ultimately their saving grace, at least for a lucky few. As steam replaced sail—notably after the amalgamation of Cardiff pilots in 1913—the old pilot cutters were snapped up by discerning sailors who realized they would make perfect cruising boats.
The last pilot cutter to work under sail was CARIAD, which was relieved of her duties off the Breaksea Lightship near the port of Barry by the steam cutter QUEEN MOTHER on December 12, 1922. She was immediately converted into a yacht, including the addition of a 14-hp Kelvin petrol-paraffin engine, and in 1923 was bought by Frank Carr. Over the next 25 years, Carr (a future director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich) sailed the boat 30,000 miles around Britain, the Baltic, and Spain and wrote the book A Yachtsman’s Log about his experiences.
The full seagoing potential of the type was perhaps best demonstrated by the explorer Bill Tilman, who sailed three Bristol Channel pilot cutters over the course of 23 years. It started in 1954 with MISCHIEF, which he sailed to the Arctic and Antarctica before she was crushed by ice off Greenland. She was followed by SEA BREEZE, which he sailed around Greenland for three years before she, too, was lost to the ice. His last boat was BAROQUE, which he also sailed around Greenland before his (presumed) death on another ship en route to the Falkland Islands.
ALPHA was unusual among her contemporaries for not having been built by a yard on the Bristol Channel. Instead, her first owner, William Prosser, had his first pilot cutter built by William Stoba of Fleetwood, Lancashire, north of Blackpool in North West England, an area better known for building speedy Morecambe Bay prawners. ALPHA’s cutaway forefoot made her so fast that Prosser worked her successfully in the Western Approaches for 20 years, and she won the Cardiff Regatta in 1905.
Renamed BLACK BESS, she was converted to a yacht in 1924 and sailed hard for many years under the Royal Cruising Club burgee; in the 1930s, she was renamed again, this time ALPHA. She was extensively rebuilt in Gweek in 2007–10 by boatbuilder David Walkey, designer Ed Burnett, and rigger Tommi Nielsen. Despite their expertise, the larch for the planking proved to be flawed, and just 13 years later the boat had to be replanked again. It’s to Willem Scholte’s eternal credit that he didn’t just give up at this point. Instead, he commissioned Ben Hopper to carry out a second rebuild at his boatyard (www.hoppertraditionalboats.co.uk), this time with oak planking, a heavier but safer choice than larch. Ben also used the replanking as an opportunity to return the counter stern to its original shape.
A hundred or so years after CARIAD dropped her last pilot on the Bristol Channel, a mixed fleet of pilot cutters—three originals, five replicas and one pilot-cutter inspired yacht—competed in the final race of the 2025 Pilot Cutter Review in St. Mawes. With so many boats taking part, I was looking forward to a busy start, with lots of shouts of “starboard” as the crews jostled for position. I was to be disappointed. Since a particularly hairy start a few years ago, when 35 knots of easterly wind created potentially dangerous conditions in close quarters, the organizers have staggered the starts. This makes for a safer race but, like handicap racing, means you don’t really know who has won until the awards are presented that evening.
One of the oldest surviving original pilot cutters, the 1889 MARIAN is still raced hard. She finished third overall in the 2025 Pilot Cutter Review.
We left our mooring 17 minutes before the gun and managed to raise all sails just in time to cross the starting line on starboard tack, well ahead of our main rival, the 1889 pilot cutter MARIAN. The 12-leg course was surprisingly complicated for such big boats, with roundings of 10 buoys spread across Carrick Roads before finishing back at St. Mawes. Luckily, our tactician was reading the course on an iPad.
Although ALPHA was recently completely rebuilt and has had huge amounts of money thrown at her, in other ways she was at a disadvantage compared to newer boats: she has no winches, so the sails were all sweated up by hand and sheets were all adjusted using block-and-tackle. Although Ben is a professional boatbuilder and skipper, he was there in an unpaid role, while the rest of the crew was made up of amateur sailors, mostly local boatbuilders and friends, nearly all of them in their 20s.
