By the time that Jack Bassett contacted Laurent Giles in February 2000 the company had been reformed and had for six years been under the control of Barry van Geffen. having been interviewed by Jack Giles in 1998 shortly before his death two years before, Barry had left school in Lymington had started his yacht design career with Laurent Giles & Partners Ltd in 1971 under the tutorship of the remaining Partners.
Barry having gained his expertise in the drawing office assembling the packages of plans for Vertue (and others) for new construction, and executing many of the revisions to the Vertue design including the 1984 development of the G.R.P Vertue Mk II, had become the authority on Vertues within the Laurent Giles firm.
Launched in 2010 Flying Fish was built to the original Vertue hull form with raised sheer, not the Vertue II. Her hull is of cold-molded construction with an initial layer of Alaska Yellow Cedar – tongue and groove molded and edge glued. Three subsequent layers of 1/8″ cedar were vacuumed bagged and epoxy glued at angles to one another and biaxial glass fibre cloth added on the outside to protect the soft cedar such is the general specification given on the standard drawing for strip plank construction. The whole project took Jack eight years of building, most of which was in a boat shed in his front garden and in the cellar! Jack has been very complimentary about the design, the level of information in the drawing package, and the characteristics of Flying Fish, and after two transatlantic voyages wrote to Barry in 2009: ‘Since launching I have been quite happy with the handling of the Vertue; she is well balanced and a true blue-water sailor’.