l26 yacht

Reviews of popular yachts in South African waters. These are all good boats in their own way.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

L26 (lavranos 26).

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Sailing Lavranos L26

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Is Lavranos L26 a good starter boat? Hi all I am new to sailing and have been reviewing the many yachts for sale over the last few months. I initially wanted to buy a bigger yacht 34 - 40ft, but decided to start small. With this in mind I hope to see if this is for me - or not. I am considering a L26 Lavranos to start with. I know I can not do any heavy sailing. Is this a recommended boat for a starter? Any info would be appreciated. Thank you  

Most posters here will not know the L26. These guys seem to think it is well-suited to conditions you're likely to encounter in South Africa: SA Yacht Blog: L26 (Lavranos 26) It may be a touch "sporty" for a beginner, because of it's racing background, but you can adjust for that by going out in less windy conditions. The solid glass layup makes delamination less of a possible problem, but even so, you need to inspect the boat carefully for wear and damage. These are old boats that have probably been used a lot.  

Hi Paul. Thank you for the info. I purchased this yacht yesterday, and did do a check. I did do an inspection, and I was extremely impressed with how this boat has been maintained. I have seen a few ones over the last months that I could clearly see it will cost me almost as much for repairs as what the asking price is. I will have to do some maintenance here and there, but it is to be expected. I have read a few blogs where people talks about it's capabilities, and I'm now even more impressed. I will however first take on the more calmer waters. Now I have to get up to speed with sailing terminology and build up some experience. Thanks.  

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Welcome to the RCYC Sailing Academy

The RCYC Sailing Academy was formally established in 2012 at the Royal Cape Yacht Club, Cape Town Elliot basin, Table Bay, Duncan Road. The Academy was initially created as the Royal Cape Yacht Club’s CSI program, which was aimed at addressing the lack of access to our sport, for marginalized communities.

The Academy was formed with the aim to create opportunities for previously disadvantaged youth and address the imbalance of representation of people of colour within the Club.  We often work with The homestead foundation for street children and the Emagqabini education foundation , tutoring kids in Khayelitsha. The Academy found a pool for new students, who represented the most under-resourced communities in our society and aim to empower the kids through sailing and hopefully someday they will become a strong constituency of our sport and redress our diversity challenge.

In 2018 we registered as an NPO with our primary focus being skills development through sailing. The Academy has a standing committee which reports to the Executives of the Club.  In 2019 the Academy registered as a PBO and was approved in 2020 with qualifying criteria being skills development and welfare.

RCYC Sailing Academy runs its sailing programs mostly on weekends and we participate in big regattas and other races. The Academy has a variety of boats including 6 L26 boats  and 1 Lavranos 36  and undertakes sailing training during weekends and regattas. The L26 design is believed to be conducive for beginners, as the nature of it forces individual to be hands on all the times and enforces team work in many occasions. The Academy has more than 6 skippers, one Offshore Skipper and one senior instructor, who are fully qualified and experienced.

Our training program takes place between 10h00 to 15h00 weekend days, unless otherwise indicated. The program has been very instrumental in developing and nurturing raw sailing talent and the development of new skills, team work and sportsmanship amongst our students.

Previous success stories include Yonela Mkaza who was invited to Spain in 2018 to experience keelboat sailing. Two students, Yonela Tenela and Daniel Agulhas have coached sailing programmes in the American Summer Camps, in 2019.  Lebogang January took part in a Youth Regatta in New Zealand in 2020. One of our instructors, Athi Vena, is now  instructing at Milnerton Aquatic Club. Academy instructor Sibu Sizato has his Offshore Skippers ticket and has represented South Africa at World Championships.

The Academy crew has competed in the 2023 Cape2Rio race on board of “Alexforbes Archangel” a Lavranos 36. The Alexforbes ArchAngel crew comprised of skipper Sibusiso Sizatu (30), first mate Daniel Agulhas (29), Renaldo Tshepo Mohale (29), Azile Arosi (22) and Justin Peters (21).  The Academy are very proud of their 3 rd place result, winning the Punte Del Este trophy and the Telescope Trophy for Offshore Youth.

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Leisure Owners Association

Dedicated to supporting owners of Leisure yachts around the world

The Association has very little information about the Leisure 26.

Built from the same moulds and virtually identical to the well known Oyster 26. The main difference between the Leisure and the Oyster is the rig, which was 7/8 on the Oyster, but is 3/4 on the Leisure.

We know that very few were built, possibly only one or two. If you have further information about this yacht, please contact the Association Administrator

Leisure 26 Images

Many thanks to Fernando Mañas and Ervino Brumat for the photographs.

Leisure 26 Brochure

We are indebted to Alan Murphy for the following brochure images, scanned from an original brochure.

L26 Brochure

Performance

For cruising boats, The RYA has updated the Portsmouth Yardstick scheme with the National Handicap for Cruisers (NHC). More up to date information may be obtainable from the RYA NHC site and the Byron  web site. The only yardstick information we have is the Recorded Number (RN) as follows.