The first three marks were a beat to windward, taking us around Black Rock, across to St. Anthony Head, then out to the Hine Downing buoy off Pendennis Point, heading out to sea. Next stop: the Lizard Peninsula, aka “the graveyard of ships.” It was one of the windiest legs of the race, with the leeward rail awash repeatedly, and it occurred to me that we were possibly overcanvased—I mean, how many yachts fly a topsail in almost 30 knots of wind? But ALPHA was built to withstand much worse than this, often for days on end.
“I kept thinking, we could take a roll in the main on the next downwind leg,” Ben said later. “Then we would go around the mark, and I didn’t want to reduce sail as we were going downwind and wanted as much canvas up as possible. When cruising, I set sails for the gusts not the lulls. When racing, I set sails for the lulls, not the gusts.”
Sailing a 36-ton boat might seem a brutal affair, but it was a subtle change in wind direction that gave us our first advantage. Ben spotted the lift as we headed past Pendennis Point and turned early, clearing the bow of the pilot cutter replica EVE OF ST. MAWES and rounding the buoy while the rest of the fleet headed out to sea for an extra half mile, wasting valuable minutes. Pilot-cutter racing might not call for fine-tuning as much as dinghy racing, but a few degrees on the wind can still make all the difference.
By the late 1990s, only 18 original Bristol Channel pilot cutters were left. By then, a whole industry had grown up around restoring old wooden boats, including pilot cutters. The 18-year restoration of KINDLY LIGHT in Gweek from 1993 to 2011 was one of the most noteworthy. But no new ones were being built. One man determined to change all that was Luke Powell. With barely enough money to pay for the necessary wood, he embarked on building the first new wooden pilot cutter the world had seen for several decades. His inspiration, however, was not the legendary Bristol Channel boats but the less well known pilot cutters of the neighboring Scilly Isles. Although built to perform the same job as their Bristol brethren, the Scilly boats tended to be a bit chunkier and beamier, with higher bows. The result was more internal volume, which enabled them to carry cargo during their working lives and conveniently provided more accommodation when reimagined as yachts.
Someone who was having a similar idea but with a very different outcome was the author Tom Cunliffe (see WB No. 309). Tom and his wife, Ros, had sailed their 1911 pilot cutter HIRTA (ex-CORNUBIA) extensively from 1982 until 1997, including two transatlantic crossings. He had written several books about his travels and was at least partly responsible for the resurgence of interest not only in gaff rig but also in pilot cutters. After selling HIRTA, he decided to commission a new cutter based on the hardy workboats he knew so well. But unlike Luke, whose boats were built traditionally, Tom had his strip-planked and epoxy-sheathed to minimize maintenance. He chose the yacht designer Nigel Irens, best known for his record-breaking multihulls, to draw him a gaffer that took full advantage of modern materials to produce a fast and extremely powerful hull.
At 38′ LOD, EVE OF ST. MAWES was the smallest boat at the event. She was the first boat of the type that Luke Powell built and helped launch a pilot-cutter revival in the late 1990s.
In 1997, two pilot cutters of very different types were launched: Luke’s delightfully traditional 38′ EVE OF ST. MAWES and Tom’s 40′ “rocket ship” WESTERNMAN, built at Covey Island Boatworks in Nova Scotia, Canada. Four more boats of the same design were built by Covey Island in short order. Meanwhile, over the next 23 years Luke steadily produced carvel-built boats, culminating in the 68′ PELLEW in 2020, the biggest pilot cutter to be built since the heyday of the type. At least two of Luke’s boats ended up in the United States: the 46′ AGNES (later bought back by Luke and now based in Falmouth) and the 44′ HESPER, which has been based in Maine since 2015.
They weren’t the only ones. No doubt inspired by the success of Luke’s boats, other boatbuilders followed suit, including Mark Rolt in Bristol, who built one pilot cutter; Dave Cockwell in Falmouth, who built two; and John Raymond-Barker in Bristol, who built three. The designer Ed Burnett, who worked with Nigel Irens on the original WESTERNMAN, designed several of these boats, including an accurate replica of Bill Tilman’s MISCHIEF. The peak of this wave of new boats came in 2008, when an astonishing four new pilot cutters, including MISCHIEF, were launched, followed by three more in 2009.
An important factor in this revival of the old boats’ fortunes was the Pilot Cutter Review, revived in 2006 by Adam and Debbie Purser, the first owners of EVE OF ST. MAWES, who also run the Classic Sailing charter company (www.classic-sailing.com). The event usually takes place at the end of May and attracts an eclectic mix of old pilot cutters, new pilot cutters, and pilot cutter-inspired craft.
