Jolly Sailor

Went south for Christmas and found myself in Hamble for lunch, overlooking the Elephant Boatyard from the warmth of the Jolly Sailor. Ah memories, of Sally berthed on the rickety pontoon (connected by a little rope ferry) alongside a number of wooden classics, some of which are still taking up the same space.

There is no doubt that the Solent has its attractions; it is, after all, where it all started. The Western Isles have their attractions, but you can have too much isolation, natural beauty, deserted anchorages, seals and wheeling eagles. There comes a time when a yachtsman needs stimulation in the shape of other yachts to ogle, the antics of other yachtsmen to watch and critisize, and a selection of waterside pubs from whose windows you can admire your own craft lying at anchor - surely as great a joy as actually sailing her.

No, I would not have a word said about the crowded Solent, or the West Country refuges. Fowey, up the Fal, Newton Ferrers... I was once asked to describe my favourite anchorage, and chose a fore and aft mooring I had opposite Mercury on the Hamble River from where I could watch the comings and goings of a procession of fascinating craft of all kinds of a Saturday afternoon. The Solent, truly the cradle of yachting...

My Favourite Boat of 2010

Now that is what I call a boat. Anyone guess? Rhymes with Dumbo? Comes from a little saintly town in the West Country? God I wish I could build boats like that...

Photos copyright Peter Chesworth courtesy Watercraft Magazine
http://watercraft-magazine.com
 
http://www.stivesjumbo.com

Sail Planes

And now for something as close to my heart these days as boats: gliders and building them. Many years ago I came close to becoming a glider pilot in the course of writing a book about gliding (Gliding in Eight Days). The book plummeted like a glider in free fall, but it was appreciated by a few and one of them, many years later, taught me the second best thing to full-size gliding: model gliding.

It is now something of an obsession with eight (I think) no nine, gliders at the last count stacked in the toy cupboard. In order of size there is a Weasel (a little delta wing aerobat); Fusion (similar but bigger); Electro Junior; Phase Six; 2.5m Salto V tail; 2.7m Proxima slope soarer; 2m Kult V Tail by Tangent; Simprop 2.8m Solution and a 4.4m Multiplex Alpina, perhaps the most iconic of them all.

They say that gliding and sailing are similar. Not sure I agree, apart from both needing a keen eye for weather conditions. Sailing is more forgiving. Botch a landing and you'll be picking up pieces. Both use aerofoil sections to provide lift, but I have never understood quite how until now. One thing: gliders are far more advanced than sailing yachts. Soft sails? Pah. The recent America's Cup and foiling wing sailed Moths are showing the way forward. I'm willing to bet that in a few years time we'll all be hoisting solid sails - I say hoisted, as some method of reefing is needed.

Getting airborne is simple. But up here in the Highlands the landings are fraught with danger. Slope soaring entails throwing your plane off a cliff, and letting the wind which shoots upwards when it meets the slope keep the glider flying until the lift fails, wind direction changes or it's time for tea.

I hasten to add that sophisticated radio control keeps things in the air, a transmitter, receiver and up to six (or more) servos control ailerons, flaps, elevator and rudder.

More of this anon, as it's begun to snow and the Land Rover needs to be moved to the top of the track...

My Guilty Secret

Now you do know how I go on about plywood and epoxy, to the despair of those who point out its many virtues, of which I am certainly not unaware having built a few such boats in my time.

They are, in order, a Mirror, Gull dinghy, Waarschip 570 mini-tonner, three 8ft John Westell-designed tenders and a 22ft Atkin motor cruiser. I once had a lovely plywood National 12, which would have been hopelessly uncompetitive planked in mahogany with copper nails and steamed timbers. And I often use epoxy to patch things up, most recently the splits in the planks of a superb 100-year-old Honduras mahogany Salters-built Thames skiff.

I can heartily recommend the stuff for so many uses, but I did not enjoy ladling it on to glass cloth, and squeezing out the excess while finishing the hull of the Atkin launch. The result was a strong, good-looking and durable boat that looks the part. Using Bruynzeel plywood, at vast expense I might add, was a good move as it is guaranteed for 20 years or so. It was lovely stuff to work, too; no splintering, no voids, more like a high-quality engineering material. But I was coughing up blood by the end of the build... The result was worth it, just.

Some of my Favourite Things...