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Cruising the Moskva River: A short guide to boat trips in Russia’s capital

There’s hardly a better way to absorb Moscow’s atmosphere than on a ship sailing up and down the Moskva River. While complicated ticketing, loud music and chilling winds might dampen the anticipated fun, this checklist will help you to enjoy the scenic views and not fall into common tourist traps.

How to find the right boat?

There are plenty of boats and selecting the right one might be challenging. The size of the boat should be your main criteria.

Plenty of small boats cruise the Moskva River, and the most vivid one is this yellow Lay’s-branded boat. Everyone who has ever visited Moscow probably has seen it.

This option might leave a passenger disembarking partially deaf as the merciless Russian pop music blasts onboard. A free spirit, however, will find partying on such a vessel to be an unforgettable and authentic experience that’s almost a metaphor for life in modern Russia: too loud, and sometimes too welcoming. Tickets start at $13 (800 rubles) per person.

Bigger boats offer smoother sailing and tend to attract foreign visitors because of their distinct Soviet aura. Indeed, many of the older vessels must have seen better days. They are still afloat, however, and getting aboard is a unique ‘cultural’ experience. Sometimes the crew might offer lunch or dinner to passengers, but this option must be purchased with the ticket. Here is one such  option  offering dinner for $24 (1,490 rubles).

If you want to travel in style, consider Flotilla Radisson. These large, modern vessels are quite posh, with a cozy restaurant and an attentive crew at your service. Even though the selection of wines and food is modest, these vessels are still much better than other boats.

Surprisingly, the luxurious boats are priced rather modestly, and a single ticket goes for $17-$32 (1,100-2,000 rubles); also expect a reasonable restaurant bill on top.

How to buy tickets?

Women holding photos of ships promise huge discounts to “the young and beautiful,” and give personal invitations for river tours. They sound and look nice, but there’s a small catch: their ticket prices are usually more than those purchased online.

“We bought tickets from street hawkers for 900 rubles each, only to later discover that the other passengers bought their tickets twice as cheap!”  wrote  (in Russian) a disappointed Rostislav on a travel company website.

Nevertheless, buying from street hawkers has one considerable advantage: they personally escort you to the vessel so that you don’t waste time looking for the boat on your own.

Prices start at $13 (800 rubles) for one ride, and for an additional $6.5 (400 rubles) you can purchase an unlimited number of tours on the same boat on any given day.

Flotilla Radisson has official ticket offices at Gorky Park and Hotel Ukraine, but they’re often sold out.

Buying online is an option that might save some cash. Websites such as  this   offer considerable discounts for tickets sold online. On a busy Friday night an online purchase might be the only chance to get a ticket on a Flotilla Radisson boat.

This  website  (in Russian) offers multiple options for short river cruises in and around the city center, including offbeat options such as ‘disco cruises’ and ‘children cruises.’ This other  website  sells tickets online, but doesn’t have an English version. The interface is intuitive, however.

Buying tickets online has its bad points, however. The most common is confusing which pier you should go to and missing your river tour.

“I once bought tickets online to save with the discount that the website offered,” said Igor Shvarkin from Moscow. “The pier was initially marked as ‘Park Kultury,’ but when I arrived it wasn’t easy to find my boat because there were too many there. My guests had to walk a considerable distance before I finally found the vessel that accepted my tickets purchased online,” said the man.

There are two main boarding piers in the city center:  Hotel Ukraine  and  Park Kultury . Always take note of your particular berth when buying tickets online.

Where to sit onboard?

Even on a warm day, the headwind might be chilly for passengers on deck. Make sure you have warm clothes, or that the crew has blankets ready upon request.

The glass-encased hold makes the tour much more comfortable, but not at the expense of having an enjoyable experience.

Getting off the boat requires preparation as well. Ideally, you should be able to disembark on any pier along the way. In reality, passengers never know where the boat’s captain will make the next stop. Street hawkers often tell passengers in advance where they’ll be able to disembark. If you buy tickets online then you’ll have to research it yourself.

There’s a chance that the captain won’t make any stops at all and will take you back to where the tour began, which is the case with Flotilla Radisson. The safest option is to automatically expect that you’ll return to the pier where you started.

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Moscow's High Rise Bohemia: The International Business District With No Business

• Written by Dario Goodwin
• Published on March 17, 2015

The Moscow International Business Center (Also known as Moskva-City ) was meant to be Russia ’s ticket into the Western world. First conceived in 1992, the district at the edge of Moscow’s city center is intended to contain up to 300,000 inhabitants, employees and visitors at any given moment and, when completed, will house over 4 million square meters of prime retail, hotel and office space to create what the Russian government desired most from this project: an enormous financial district that could dwarf London’s Canary Wharf and challenge Manhattan . Twenty three years later though, Moscow-based real estate company Blackwood estimates that as much as 45% of this new space is entirely vacant and rents have plummeted far below the average for the rest of Moscow. The only press Moskva-City is attracting is for tenants like the High Level Hostel , a hostel catering to backpackers and other asset-poor tourists on the 43rd floor of the Imperia Tower , with prices starting at $25.50 for a bed in a six-person room. This is not the glittering world of western high finance that was envisioned back in the post-Soviet 90s; but what has it become instead?