Out on the race course, it didn’t much matter whether the boat was old or new. The race is run using the Old Gaffer’s Association handicap rules, which make no allowance for age. And yet the results of the previous days’ racing showed no consistent pattern of new versus old, or even big versus small, with the second-oldest boat there, the 1899 MARIAN, winning the feeder race from Fowey and the dainty EVE OF ST. MAWES, the smallest boat in the fleet, winning the first two round-the-buoys races off St. Mawes.
ALPHA has been rebuilt at least twice since her launching in 1904, most recently in 2023–24, when Ben Hopper restored her original fantail counter stern. Her huge rig is faithful to the original and handled without any winches.
ALPHA caught up with MARGUERITE on the third leg of the final race, a 2-mile reach from Pendennis Point up the Carrick Roads to a buoy off St. Just. There was a great deal of pretending not to gloat as we gradually overtook her just before the mark, followed by an equal amount of pretending not to care as she sneaked past us to leeward beating toward the next mark.
ALPHA’s main rival during the final race was the 1893 Bristol Channel pilot cutter MARGUERITE, seen here off St. Mawes Castle on Pendennis Point.
Being a foot longer overall, it was only natural that MARGUERITE , built in 1893, would be a bit faster than us, but what we lacked in length we made up for in cunning. With both boats on starboard tack, MARGUERITE couldn’t tack until we did, or she’d end up on port tack having to give way to us. Even though she was nudging ahead, the ball was in our court, and Ben was more than happy to play some mind games with our competition.
“With two short tacks to go, I knew this was our chance,” he said. “We watched MARGUERITE’s crew setting up to tack, and I told our team to prepare for a tack but not to move yet. I could see MARGUERITE’s helmsman looking over and watching for the moment we tacked. One of our crew started to stand up to get ready to release the jib, and I told them to sit down.
Ben Hopper, who rebuilt ALPHA, skippered her during the 2025 pilot cutter race, with his partner Evelyn Hull (right) among the crew.
“As we got closer to the lay line, MARGUERITE’s helmsman looked away to check for boats to leeward. I pushed ALPHA into a tack, and everyone scrambled into their positions. Despite nobody being in the right place, we made a perfect tack, which opened enough room for us to then tack back shortly after and end up clear ahead of MARGUERITE’s bow going round the windward mark.”
Caught by surprise, MARGUERITE made an awkward tack and stood dead in the water for several moments, while ALPHA kept her momentum and slipped easily ahead. It was a remarkable moment, not just because of Ben’s psychological tactics but because of the smoothness of our amateur crew’s maneuver, with ALPHA barely losing any way from one tack to the next. Willem’s words at the start of the race, that “mobility can win the race,” couldn’t have been more apt.
It was then just a case of keeping the boat moving as fast as we could, as we headed back toward St. Anthony Head with MARGUERITE in pursuit, sailing a big figure-eight between St. Mawes and Falmouth. There was a moment of nervousness as we spotted MARGUERITE heading toward a different buoy on the penultimate leg, and we briefly thought we might have got it wrong, but the tactician double-checked the race instructions and confirmed we were on the right course. We later overheard MARGUERITE on the VHF realizing their mistake.
ALPHA has been rebuilt at least twice since her launching in 1904, most recently in 2023–24, when Ben Hopper restored her original fantail counter stern. Her huge rig is faithful to the original and handled without any winches.
Despite the staggered start, we crossed the line at St. Mawes first, followed a few minutes later by MARGUERITE and the fiberglass-hulled ERAN MOR. We had won the race, followed by EVE OF ST. MAWES and MARGUERITE in second and third place. The overall winner of the three St. Mawes races was EVE OF ST. MAWES, Luke Powell’s first-born. ALPHA was second overall, followed by MARIAN, proving that the heavy older boat could still perform well, particularly when the going gets tough.
Old boats, new boats, lookalike boats. Working boats, charter boats, cruising boats, racing boats. The pilot cutters have proven themselves versatile and adaptable over three centuries. What will be their next incarnation? 
Nic Compton is a contributing editor for WoodenBoat.