Vertue

The Vertue began as Andrillot, a little gaff cutter launched in 1936 from the drawing board of Jack Laurent Giles. She did not get the class name until 1946, after a sister ship, Epeneta, won the Little Ship Club's Vertue Cup for the log of her 1939 cruise to Brittany, and the name stuck to every boat built to the design since. The class site traces her heavy-displacement shape back to Giles' study of the Le Havre pilot cutter Jolie Brise, whose lines he took off in 1928: very fair buttocks and waterlines, slack bilges and fine runs.

She is 25 ft 3 in overall and 7 ft 2 in in the beam, carvel planked in wood, and the hull form has stayed essentially the same while rigs and coachroofs have varied a great deal: gaff cutter, true cutter, masthead sloop and doghouses of several lengths. Small Vertues have made a long run of serious ocean passages. She suits a builder who wants a proven, very seaworthy small cruiser and has the skills for traditional plank-on-frame work.