I have three half models to my name; all by Peter Ward of Poole. The first is of Sally, of which you’ve probably heard enough (Vertue No2, love of my life, etc). The second is of the yacht America, the low black schooner which, in 1851, took the cream of the British yachting fleet to the cleaners or, if you like revisionist history, was a slow, black schooner which just happened to meet the cream of the British fleet on a bad day. And she went the wrong side of a mark to boot. Again, enough said.

The third, and probably my favourite, is of the King’s yacht Britannia; or kings’, the kings being Edward VII and his son George V, both of whom loved her in a way that any wooden boat owner will understand. In 635 races she won 231 firsts out of a total of 360 prizes - a record that is unlikely ever to be equalled, let alone bettered.

‘Britty’ was a prodigious creation, measuring 121ft 6in overall on a waterline of 87ft 9in. With a beam of 23ft 4in, she drew just over 15ft, and displaced 154 tons. Under her original gaff rig she spread 10,000 sqft of canvas. The base of her sail plan from tip of bowsprit to end of boom was 172ft. With her 3-ton Oregon pine lower mast measuring 80ft and her topmast 58ft, her sail plan towered over 142ft above deck.

George Watson designed her and Henderson’s on the Clyde built her. ‘So proud,’ wrote James Meikle, a yachting correspondent, ‘over her building were the men that the putting of her together was a real labour of love. Really it was not difficult to imagine that the framework was woven together, so beautifully were the many parts joined in to and on to each other.’

Composite built of wood planking over steel frames, she had been refitted extensively in 1935, at her end (she was scuttled off St Catherine’s light) her Lloyds classification would have been current until 1940.

My modest part in her story is simply that, one fine day in April 1983 found me in the Public Records office in Kew, enquiring after the log books of HM destroyers Amazon and Winchester, the luckless pair that were detailed to preside over her scuttling.

After a lengthy wait, a box emerged from the vaults, containing the documents that were to form the core of an article I was preparing on the anniversary of her building. Winchester’s log, unopened until that day, was typically to the point. It reads: ‘0245 slipped and sank Britannia in position Lat 50 34 18 N, Long 1 1 0 W.’ It was only later, following a tip-off from an old colleague, Bill Beavis, that I chanced upon the one living eye witness of the event.

Able Seaman Torpedoman Cyril ‘Bods’ Bodsworth, as his naval chums called him, was 19 years old, the youngest member of Winchester’s crew. He was 76, by the time I spoke to him, and living quietly in retirement near Portsmouth with his memories and a single memento of the night when he blew Britannia’s bilges and deckhead apart with four carefully prepared gun cotton charges.

All did not go according to plan, that July night in 1935, he told me. The charges failed to blow. ‘Those who had made them were beginning to sweat. We thought “Oh dear we are going to be in dead trouble”. Luckily someone must have opened the seacocks,’ ‘Bods’ recalled. ‘After about a quarter of an hour we heard just a gentle pop.

‘A bit later we heard this much larger explosion, and one solitary deck plank shot up out of the water and did a gentle parabola in the light of our searchlight. We spent the rest of night looking for the wreckage. We never found that plank.’

Bods did not go home completely empty handed, however, from his night’s work. ‘In spite of what we had been told about no souvenirs, there was this cocktail cabinet, wooden Victorian-style furniture, with wooden spikes to keep in the bottles,’ he remembered. ‘One of them was a bit loose, and just fitted my rule pocket. It’s in my attic. No one can prove where it came from but I know it came from the Britannia.’

Now that, not the dry conservation or the patient recreation of an old boat, is history. For without people, boats are just artefacts.

Mid-Life Crisis Boat Builders

As one who has been having a mid-life crisis ever since he was 21, when he returned from swanning around the Caribbean to become a tea lady at Samuel Hoare's bankers in the city (I do not joke), I can sympathise with those who down pens and mice and up chisels and planes to become boat builders. The world needs more boat builders, as many in fact as the market will stand.

I applaud those who leave the excellent colleges to set up business in draughty sheds building bespoke craft for discerning customers. And as the economy improves (or not) then more and more discerning customers will take wallets from inside pockets and make out cheques which will justify the decisions of all those mid-life crisis boat builders giving up well paid, secure jobs to plough their lonely and insecure trade.

I wish you all the very best of luck. Do not be disheartened when you get no reply from the email from the man who is definitely thinking about having a boat built, and to whom you have given a comprehensive breakdown of costs. He will cherish those emails for ever, although he will never have the wherewithal to order the boat. You will have given him something on which to hang his dream, and although you have not profited thereby, you will have made his day (and made him happy).

A boatbuilder is as much a builder of dreams as of reality. We are counsellors and  confidantes. It may not pay the bills in cash, but we will have our rewards in longer lasting currency.

