La Fenice: Leigh Shardlow’s remarkable revival of a classic superyacht

COURTESY OF OWNER

BORN: 1974
ALMA MATER: BARTLETT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, UCL
OCCUPATION: OWNER AND DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS, THE LIMING CHARTER COMPANY
FIRST/CURRENT YACHT: 29.16M LA FENICE

He has sailed all his life, “mainly dinghies and RIBs” on Rutland Water and at Salcombe in Devon, on the south coast of England. “I got my 200GT Master’s ticket in 2001 and have covered thousands of miles offshore in sailing yachts, but La Fenice was the first proper boat I’d ever owned when I bought her in 2020,” he says.

He might never have been in the market for a big boat if not for a series of serendipitous moves. After a master’s in timber frame conservation, he had begun to build up a property portfolio – starting with a “very, very poorly built” Grade II-listed house in Emsworth.

“I got my 200GT Master's ticket in 2001 and have covered thousands of miles sailing yachts, but La Fenice was the first proper boat I'd ever owned when I bought her in 2020”

“When I wasn’t freelance skippering, I would work on it, and some of my best sailing friends would pitch in. I caught a property bubble in the early 2000s and went from there.

“Then, after the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone wanted to move to the sticks – people were paying crazy money for properties they’d never even looked at, anything to escape from the city. I saw my opportunity, so I sold everything I had – all my building stock – at the top of the market.”

Now on at least her fourth life, she was named La Fenice (The Phoenix) after the venerable Venetian theatre that has burned down and been rebuilt numerous times. When Shardlow got the call after Lindbergh’s death, the boat was up for sale by the estate.

“She was on the market for €1.5 million [£1.3m], but we agreed on just under €500,000, which is not bad when you think about it for a 29-metre yacht with a Liaigre interior and a story behind her,” he says.

“I started talking about bringing her back to the UK for charter, and the broker clearly thought I was mad because that would have opened her up to class rules. But I had a trick up my sleeve.

“There is a grandfathering clause for yachts that were built in the UK before the International Tonnage Convention of 1969 came into force, which allows La Fenice to be treated as a sub-24- metre yacht, effectively ducking under class requirements. It is so little understood that even the UK Ship Register barely got it. I had to read the rules front to back myself, then talk the Register through it step by step.”

To receive her exemption, La Fenice also had to be reassessed for her gross tonnage using the same formula that was in force at the time of her launch in 1962. Few surveyors have the patience for it, but Shardlow was introduced to a naval architect working at Laurent Giles.

“He was instrumental in helping us to get all the compliance paperwork sorted out,” Shardlow says. “He needed to be passionate about all that, because it was a really draining process.” As her new owner, Shardlow sailed the boat across the Bay of Biscay on her own bottom to Salcombe, where the family spent idyllic weeks using her as a floating home in the picturesque surroundings of south Devon. “It was just a wonderful, charmed time for us as a family,” he says.

If it felt like a significant milestone at the time, Shardlow agrees in retrospect that this was only the start of a long and painful process. The plan had been to have La Fenice refitted and her machinery overhauled during a six-month stay at Saxon Wharf in Southampton. Building a team that fluctuated between two and 20 at different points of the project, Shardlow saw those six months steam past in no time.

“We set our sights on nine months, then 12,” he says with a wince. “In the end, it took 18 months.” A major sticking point was the glorious twin Gardner 8L3B engines, which had been with her from the off. In overhauling the engines, they had pulled out the propshafts and the huge 1.37-metre bronze propellers so that Gardner’s Michael Harrison could nurse everything back to optimum mechanical and aesthetic health. Getting the shafts back in proved much harder than expected.

“Gardner used a direct shaft coupling to the engine that requires almost perfect alignment,” says Shardlow. “I mean, the tolerance is insane: four-thousandths of an inch – that’s around 0.1 of a millimetre. At the first try, we fired up the engine, then slipped her into gear, and there was this awful vibration.”

Instead of the proud sea trial he’d expected, Shardlow found himself limping back to the yard. He’d also negotiated with his son’s school for him to be there so father and son could take the first cruise together on La Fenice. “I was nearly in tears that night, feeling I’d let my son down, and no closer to launching the boat.”

It was a sobering moment, and not the first time he’d questioned the wisdom of the whole project. By this point, Shardlow had burned through his main budget, the reserve and was starting on a nest egg tucked away for a bolthole in the Lake District – something his wife was passionate about. It will be a familiar story to many a classic boat owner.

The shaft turned out to have a slight bow to it, which was corrected in time for a second visit from Gardner, and La Fenice was eventually launched later in the spring of 2022. Shardlow, however, was still struggling to find a captain capable of handling the yacht – “They needed to be an engineer as much as a skipper”.

So he contacted a former captain from the Lindbergh years: Frenchman Erwan Le Gall, who agreed to return on an interim basis, but only if the boat moved back to La Ràpita. For all his misty eyes about chartering La Fenice in UK waters, Shardlow pragmatically accepted.

Le Gall also offered to give Shardlow’s family a taste of the superyacht experience. “I’m generally uncomfortable with being cooked for or pampered,” Shardlow says. “But that week aboard with my family really showed what La Fenice could become. Erwan is an amazing cook, so we ate really well and spent lots of time just lounging about swimming and exploring. It opened my eyes.”

The yacht’s undoubted presence had been enhanced with a full exterior repaint and new decking, while the interior had seen its Liaigre glory restored. “It was the first yacht he did, a sort of experiment right back at the start of his career,” says Shardlow.

Dark teak flooring and curved cabinetry contrasts with white deckheads and ceilings studded with vintage uplighters and stainless-steel hull lights and portholes. With its four cabins, bar area and interior lounge, the yacht has a distinctly gentlemanly air, with a hint of her more recent past in the original portrait of Uma Thurman in the wheelhouse.

Trouble was still brewing, however. Shardlow’s efforts to recruit a team to take the helm were foundering. “Don’t talk to me about finding crew,” he says, eyes blazing. “It’s been an absolute nightmare. You’ve just trained someone up and got them through their qualifications when they join another ship.” Seeing his team slipping through his fingers, Shardlow again asked Le Gall for help.

It is a testament to his persuasive powers, and to the fierce loyalty inspired by this yacht, that he accepted. The plan was to take a punt on the America’s Cup in Barcelona, booking a berth in Port Vell in the hope of selling charter days there. It wasn’t the commercial success he’d hoped for, but there was a silver lining.

“We ended up lending our Axopar tender to INEOS Britannia on the day they won the Louis Vuitton Cup, so I got amazing shoreside access as they went out and came back in. I also met Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who knew about the Boyden challenge for the 1964 Cup – he got the historical symmetry of having La Fenice there that day,” says Shardlow.