Sail Number:
Type: Sloop
Wanderer III Specifications:
LOA: 30’3″ / 9.22m – LOD: 30’3″ / 9.22m – LWL: 26’5″ / 8.05m – Beam: 8’5″ / 2.56m – Draft: 5’0″ / 1.52m – Design Number: 39 – Designer: Laurent Gilles – Original Owner: Eric Hiscock – Current Owner: Thies and Kicki Matzen – Year Launched: 1952 – Built By: William King, Burnham-on-Crouch, UK – Hull Material: Wood – Gross Displacement: 7.2 tonns – Sail Area: 600 sq ft / 55.74 sq m
Historical:
Wanderer III, a 30-foot (9.1 m) Laurent Giles sloop, carried the Hiscocks around the world via the tropics at a time when few people were cruising the world for pleasure on small sailboats. The voyage and book accorded them a degree of popular celebrity, and was the first of their three circumnavigations. It was also the start of a series of books detailing their later voyages on their sailboats Wanderer III, Wanderer IV and Wanderer V. The trips in Wanderer III, together with previous voyages, provided much technical information for his technical how-to volumes on small boat sailing and ocean cruising, Cruising Under Sail and Voyaging Under Sail (later combined and published as Cruising Under Sail).
About the Video
Thies Matzen and Kicki Erickson, longtime adventure sailors and current owners of Wanderer III talk about the boat and their 30 years of adventure sailing aboard her. Twice circumnavigators, Lin & Larry Pardey talk about their friendship with the Hiscocks when they were young cruisers just starting out, what they learned from them, and the Hiscock’s accomplishments aboard Wanderer III.
The original owner of Wanderer III, British Sailors, Eric and Susan Hiscock became pioneers in making long trans-oceanic passages in a small sailboat to what was then quite remote destinations. The Hiscocks shared their sailing adventures in several books and made “Beyond the West Horizon,” a 16mm color documentary about their 3-year circumnavigation aboard their 30 foot wooden sloop, Wanderer III. Available from TheSailingChannel.TV.
Provenance (The Wall of Remembrance – The Owners, Crew & Notable Guest):
Owner/Guardian: (1952) Eric Hiscock
Owner/Guardian: Thies and Kicki Matzen