What is Wood and What Not

There seems to be considerable confusion about what constitutes a wooden boat. Some maintain that anything with a wooden core, albeit plastered with resin and cloth, qualifies; others that only solid timber is proper. What is the difference between a balsa-cored epoxy laminated hull and one that has a harder core of strip planking, also covered in resin and cloth?

The question arises whenever two or three wooden boat enthusiasts gather together, and often leads to heated debate. And it was only the other day that a similar conversation lead me to question and then seek to qualify my own, very personal ideas about what is is not a wooden boat, and it was not an easy one to answer.

Clearly a plywood boat is, to some extent, a wooden boat. I would argue that laminating thin layers of wood between lines of glue nullifies the material’s claim to be wood, in the accepted understanding of the word. And the strange grain patterns which some builders of plywood boats sanctify under layers of varnish serves only to showcase plywood’s fakery. It’s a laminate, like Formica, masquerading as the real thing. So rule number one, in my book is, if you do build a plywood, rather than a wooden boat, so as not to offend the eye, use paint. That way you will hide your guilty secret, and save money into the bargain: also, mahogany faced ply is very dear and, as it uses old growth timber, ecologically very suspect.

I have no objection to boats built in plywood; having owned a number, one of them was even varnished, but I would not claim they were wooden boats. So what, you say? It’s pure snobbery to downgrade plywood boats of which there are countless exceptional examples. Look no further than Iain Oughtred’s designs which take traditional shapes and refine them to the ultimate. In line and form they are close to perfection, but they are still not what I would call proper wooden boats.

So what is a proper wooden boat? It’s probably best to avoid categoric statements and rely instead on a scale, the higher up the more closely does the boat conform to the definition of a wooden boat.

At the top end of the scale would be classic carvel and clinker constructed boats in solid timber, at the bottom, perhaps, strip planking encapsulated in resin and glass mat of some sort. Somewhere near the bottom would be laminated wood composite boats, aka plywood and so on.

Why go for plywood? As someone who is passionate about the virtues of  solid timber boats, I feel it is important not to lose sight of what can be termed wooden. When people talk of a “wooden boat revival” they invariably mean plywood, and more often than not plywood and epoxy. At Beale Park, thankfully, the trend is slowly away from plywood towards traditional construction. There is a beauty in a clinker boat, its lines of copper rivets gleaming. Fillets of pigmented epoxy just doesn’t do it for me. Plywood is dead, inert and while excellent for building precise boats to meticulous plans, makes dead, inert boats. Sure, they are unlikely to leak, or move, but nor do they, as one writer say of the wooden loch boats on which he learnt to fish for trout, “live”. And if living means a little movement, then so be it.

Any true wooden boat revival cannot, in my opinion, then rely solely on plywood. The techniques requred to build a plywood boat overlap only rarely with those needed to plank a solid timber boat. The latter, I maintain, is not only quicker and cheaper to build (just look at the price of top-quality marine ply) but better for the environment. It is infinitely more satisfying to build in solid timber too, with less emphasis on mixing quantities of mayonnaise, more on close-fitting bevels.

History of the World in 100 Objects

Boats are the single most important objects in the history of the world, bringing migrants, spreading civilisations, carrying goods, providing recreation, allowing fishermen to feed populations. The vikings perfected the northern method of clinker boat building, and the method has changed little if at all since. Clinker boats have been built, and are still being built, and are objects of great beauty in themselves. The method involved wrapping thin overlapping planks or strakes around temporary formers (moulds), which are removed when the shell is fully planked, which is then strengthened with oak ribs (called timbers), steamed to give suppleness. Copper rivets are used to fasten the planks together and the timbers to the planks. When gunwales and seats (thwarts) are added, this produces a light, flexible structure that withstands wave action. Moreover, as a clinker boat is simply a collection of individual pieces, all of which can be replaced (no glue is used), it is infinitely repairable. A clinker boat: practical, useful, beautiful and once ubiquitous. Now seen more often than not reverting to nature on a shoreline near you, and still beautiful in decay...

Sum of the Parts

There's a Shetland boat in the shed as I write, built in Fair Isle by Iain Best. She'd been left to fend for herself in the open, and the open up here is very open.

Miraculously after five or so years of almost total neglect she is in good nick, considering. Now I do go on about plywood, but if she'd been built with that material there'd be precious little left to fix.

