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 road on to the Azores.
One mooring line, cast off again. A boat like this was never meant to stay tied up.
Antigua · St Barth · Bermuda · the Azores
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 Antigua Classic Yacht Regatta. In 2026 they returned again, racing under the Venus mark.
Some yachts race for trophies. Cherub races for the story.
Beryl could not keep her down.
Just when Cherub was finally ready, Hurricane Beryl tore through Carriacou and left a graveyard of masts and roofs. Cherub was damaged — but unbroken.
Another haul out, another round of repairs. She came back once again.
Brought back, piece by piece.
In Paul's last years the boat had not been kept up the way she needed. What Angie inherited was as much a project as a vessel.
At one point hauled out with mast and rudder down and the engine pulled, it seemed impossible. But friends stepped in, and piece by piece Cherub was afloat again.
When Paul let go, Angie held on.
Angie was crewing on a salvage tug 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.
A home that crossed oceans.
In 2001, Paul Johnson lost his just‑finished 38‑foot Venus on the coast of Martinique. His plan to build a new design, a centerboard version of his Venus in Carriacou, unfortunately failed. He found another Venus built to Paul's plans years ago, but sunk and salvaged after a fierce hurricane in Bermuda.
The guy who sold him the boat, Mr. Murphy, had only one condition: the boat's name must remain. So for the very first time, Paul Johnson sailed a boat that was not called Venus, but Cherub.
Paul fixed the badly holed boat and for two decades lived aboard and sailed her hard — several Atlantic crossings, the last great one in 2009. His last years were captured in the documentary The Sailor by Lucia Kasova.
Born in a Bermuda dockyard.
Cherub was built in Bermuda's historic naval dockyard to lines drawn by Paul Erling Johnson and launched in 1983. But she was born and left alone — never truly used, sitting quietly through the years in Bermuda.
Cherub's lonely time on the island would not last forever. A hurricane holed her and sent her to the bottom. She was raised, brought ashore and left on the hard — and waited for the right sailor to come along.
