Portugese maritime history went straight to the bottom of Batemans Bay when yacht Vale De Moura sunk early yesterday morning. The Vale De Moura is the last survivor of a fleet of traditional, sail-powered vessels that worked commercially on and around the west coast of Portugal. Built in 1956, the yacht carried salt to fishing boats in Portugal before it was fitted with a motor and taken to Germany.
For more than a decade, the Vale de Moura was little more than a tourist icon ship-wrecked at The Wharf, Mooloolaba, Queensland, but in early 2005 the now 56-year-old wooden boat, which circumnavigated the globe twice in its heyday, was been given a second chance after a pirate story curtailed its first adventures in Australia.
Customs officials impounded the 72-foot sailing vessel when it sailed into Mooloolaba in 1994 as they didn't believe the Austrian captain who said he sailed it from Europe single-handedly. They thought he had killed all his crew. The Vale de Moura was impounded for three years and was then sold to a Perth businessman who had dreams of restoring it. Years passed while the boat languished at the Mooloolaba Wharf.
That was until John and Krystina Mackintosh from Batemans Bay spotted it while holiday on the Sunshine Coast in 2004. They thought it would be wonderful to restore and so Mr Mackintosh gathered his sailing friends, Tony Sutton, Peter Walsh and Bob Beresford, called the Four Buccaneers, bought it and sailed it to its new home in Batemans Bay. The Vale De Moura had been moored in the Bay since then.