There are many advocates of plywood, and they do advocate vociferously. Traditional boat builders seem to be, maybe by nature, a little less strident. It could be that all that epoxy goes to the brain, makes them angry. Mixing mayonnaise for days on end, rather than tap, tap, tapping lovely rose head copper nails onto rooves, would make anyone peevish. That's my theory, at least.

So I make no apologies for holding up the virtues of traditional building. Take a  look at those Jumbos being built down West, for instance. To my mind the most beautiful of working boats. And there's the lerret launched at Lyme recently, and Marcus Lewis's Fowey River class: perfection, sheer perfection. Have a look at Gavin Atkin's intheboatshed. Then there's the West Country pilot gigs.... I could go on.

And when it comes to mending them, they all come apart like a kit of parts. This Shetland boat, for example: rotten plank; grind off the rivets;  cut out the plank; use it as a template; scarph, bevel, mastic, fit, rivet - done!

Now with plywood and epoxy that is simply not possible, or at least it takes a damn sight longer. No, I will defend traditional clinker as long as I have breath. Someone has to stand up against the hordes of so-called wooden boat enthusiasts for whom wood means plywood. "I've got a wooden boat," they will tell you. No, you have a plywood boat. Not a bad boat, maybe an exceptionally good boat, but not a wooden boat. Plywood is simply a man-made wood-based laminate; it can make a good boat (ie it will float) and will get people afloat. That can't be a bad thing. There's got to be more to it than that, though. I tell you: there is...

Viking Boats of Beijing...

Tongue in cheek I suggested in my latest bit of columnar Classic Boat nonsense that I would soon start importing clinker dinghies from China, where they could no doubt turn them out far cheaper and probably to a high standard (given a few hundred to practice on first).

And now I've just had an email to say that my domain name (viking-boats.com) will soon be joined by eight others, in India and the Far East:
viking-boats.asia
viking-boats.cn
viking-boats.com.cn
viking-boats.com.hk
viking-boats.com.tw
viking-boats.hk
viking-boats.in
viking-boats.tw

I build to a viking tradition, at least. The idea of viking style boats being built in the Far East is, well far fetched. I wasn't aware that their influence extended that far? But then the name vikings seems to have been appropriated by all and sundry, including a company that supplies office supplies. Can't see where looting and plundering has much in common with paperclips and post-it notes...

Oh the Joys, the Joys...

Gloucester Old Spots and Percy the wild boar are my companions down at the farm by the shores of Loch Broom where I build wooden boats. The field above my shed is awash with sheep who converge pathetically on my Land Rover every morning (you can’t expect a sheep to know the difference between the shepherd’s 2.5 litre Td5 diesel and my 200 series Tdi). All is idyllic. Pete comes with his pale to feed Percy mid-morning and check on the piglets, Tam who’s building an organic vegetable garden, stops to pass the time of day and there’s always the chickens to chase from the shed where they take refuge overnight from the farm dogs – two collies who behave well alone and like wolves when allowed to roam together.

This, then, is the quintessential, traditional boatbuilding scene. Rural tranquillity, a brisk tapping of roving hammers (split by the occasional scream of the thicknesser), the grunt of pigs, crowing of cockerels, clatter of sleet on corrugated iron roofs. This is why I left the city. This is what every commuter stuck between Blackfriars and King’s Cross dreams of on a Friday night in June when his boat’s already lifting to the tide off Pin Mill.

And yet it makes no sense. The traditional boatbuilding industry in this country is hanging on by a wasted keelbolt. You’ll find pockets of expertise all round our coasts – a yard here and there which can still do competent wooden boat repairs – but nothing on the scale of what you would find on the east coast of the America.

Now I have visited  New England three times, and not to look at wooden boats. It was in the 1980s when Australia was edging closer to winning the America’s Cup. On the strength of the advertisements in Classic Boat’s sister magazine WoodenBoat, the sheds – they call them shops – by the waterside, are alive and throbbing. To slip a canvas apron over your lumberjack shirt, stick a pencil behind your ear (and a few more in your special pencil pocket) strap a tool belt round your waist, hitch up your denims and make with the Lie Nielsen bronze smoothing plane is well, cool. In Old England it’s crazy.

John Perryman told me something odd at the London Boat Show apropos wooden boats. “It is a strange fact that a furniture maker need only mark up his chair 300 per cent and people think it’s more valuable. A wooden boat builder has never been able to ask a reasonable price for what he makes.” Did you know that Camper & Nicholsons never made any money from building boats? So what hope have we?

