Voortrekker (yacht)
racing yacht
Voortrekker is a 50-foot (15 m) racing yacht that became famous for placing first on handicap in the 1968 Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race and for placing second in the BOC Challenge in 1982/83 when it was 14 years old and had been considered obsolete.
History
The Springbok Ocean Racing Trust announced that South Africa would have an entrant in the 1968 Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race and began fundraising to build a yacht. A design was ordered from Ricus van de Stadt and the order to build her was placed with Thesens of Knysna. Originally designed as a ketch, she was later re-rigged as a racing sloop by Brian Lello. Lello was the then-editor of the SA Yachting magazine, who created a technical outline of what was needed to create a race-winner. This outline was sent to Van de Stadt who then created the design for Voortrekker. Thesens of Knysna won the tender and quoted R35,000 for the construction. However, no financial backers came forward so Dr Anton Rupert of the Rembrandt Group offered to guarantee payment so that construction could begin.
At the same time the Trust began looking for a skipper and Bruce Dalling was selected to be her first skipper. Dalling took Voortrekker to first place on handicap in the Observer Transatlantic Race.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as racing yacht. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q48807469. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1968 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “Voortrekker (yacht)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.