Greetings all,
Although I fear it to be a
lost cause, I am searching for any more recent concrete reports on the fate of the cruising proa Epicure. I have done a lot of
fishing around in the last couple of years and still have yet to find anything on what happened after she ran aground for the second time. Things I already know:
The brainchild of Daniel Charles, she was launched in 2010
Aluminium hulls with a stayed (main only?) rig
Charles was unhappy with her performance, specifically with regards to her rudder/board arrangement
He eventually ran out of
money and had placed the
boat on a
mooring on the Blavet river with the
mast down (presumably for bridge clearance) sometime in 2012?
He attempted to sell it (for a very small sum if I remember correctly) for a while but could not find a buyer
During that time, it broke its moorings twice and drifted downstream to rest on the rocky banks
Due to a lack of funds, Charles let the
insurance lapse and as such had no way of recovering the stricken proa. I heard from a friend that she was pretty badly vandalized during her time on the river bank
I gather from another forum post that the
builder had tried to gather
funding to put the
boat on the hard again in 2013, but I was unable to find any proof of this occurring nor any proof of its success
Since then, there have been one or two more posts about this boat, but nobody has had any other reliable information to offer. However, since it’s been a few years, I thought I would reach out on a variety of different
forums to see if anyone has heard anything since then. Epicure is one of the few modern proas that was professionally built and one of the only ones made from aluminium. Presumably she is not still sitting on the river bank (recent
satellite views show no sign of her where she was spotted previously nor further downstream) so what happened to her?
Was she towed and then cut up for scrap (a fate facing too many metal
boats when their owners are unable to support them) or is she sitting in a field somewhere growing moss like that one Newick atlantic proa?
Anyways, if anyone knows anything other than what I have provided above, that would be greatly appreciated. It would be a shame if such an iconic vessel ended its life under a grinder, but given the amount of time it’s been since anyone has heard anything, I’m not hopeful.
Cheers