I write this having just quoted for another 18ft clinker double ender. That’s 60 days work, plus materials, costs, rent, overheads, sails, spars. What does £8,500 sound like? The phone goes quiet for a moment. He’s thinking “strewth, that’s a lot for a little wooden boat? I could buy a brand new Fiat Punto for less than that. Or two Plastub simulated clinker rowing boats, or a Drastic Plugger.” And he’d be right. Off the shelf, delivered tomorrow, comes in blue or green. Why in heaven should a production line glassfibre boat for £8,500 sound reasonable and a hand-made larch on oak clinker boat of the same length that took three months to build “a bit steep”? Beats me.

I have a theory – several in fact. Number one. The myth of maintenance. Wooden boatbuilders (and I don’t mean plywood and epoxy) have been too slow in espousing new technology. We have microporous water-based varnishes that last for decades; we have flexible mastics that ensure a clinker boat will not leak, ever. Yet we persist in slapping 50/50 varnish on bare wood, and wonder why it’s peeling by next spring.

Number two. People have bought the myth of glassfibre. It’s too late to convert all but a very tiny minority. Glassfibre is now the traditional boat building material (just as steel makes cars). Forget it.

And thirdly they think we just do it for fun. They think we enjoy spending our days in and around draughty old milking parlours on the shores of Highland lochs, with piglets and cockerels for company, listening to Mozart on the radio, passing the time of day with farmers and market gardeners, laying coats of enamel on smooth topsides and shaping larch into perfect curves…

The Smaller the Boat

‘The smaller the boat, the greater the pleasure’ is rolled out almost as often as Ratty’s total delight in simply ‘messing about in boats’. That old song, Messing about on the River captures a world of summer days, floaty dresses, quanting poles, boaters, bonnets and fair hands dipped in still waters. And underlying all is the assumption that the boat is old, and wooden, fastened with copper, shining under a translucent film of copal varnish, details picked out in gold, spoon oars cupped in bronze rowlocks.

Messing about in warm mahogany may be pleasurable, but building them is a business fraught with financial danger. When one learns from the official biography that Camper & Nicholsons never made a penny from building boats over the centuries, only from repairs and brokerage, it throws the whole romantic edifice into new perspective. Wooden boatbuilding the traditional way may have nostalgic overtones of quaint sheds, fragrant oak shavings and well-honed blades, the reality was often very different. Boatbuilders in the time of Nelson may have been among the elite, as Colin Mudie once told me ‘the rocket scientists of their age’, but it’s been downhill ever since.

Traditional clinker boats, for all their craftsmanship, do not command a premium. Show a man an 18ft dinghy, hand made from finest materials that took three months to build, and a price tag approaching five figures and he’ll think you’re mad. He’ll talk about maintenance, about ‘taking’ up. He’ll likely quote his grandfather’s suggestion of soap, sawdust and tallow, and (despite telling him there’s a bead of Arbocol between the lands, not sheep dung) submerging her for two weeks. That’s like suggesting his new Peugeot will need running in at 40mph for the first 1,000 miles.

Old boats, quite simply, have a bad reputation. Insurance companies are wary and surveyors  pepper their reports with ‘as far as was possible to ascertain…’. And yet, having taken a new 18-foot clinker double-ender to London’s Excel a year or so ago, I can vouch for the huge delight on people’s faces, jaded after a sea of glassfibre, as they run their hands around the gunwale, stroke the varnish and squint at the way each plank rises up from amidships. ‘How do you do that?’ they ask. ‘Does the wood come in precut boards, planed to fit? Is it ply?’ You tell them it comes in log from the forest, is cut on site to 5/8in, thicknessed to 1/2in, each plank spiled to fit its lower neighbour and they begin to get some idea of what they think they cannot afford. Sometimes I reckon I’d have more joy making bookshelves from old boats, cut off amidships and stuck on end, for loft conversions.

Underlying this reluctance to value new boats built the old way is an assumption that it’s fun. Which, up to a point, is true. No matter how draughty the chicken shed in which you work, cold the winter’s day, you are your own master, something very precious these days. Who’d be a lawyer when you can build a wooden boat, shaping larch to conform to curves drawn by Vikings, steaming English oak as it’s been steamed for centuries?

As for making money; dismiss the thought. The answer for those who wish to keep tradition alive is not to give up the day job. I know several yards, and a number of boatbuilders who subsidise their work by enslaving themselves to the computer. The flickering screen makes a fine scarf joint against the work of chisel and plane.

And I believe it’s the best, and perhaps only way to keep traditional ways of crafting boats alive. Stick with the draughty sheds which go with the trade, keep the long hours and late nights; in essence, the ethos of the old ways. Just take out some of the uncertainty.

