SV Tenacious


The SV Tenacious is a modern British wooden sail training ship, specially designed in the 1990s to accommodate anyone over 16 with a disability. When completed in 2000, it was the largest wooden ship to be built in the UK for over 100 years.
The ship was built by the Jubilee Sailing Trust and, along with the STS Lord Nelson, the pair are the only tall ships in the world that are wheelchair accessible through. The JST are an international UN accredited charity offering sailing adventures to people of all abilities and backgrounds.

History

Launched in 2000, SV Tenacious is the largest wooden tall ship built in the United Kingdom in the last 100 years. It is 65 metres long including bowsprit, and it is rigged as a barque with two mizzen gaffs. Its deck is 49.85 metres long, its hull is 54.02 metres long, and it has a beam of 10.6 metres at its widest point. A press release from the Belfast Maritime Festival on 22 June 2006 announced that the Tenacious was "the largest wooden ship still afloat".
The Tenacious displaces about 714 tons. Its maiden voyage was on 1 September 2000 from Southampton to Southampton calling at Sark, St Helier and Weymouth. The ship is owned by a UK-based charity, the Jubilee Sailing Trust, which also owns the 42-metre-long tall ship STS Lord Nelson.
The Tenacious featured in the first series of Channel 5's Sea Patrol UK, when one of the crew members had fallen ill and needed to be winched into an RAF Westland Sea King and taken to hospital. Due to the height of the masts and rigging, this posed a challenge to the helicopter's pilot and winch crew but the rescue attempt was successful and the crew member survived a potentially fatal condition.