Topsail schooner · France
Bel Espoir II
A Danish three-master of 1944 that spent more than fifty years in youth work.
Technical data
- Rig
- Topsail schooner
- Flag
- France
- Home port
- Brest
- Built
- 1944
- Shipyard
- J. Ring Andersen Werft, Svendborg, DK
- Hull material
- Wood
- Length
- 37.2 m
- Beam
- 7.1 m
- Sail area
- 545 m²
- Sailing area
- French coast and Caribbean
Built in 1944 at the Danish yard J. Ring Andersen as a three-masted schooner with a fore yard, ordered by the shipping company A. C. Sorensen for the Baltic and Newfoundland routes. Her first name was Nette S.
From 1950 she fished off the Greenland coast as Peder Most, and from 1954 carried cattle between Hamburg and Copenhagen. The British Outward Bound Trust refitted her in 1955 and handed her to the Moray Sea School as a training vessel for twenty-four trainees; from 1965 she sailed as Prince Louis II.
Since 1968 the organisation Les amis de Jeudi-Dimanche has used her in the rehabilitation of young offenders and people recovering from addiction, renaming her Bel Espoir II. She usually wintered in the Caribbean and sailed the west coast of France in summer.
She took part in Sail Amsterdam 1985, Operation Sail in New York in 1986, the Hanse Sail Rostock in 2003 and the Brest festivals of 2004, 2008 and 2016.
Since February 2017 she has no longer been seaworthy because of structural problems in the hull. The operating association is working on a steel replacement into which everything reusable from the old ship will be built.