Incidentally, I had that fellow Doug Peterson, designer of America’s Cup winners, on the stand at Excel, running his fingers round my gunwales, squinting at the run of planking. He may have spotted a flat spot. Never let on. Just smiled and muttered something about ‘the smaller the boat…’

Sorcerer's Apprentice

It’s a fact that few of the graduates from the various excellent boat building colleges leave having built an entire boat. They may have scarphed the stem, put in a garboard (just one mind you) riveted the third strake, and done a bit of caulking, but a whole boat? Nah. They will have learnt a great deal about sharpening tools (I’m still learning by trial and error) and received a thorough grounding in a variety of techniques, most of which they will find useful one day. If they also learn the value of speed and adequate accuracy, and basic accounting practices, then the course fee would have been worthwhile. They may even find employment.

That sounds meaner than it’s meant to sound. I envy those who learnt at leisure, under the guidance of an old fellow in brown overalls with the patience of a saint. You’ll know that my experience was gained in a year at a working yard, with deadlines to meet, and yes, I did build a boat, a 15ft clinker dinghy after four months, and had planked up an 18ft Norwegian boat by the time they threw me out.

I count myself fortunate; I can’t imagine what it’s like to put up the port garboard and hand over the starboard side to someone else. Mark Stockl, under whose benign influence I spent my time at the yard, swore by one man one boat. “Then you’ve only yourself to blame,” he said. All those check shirted blokes (and a token woman) in advertisements promoting American boat building colleges, crowding round that up-turned hull, one holding a brace and bit, the other a screw, the other a clamp... I’d go bonkers with claustrophobia.

It is amazing what you can achieve working alone. My friend Tim, who left the yard soon after me to build a plank on frame cutter, hung the 35ft larch planks by himself. If there’s any discrepancy between port and starboard, which I doubt, it’s at least symmetrical. A helping hand is often welcome when it’s tme to rove up those last few; many hands when it comes to turning over a hull. Between times, just leave me alone.

The little clinker boat I’m building at the moment is a case in point. I don’t need any help. The fourth plank on the starboard side is beginning to stray from the mould. So I’ll have to watch it, maybe bring the opposite number out a touch to balance. It’s my problem, and noone else’s. There’s no explanation needed to a third party.

It also helps that the overall length of the boat is just 45in. She’s a proper boat in every way: scarphed backbone, 3/16^th larch planking, riveted, steamed oak frames, stem rabbet, proper jerrolds or gains, mahogany transom. It’s proved an invaluable refresher course in clinker building, enabling me to hone my accuracy to a high degree. And there’s no hefting huge planks around. At 45in or so, they can be got out of scraps, and resawn to give book matched pairs. I can put up four planks on a good day. The whole project will take no more than two weeks.

So I recommend boat building in miniature to all principals at our burgeoning boat building colleges. It enables students to build an entire boat for one thing. And if they expect to have grandchildren, as the owner who commissioned my boat does, then she’ll make a fine cradle for a future boat builder. Those formative months curled up inside a clinker boat will afford ample time to study the subtleties of planking. The eye for a fair line should stay with the little mites for a lifetime.

Beards...

If the cause of little wooden boats is to be furthered; if the sailing of small traditional craft is to prosper, and in order to encourage more youngsters and women to take an interest in classic dinghies, a major issue has to be addressed: beards.

You cannot fail to notice at classic boat gatherings and jumble sales the length of the land that the vast majority of those running their fingers over varnished gunwales or squinting at sheer lines or discussing the merits of standing over balanced lug rigs are men, usually over 50, and invariably bearded. Of women and the young there is usually no sign. And those that are present look  impressed (in the sense they look as if they’d been rounded up by the Press Gang and shovelled into the family MPV).

There are exceptions: the other day I delivered a 15ft faering (yes, the one I’ve been wittering on about for months was finally delivered) to a family in the Lake District. To a man, woman, boy and girl they were mad about little boats, and the children all wore red woolly hats like Swallows (or was it Amazons?). No sign of boredom there, and not a Game Boy to be seen anywhere. Heart warming.

Then along came the bearded ones. Now I have to be careful here as they are all good friends, who I respect and like a lot. And one of them was, to be honest, beardless. Oh, and there was also a young woman amongst them who would be sorely offended if I suggested she had even the slightest trace of a beard. Nevertheless, beardless or no, they all looked as if they should be bearded.

