I was eight years old and she was seventeen, and I’ve been besotted ever since I first saw her. I was on vacation with my parents in the West Country, it was a holiday romance that never happened and I’ve been returning every few years in the hope of seeing her again. She’s now 43 years old, yet still as beautiful as ever, despite the pleasure she has given to so many men (and women) over the years. Yes, ever willing to please, for just a few quid she will take you out for twenty minutes of damp and delirious excitement.
For twenty-five years I’ve been chasing her, yet never managed to take my place in the queue. Finally,last summer, I paid my fee and added myself to her list of conquests.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This is the story with Looe in Cornwall, a favoured holiday destination of my family for generations. Though trends come and go and Looe’s boutiques evolve to reflect that this years must have will become next years fashion mistake, the underlying village doesn’t really change. Same glorious beach full of determined and oft-foiled sun-worshippers, same bustling harbour with oilskinned mariners landing their fresh catches, every year I come back to find everything more or less how I left it.
In 1989 the speedboats were lined up along East Looe’s high harbour wall, three boats waiting to take the next group of up to twelve adventurous folk for a high speed trip. Their names were Thunderbird, Red Arrow and Superstar, and I knew absolutely nothing about them aside from their looking amazing and sounding fantastic.
For whatever reason, I never got to go out on either of them, so I spent a good dozen years fawning over these three boats every time I watched the patchy old VHS footage of my family holidays in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Of course, now I’m a grown up with my own house and everything, these days I go on holiday with my partner. In 2010, by way of a kind of pilgrimage, we went for a Cornish Vacation.

Remarkably, two of the three boats I remembered so fondly were still around. Thunderbird and Superstar stood nobly in their cradles, ready to take appreciative crowds of folk on thrilling trips around the bay. But somehow, again, this time around for me, yet again it wasn’t to be.
Our Cornish holiday in 2010 was a very busy one with trips hither and thither throughout the county, so it was tricky to see just how, exactly, we could fit a boat trip in. Then, suddenly, the worst thing in the world happened as I walked past a local boatyard.

Yes, Superstar was for sale.
This could mean the end of an era. A £30,000 transaction would see that at least one of the two remaining Looe speedboats would no longer ring out their sweet diesel tunes for all to hear. And yet, still I managed to make a colossal error of judgement and not seize this final opportunity to catch a ride before it went.
Fast forward to Wednesday 20th of August 2014 and we didn’t even have a trip to Looe planned. We had been at a music festival in Devon with plans to extend the trip for a few days, probably in Cornwall, and then suddenly a decision was made to camp near Looe. It was my fiancé who reminded me-
“Chris, if it’s there you can take a trip on that boat you like”.
And that’s how it happened.

Superstar is, without a doubt, a beautiful boat. Built in 1972 she is delightfully, wilfully old-fashioned, even by the standards of the day. By that date sporty runabouts were already being built, especially in America, with the beginnings of hull-forms and styling you can recognise in the SeaRays and Bayliners of today. But Superstar wasn’t built to be modern, she was built to be special.
She was one of a run of several boats built buy the small yard of Gerald Pearn in the village of Morval, just a few miles upriver of Looe. I’m not clear on how many boats were in this series, but they all appear to have been based on the same theme, being based on a one-off mahogany craft named “Miss Looe” built in the ’50s. These later boats would instead be of GRP construction but with a lot of proper, honest-to-goodness wood being involved in the mahogany decking and reinforcing stringers.

 
The underwater profile is quite unlike that of today’s everyday plastic Mercruiser-propelled projectiles, this lift-out photo from the Superstar website shows a vee-shaped entry which reduces quickly, becoming almost flat by the time it reaches the prop and rudder. It most closely resembles a scaled-down motor torpedo boat, and there’s a bit of Riva in there, too. Having a proper shaft and prop rather than an outdrive is another link with the past, though many ski-boats are still thus equipped today.
On duty for motivation is a good, trusted workhorse from the Perkins stable. The 6.354 (six cylinders, 354CI) has been used in boats and trucks alike for decades. In this turbocharged form the owner suggests 240hp is the rating (though the 2010 For Sale advertisment said 225…) but some of those horses may well have bolted from the stable since 1972.

I excitedly boarded her from the brand new pontoon from which all the Looe pleasure fleet depart, I chose the second row of seats so I could communicate with the helmsman, who happened to be the owner. Superstar was built as a commercial craft from day one and handles up to twelve paying customers on four comfy lateral benches. The first pair are separated from the rearmost couple by the engine compartment, roughly central in the hull. The Perkins lurks under a vented mahogany cover and throbs away soulfully at idle.

When clear of the restrictions in the harbour the throttle can be pushed forwards and the fun can begin, and this is where Superstar really wins your heart. The acceleration isn’t brutal, nor sharp, but purposeful and smooth. With a truck-style six-pot diesel you’d expect and forgive an amount of vibration or harshness, but I didn’t detect anything obtrusive. Nor was it noisy. The sound was unmistakably oil-fuelled, topped off with a reassuring turbo whistle, but appropriately nautical. A big, bellowing V8 has its place, but the determined growl of a Perkins felt right at home.
We would have been making somewhere between 28 and 30 knots on this trip, and again there are commercial speedboats out there by which such speeds could be reached on tickover. Yet somehow this velocity feels like the RIGHT speed for Superstar to do. With more power there seems no reason that this hull shouldn’t be made to go faster, but I don’t think she needs to. To try and capture the experience I caught a video which can be seen below in wonderful Nokia crackle-o-vision. Christ know’s what’s wrong with the audio.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vGlOgi4z9M&list=UUMM-ytiWCHF0qSgda8vnFtQ[/youtube]
I’ve been on fast boats before and have always enjoyed it irrespective of the way the boat behaved. A fifty-knot RIB will invariably soar over crests and slam down into troughs, it’s as spinally challenging as it is exhilarating. A pure deep-vee hull with loads of grunt behind it is a whole different story, scything through and over the water and gripping on hard in turns.

This boat is different again. Very obviously a planing hull, she wants to get up and over the hump, and does so very swiftly, and in a fashion that somehow feels more elegant than in newer, faster craft. Rather than slicing through the water her wetted parts feel like they’re flowing along with it. It feels like the sea is carrying her on its shoulders. It all feels utterly effortless.

Utterly addictive.
At this kind of speed you can still feel and see the boat interacting with the waves. You can still sense the weight of the water shoved aside by those bits of the hull that don’t plane. It feels like you’re riding a fast boat, rather than some slightly demilitarised sea-skimming torpedo. To be honest, this is the feel I want to get from a forty-two year old boat. It feels grown up, mature. She’s a vintage boat and feels it, for all the right reasons.

Superstar is a boat that gives her guests an overwhelming feeling of security and reassurance. The mild chop that prevailed under the threatening  skies did nothing to fluster her, there was none of the bend and flex that you feel in a lighter, more plasticky boat. Indeed, the feeling was of a hull that was solid and inert. You know, the kind of thing that gets built 42 years ago and just goes on and on if cared for and loved, which Superstar definitely is.
How I had left it so long is beyond me. I truly hope that some day my kids will be able to ride on her with me.
Postscript: I was back in Cornwall last week…… Superstar is still going strong. Three cheers to that.
(All images and video copyright Chris Haining / Hooniverse, except the 3rd image down stolen from PistonHeads, and the lift-out image from Superstar Looe. Thanks, Andy)