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.