As a beardless one myself – any attempts have been pathetic – I am not a little envious of those old-fashioned, luxuriant chin bushes and side whiskers you still occasionally see. The ones that look as if they might shelter two larks and a wren or if shaken would disgorge the crumbs from half a loaf of wholemeal bread. These are seldom the beards one sees at British traditional boat gatherings, however, which are usually less flamboyant. More an excuse not to shave, or perhaps a disguise. Maybe even as a deterrent, for women, by and large, do not like straggly beards.

Little old boat gatherings are clearly among the last havens for the hunted and harassed and soon to be made redundant old British male; places where this endangered species can range around safely without dressing to attract a mate. He can poke about boat jumble with impunity, rummage through skeins of cheap rope, stroke varnish in peace, away from the critical gaze of spouse or partner, and converse endlessly about grommets, the genius of Albert Strange, centreboards and buttock lines without that tug on the sleeve that signifies “I’m bored, I want to go home/get a burger/recharge my Game Boy/ go to a garden centre or sit in the car and watch telly.”

In America little old wooden boats are also largely owned, admired, stroked, varnished, built, designed and sailed by bearded men over the age of 50. However, the clothes are smarter, beards much neater – often modelled after Ernest Hemingway’s. You will find throngs of Old Men of the Sea, lacking only a battered straw hat and a pair of ragged canvas trousers, and more women (anthropologists discuss).

Over here we need more young families in red woolly hats involved in little boats. And more women. Bottom line is a bunch of bearded old geezers in scruffy jeans is not only unsightly but deeply unsexy. So smarten up lads.

Elf an' Safety

It’s a dangerous business safety.  Every time I use the planer it’s a case of: “OK Morgan. What’s it to be? Asphyxiated by oak dust, blinded by a wood chip or deafened. You choose.” I go through phases. One day I might put on the whole shebang: ear defenders, mask and goggles. Other days I think: “what the hell”. Some days I won’t find my mask for hours, and when I do it’s caked in dust. I shake it, put it over my mouth and inhale a day’s worth of dust in one gulp.

Then there’s the question: in what order do you put on your safety gear? Strap on goggles first and the ear defenders fit no problem. But the mask? No. So it’s off with the lot of it – like trying to put your shoes on before your socks. So it’s mask, goggles, then ear defenders.

Oh that it were that simple. The mask, no matter how careful I am, is always full of dust or moisture (or both). The goggles are never crystal clear, and over glasses it’s like looking through grubby double glazing. Which means I can’t see much. Which means I often can’t find my ear defenders. Especially when it’s hot and the fug from my mask steams up my goggles. Before I’ve put on the ear defenders I’m staggering around with my hands out, tripping over things.

Put the ear defenders on and I’m deaf. Thus deaf, half blind and breathing heavily I grope towards one of the most lethal, yet innocuous-looking pieces of boat shop equipment: the bandsaw. I press the green button, and a faint whirring noise become apparent. I push the workpiece against the blade and nothing happens. The whirring noise was the fridge in the deer larder kicking in next door. I have not plugged the bandsaw in.

And so it goes on. And so I have to choose. Do I want to hear the bandsaw, and not see it? Or vice versa. Do I value my lungs over my eyes, or my ears over my sight. It seems that I cannot have all three. Mostly, as I already wear glasses, I leave off my goggles -– unless I'm grinding steel. When I’m grinding wood then it’s mask, no goggles and ear defenders.

As for the planer, which emits a banshee shriek that is probably responsible for keeping my shed mice free, my first recourse is to the ear defenders. I figure the chances of a wood chip getting past my glasses is slim, and how much dust can a planer make?

The other day, when a weak sun slanted through the skylights, I discovered that a planer does indeed make a huge amount of fine dust. The shed was a miasma of suspended dust particles. It was as if I were the meat in a huge pot of dust soup.

Today I resolve to wear at least two out of my three defences. I will wear a mask mostly, and ear defenders whenever it gets noisy. That way at least I’ll not be coughing my way to an early grave holding a brass trumpet to my ear. My eyes? They’ll have to take their chances, unless I’m attacking metal with a grinder. The thought of a red hot sliver of steel in my cornea doesn’t appeal.

