Anna Yacht for Sale | 56 Brooklin Boat Yard Yachts Rockland, ME

This is an opportunity to acquire a yacht of exceptional quality, comfort, pedigree
and performance. ANNA is a 56-foot Sparkman & Stephens racer/cruiser that was completed in 2007 by one of the very best builders in the business, wooden-boat specialist Brooklin Boat Yard in Maine. ANNA has been homeported in these colder waters throughout her existence, sailing in recent years out of Camden Harbor on Penobscot Bay.

To date, ANNA has had one owner. The man who commissioned her, who worked
closely with Olin Stephens and Brooklin Boat Yard throughout the build, and who
has cruised and campaigned ANNA for 16 seasons, has decided—with regret—to sell her because of health problems and the press of business.

ANNA was the final design to come from Olin Stephens’ drawing board, yet she
was patterned after one of his earliest sailing yachts, the renowned Stormy
Weather, launched in New York in May 1934. Stormy Weather won the 1935
Transatlantic Race from Newport, Rhode Island, to Bergen, Norway (by way of
Sable Island, Greenland and Iceland), in 19 days. This was a grueling test of
design, construction, seamanship and resolve, and no fluke, either, for Stormy
Weather went on sweep that year’s Fastnet Race also.

By 1954, her 20th anniversary, Stormy Weather had earned 12 overall wins, 15
class wins and five third-place finishes in 31 major ocean races, making her the
most significant racing yacht of the 20th Century. Fifty years later, ANNA was
commissioned to be a worthy inheritor of those genes, one that combined
advancements in sailing-yacht design with the look and feel of a classic.
At her launching, in June 2007, Sparkman & Stephens President and Chief Naval Architect Greg Matzat said, “With some notable exceptions, ANNA is a scaled-up version of Stormy Weather. We’ve maintained most of the aesthetic elements of the older boat—her sheerline, her tumblehome, the shape of her house, the configuration of her cockpit, her overhangs and transom—and placed them on a modern, efficient underbody.”

ANNA’s hull is built of a cold-molded combination of mahogany, western red
cedar and Port Orford cedar fastened with West System epoxy for traditional
wooden-boat character but less weight. While Stormy Weather was a yawl, ANNA’s owner wanted a fractional sloop rig like the high-performance Star boats he’d learned to race as a boy. Other, more subtle modernizations abound: Underneath, ANNA has a bulbed fin keel with a spade rudder. Her rudder, mast and boom are carbon-fiber. Her hidden anchor is suspended from an arm that retracts into the foredeck. So that she could easily be crewed by a couple, ANNA’s sail-handling, maneuvering and anchoring systems were designed for simplicity and efficiency as well as reliability.

The scaled-up hull provides maximum headroom while keeping the freeboard
relatively low. With input from the owner and from Martha Coolidge Design,
Sparkman & Stephens also updated the yacht’s interior. The galley, for instance, was moved aft for easier access from the cockpit and better socializing. There are deluxe accommodations for two couples plus pilot and transom bunks to port and starboard, for a total of eight berths.

Extra care was taken with ANNA throughout. Before work began on the interior,
for example, the owner had the yard build a full-size model of her out of particle
board as a walk-though mockup, so no adjustments would have to be made
afterward. As a result, “when she was launched, ANNA was the ‘most finished’ boat ever.”

ANNA commemorates the owner’s mother, a lady who lived to the age of 96. The
owner: “In 2004 we sold our family business and I began to work on ANNA. I
already had a relationship with Olin Stephens and with Mitch Neff, Brooklin Boat
Yard’s president, and the three of us, along with Greg Matzat, set out to create a
special boat that had the same lines as Stormy Weather but wasn’t a sister ship.

“Olin was then living in Hanover, New Hampshire, which was only half an hour
from my place on Lake Sunapee. When I first walked into his apartment, I was
amazed at the computer equipment he had and his expertise at running it. He was extremely helpful in getting me the performance that I was looking for in ANNA. Even though he was then in his 90s, he was still very vibrant and we made several trips together to Maine while ANNA was being built.

“When ANNA was launched, in 2007, we didn’t have a lot of time to sail her
before the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta. I quickly put together a scratch crew of nice young sailors and we entered the race. There were about 100 wooden boats in all, including a handful of 76s, also built by Steve White and his team at Brooklin Boat Yard. Long story short, we easily outpointed the 76s, and everybody else too, and won that race outright, on uncorrected time and by a very large margin.

“We had ANNA in Newport once, alongside Sonny, another famous Sparkman &
Stephens ‘best of the best’ ocean racers. She was patterned after Stormy Weather too, but rigged, like us, as a very tall sloop. I invited her to come out and race, but her captain declined, saying ‘Never bring a knife to a gunfight!’

“ANNA proved to be exceptionally fast and easy to handle as well as
comfortable. I’ve single-handed her many times in some very foul weather and
she’s always performed incredibly well. To this day, when I see her, I often think of
something Olin used to say, that the easiest boats to look at seem to be the easiest to drive.

“We’ve sailed ANNA all over the Northeast from Rhode Island up to Nova Scotia.
We never tire of the wonderful Maine coast, though, and finding new islands to
explore. It will be hard to give her up.”