Time to cut the lines again.
After the 2026 season, Cherub points her bowsprit north. The plan: one more Antigua Classics, a reach across to St Barth, then Bermuda — the island that built her — and, if the weather and the crew are willing, the long Atlantic road on to Europe.
One mooring line, cast off again. A boat like this was never meant to stay tied up.
Antigua · St Barth · Bermuda · the Atlantic
An all-female crew — and a boat that sails for something deeper.
In 2025, Cherub and her all-female crew arrived just in time to join the regatta. In 2026 they return to Antigua, April 15–21, racing under the ♀ mark.
Some yachts race for trophies. Cherub races for the story.
Beryl could not keep her down.
Hurricane Beryl tore through the anchorage and left a graveyard of masts. Cherub was damaged — but unbroken.
Like every hard season before it, this one ended the way they always do for this boat: she was brought back.
Brought back, plank by plank.
Keeping a boat like Cherub alive is slow, salt-stained work — hauled out, opened up, refastened, repainted, and paid for one small piece at a time.
Angela and her crew have spent these years doing exactly what Paul always did: mending Cherub with their own hands, out of whatever the islands could spare.
When Paul let go, Angela held on.
Angela Wolf was already making her living from salvage in the Caribbean when Paul Johnson's path crossed hers — and in his last years she became the person who cared for him.
When he passed in 2021 he left her Cherub — not as a trophy, but as a responsibility. She took it, and never put it down.
“Help when you can.”— Paul Erling Johnson · Cherub's designer, 1938–2021
A home that crossed oceans.
For more than a decade Paul lived aboard and sailed her hard — several Atlantic crossings, the last great one in 2009. Then, in 2011, a hard knock: a block and tackle came down on his head, and Cherub went in for another refit.
Later came a grounding that nearly claimed both boat and skipper — the near-loss that carried Cherub into the documentary The Sailor.
One boat lost, another found.
In 2001 Paul Johnson put his previous boat on a reef off Martinique. Word travelled fast among sailors.
In Bermuda, the owner of a certain ketch — drawn to Paul's own plans years before — handed her over for next to nothing. The designer and his design had found each other at last.
Born in a Bermuda dockyard.
Cherub was commissioned by a Mr Murphy — who asked for extra headroom — and built in Bermuda's historic naval dockyard to lines drawn by Paul Erling Johnson, launched in 1983.
Her early years were not gentle: a hurricane holed her and sent her to the bottom. She was raised, repaired and sailed on — and she has been doing it ever since.