As for the bandsaw, I reckon that not wearing ear defenders is probably the safest bet. The times I’ve left it running, and not realised I nearly couldn’t count on the fingers of my hands (I nearly lost them, that’s why). I am reconciled to losing one sooner or later, as I have developed a morbid fascination with that singing blade. Like a man who must stand on the very edge of a precipice, I dice with disaster every time I fire up the bandsaw. The other day I found myself fishing small slivers of wood from beside the blade – without stopping the damn thing. They say that over familiarity with machinery is the cause of the majority of accidents. Well me and my band saw are, you know, just like that. She calls me Posh and I call her Becks (it’s an Elektra  Beckum). And you can’t get much more familiar than that.

The Beauty of Clinker

Boats are the single most important objects in the history of the world, bringing migrants, spreading civilisations, carrying goods, providing recreation, allowing fishermen to feed populations. The vikings perfected the northern method of clinker boat building, and the method has changed little if at all since. Clinker boats have been built, and are still being built, and are objects of great beauty in themselves. The method involved wrapping thin overlapping planks or strakes around temporary formers (moulds), which are removed when the shell is fully planked, which is then strengthened with oak ribs (called timbers), steamed to give suppleness. Copper rivets are used to fasten the planks together and the timbers to the planks. When gunwales and seats (thwarts) are added, this produces a light, flexible structure that withstands wave action. Moreover, as a clinker boat is simply a collection of individual pieces, all of which can be replaced (no glue is used), it is infinitely repairable. A clinker boat: practical, useful, beautiful and once ubiquitous. Now seen more often than not reverting to nature on a shoreline near you, and still beautiful in decay...

Let's hear it for old boat builders...

I feel it expected of me to foster the romance of the humble wooden boat builder, hard at work alone in a draughty shed, making an honest crust against the odds in a cruel world, but in truth it’s been a quiet few months on loch Woebegone, or rather beside Loch Broom. The snows of autumn are upon us, the stags are roaring in the hills, the workshop is colder inside than it is outside, but there is not much going on, Viking Boats International of Ullapool, after a busy spring and summer, having fallen on its first barren patch in nine years.

If I had a pound for every time someone told me “you’ll never get rich being a boat builder” I’d be, er, rich. My heart bleeds for all those apprentices we hear are pouring from the training schools...

But all is far from doom and gloom. Praise the lord, for I can hear again., thanks to Bryony, the practice nurse, and what looked at first when she wheeled it into the surgery like a small tropical fish tank. I mouthed a sense of alarm, but she just smiled and stuck this pulsating probe thing in my ear. What was I expecting? A pair of Amazonian ear-cleaning piranhas?

And it worked, detritus fell from my lugholes like leaves from a blocked storm drain, viz: several spoonfuls of olive oil, introduced over the preceding days to soften the wax; several pieces of that softened wax, which had plugged my eardrums as efficiently as those little yellow squashy things, and half a pint of warm water (introduced by Bryony in order to loosen the wax) on the surface of which noxious and probably toxic soup floated a film of glue and sawdust...  Suddenly I could hear as clear as a bell, and just as I was getting the knack of lip reading and ignoring calls to do the washing up.

“I see you are a boat builder,” says she, knowing full well that I was, still am. I expect she was waiting for a 1/2in chisel and a lost pencil to appear, as was I (where the hell did that chisel go?) “Occupational hazard,” she says. “Ear defenders trap the wax.” And, so, apparently make you go deaf? That can’t be right.

So, another hazard of boat building: to ‘blinded by a splinter’; ‘crippled by a band saw’ – or starved to death – we can now add ‘deafened by ear defenders’. Time I had the health and safety boys round to close me down, claim for disability allowance and spend the rest of my days on benefits.

Personally, and I am quite proud of the fact, I have never taken a penny in state benefit in my life. I could claim all sorts of things, my income now being well below the bread line. Furthermore, unemployable after 25 years of self employment, alternative occupations open to me are few and far between.

Did consider becoming a poet, to which end I have begun scribbling the odd line on a pad, the most recent of which I will exclusively share with you.

An ocean, an ocean, simply waves repeated,

Ad infinitum, ad infinitum...

Profound, eh? OK, I’m working on it. Becoming an artist was rather more appealing, having discovered for how much they sell their work, and how short a time it often takes to make, compared to humble artisanship, a subject about which I wrote last month. Except I can’t draw (so what’s the problem, you say?)

Having tried writing, maybe teaching is the answer? After all, as the old saying goes “If you can: do; if you can’t: teach and if you can’t teach, write.”

Logic says that, having skipped straight to writing early on in my career, and then having back tracked to a spell of doing, it’s time to move forward again. As my good friend Topher, a boatbuilder who incidentally is now a teacher, is fond of saying: “Whatever your problem, boat building is not the answer...” Trouble is I quite like building boats.