As one might expect from a project of this sheer ambition, Moskva-City has a troubled past. The economic crash in 2008 hit Russia hard enough to evict the previous Mayor of Moscow , Yuri Luzhkov, who had been a cheerleader for the district, and replace him with the considerably more austere Sergei Sobyanin, who famously declared that the whole idea was an “urban planning mistake.” But as recently as 2013, the Wall Street Journal was triumphantly claiming that Moskva-City had risen from the dead, citing 80% occupancy rates and glowing quotes from industry insiders claiming that Moskva-City was the "place to be." Driven by record highs in oil prices, Moscow looked poised to become the next Dubai .

Instead, Moscow is now in the grip of an economic winter prompted by western sanctions and drops in the price of oil. The large financial groupings that Moskva-City was meant to shelter have been warned off by their inability to issue credit to international markets, for example - but Moskva-City isn’t just an Empire State Building left empty by the Great Depression.

A fundamental problem that is holding Moskva back compared to the rest of Moscow is the simple fact that currently, getting to Moskva-City is nigh-on impossible at peak hours. Moscow has long been plagued with transport problems, ever since the government failed to match the dramatic expansion of the city with a dramatic expansion of the transport system after the Second World War. Despite being only 2.5 miles from the Kremlin , Moskva-City is only just inside the ring road that bounds the city center and which acts as the only real transport link to it (and as a result, is clogged by construction vehicles.) A railway and metro hub has been finished, but so far only runs a one-stop shuttle service to the closest Metro station that is actually integrated with the rest of Moscow Metro. The isolation of the outer districts is a large, negative part of the Moscow psyche, and it’s not surprising that this is driving away the globetrotting financial elite this project was meant to attract.

The project is managed by architectural practice No.6, which is a constituent part of the large Moscow based practice Mosproject-2 , which is itself a public corporation headed up by Mikhail Vasilyevich Posokhin, who is apparently the “People’s Architect of Russia.” Despite all this state involvement, the project has still managed to become bogged down in bureaucratic infighting - each lot is managed and developed individually, which has led to developers competing for occupants by slashing rates.

Much has been written about the way modern financial districts and towers that inhabit them can be unwelcoming, forbidding or even hostile by design, but the skyscrapers of Moskva-City seem even less friendly than usual. The site - a former stone quarry, chosen out of necessity as the only place in the city center where a new district could be plausibly constructed - is isolated both physically and visually, leaving the cluster a stark anomaly on the city skyline. Even the names seem more imposing than optimistic now: Imperia, City of Capitals , Steel Peak.

The Mercury City Tower , so far the tallest completed building on the site, is officially “a strong reference to Russian constructivism, [which] gives the tower a strong vertical thrust similar to the one found in New York's Chrysler building .” It would be easy to criticize the Mercury City Tower for picking ‘inspirations’ that are so totally opposed to each other - The Chrysler building the defining emblem of American pre-crash confidence and Constructivism created with the express purpose (especially architecturally) of extending the Bolshevik revolution into a social revolution - but the way they smash those two inspirations together is almost beautifully ironic.

Even though the High Level Hostel is less an asset to a financial district than it is a PR problem, it’s been a huge success since opening in September, already ranked 27th out of 766 hostels in Moscow by TripAdvisor. According to the management agency for Moskva-City , 58% of the new occupant signings this year have been non-financial, including a number of small to medium size businesses. Other areas of office space have been occupied by a restaurant and a culinary school, while another space has been redeveloped into a 6,000 seat theater.

While Moskva-City is failing to be a financial district that could take on the world, it’s inadvertently becoming a humanized space catering to the very groups that the Russian economic miracle left behind. Taking advantage of rents lower than the rest of Moscow , the world class facilities and the sheer desperation of the developers, the humanization of Moskva-City could well create the world’s first high-rise bohemia.

Of course, these are not spaces designed for a community, or even for people: these are spaces designed for money, and there’s little scope for changing something that seems so baked into the design of Moskva-City . The High Level Hostel is trading off of the irony of being a hostel in a banking tower, but it’s perfectly possible that at some point people will no longer find this joke funny (especially in a building that seems hostile to the very idea of humor). The isolation of Moskva, even though it allowed this community to spring up in the first place, is just as detrimental to a humanized district as it is to a financial one: even bohemians need to move around the city, or the district risks becoming a black-spot instead of a hot-spot.

Moskva-City’s isolation won’t last forever. The end of construction will open the roads up to traffic, and plans to properly integrate the spur lines of the Metro in this area into the wider system are well under way. The integration of the district will inevitably push up rents, and the Russian economy will eventually boom once again. When that happens, Moskva-City is prime territory to be reconquered by the giants of international finance, and it seems unlikely that the municipal or national governments would want to step in to protect this accidental district. For now, though, the towers capture perfectly this moment of Russia ’s schizophrenic understanding of its place in the world.

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