The old lady is asking for it. She lies there looking incredibly beautiful and has the attention of three men all to herself. The trio is highly focussed - after many days of waiting because the weather didn't want to cooperate.
Now the men want to slowly, very slowly, give the distinguished lady a boost, let her do what she has done for 135 years: glide through the water with inimitable elegance and cast a spell over her passengers.
The entire yacht named Duchess of Argyll: a feast for the eyes. The hull: almost erotic in shape. The instruments: in excellent condition. The brass: brilliantly polished. The chimney, adorned with a crown: an impressive three metres high. The original English tea kettle: a relic from a time when English high society travelled in style on this steam yacht.
It is a beautiful day. The sky is as blue as Lake Constance, on which the sun is reflected in thousands and thousands of stars on the small crests of the waves. There is snow on the mountain peaks. In front of it, as if she had always been at home on Lake Constance, the "Duchess of Argyll", the beautifully shaped steam yacht built by Turks of Cokham in 1883, is moored off the Austrian town of Hard in the state of Vorarlberg.
She has had an extremely chequered history, and it was probably the greatest stroke of luck in her entire life that three men from Lake Constance more than warmed to her: Reinhard E. Kloser, senior captain and project manager for the restoration of the "Hohentwiel", the last paddle steamer on Lake Constance built in 1913, boat builder Hubert Hartmann from Hard and Erich Hoop, a businessman from the Principality of Liechtenstein.
Erich Hoop is sitting in front of his computer in December 2011. He is a businessman, has restored many classic cars, drives a 1908 Brasier Racer sports car in his spare time and owns a "Stearman" biplane from 1942. "So we were still missing a ship," jokes the tall man from Liechtenstein. After a long search, Hoop discovers the "Duchess of Argyll" on the Internet, once built for the real "Duchess of Argyll", who is said to have been a beautiful woman.
Now the greying Eaton professor Geoffrey Desbourough is offering to buy the ship in which the outspoken seductress travelled in style. Hoop calls Kloser, whom he met through his passion for classic cars. He was in charge of the project to restore the "Hohentwiel" paddle steamer, which had been reduced to a heap of scrap metal and is considered to be the best restored steamer in Europe since its second maiden voyage in 1990.
At the age of 25, Kloser was the youngest chief engineer at the long-established Laeisz shipping company in Hamburg in the 1970s and acquired the expertise and tools to repair steamships on American "Liberty" and "Victory" cargo ships from the Second World War. During his "seafaring days", he travelled through the Panama Canal 55 times and the Suez Canal more than a dozen times.
You can read the full report in the June issue of BOOTE, which will be available in stores from 16 May 2018. Subscribers Of course, sooner.
