Wild Goose 3 – For sale!
At long last Wild Goose is finished! Or rather I have done all that I plan to do, with any old boat you could go on doing things more or less for ever. So now she is for sale. She has full set of spars, sails in good condition, lots of fittings and a repaired road...
read moreWild Goose – Part 2
I am slightly taken aback to discover that Wild Goose has now been in the workshop for nearly three years. To be fair, she was always a side project to be worked on in quieter times and I was away sailing for four months last year. Still, the job continues to move...
read moreNew Boat for Old
The local open boat race fleet is thriving and has reached the point where the doesn't seem to be enough boats to go round. One new boat has been built recently but this is a huge commitment in time and money so people have been looking for easier ways. As a result...
read moreWoozle’s new rig
Like many wooden boats Woozle's history is a bit uncertain but in any case she is an elegant little 12ft clinker dinghy which has been restored by the International Boatbuilding Training College in Lowestoft at some stage and she is an established member of the...
read moreAdventures in plywood
Like many other technologies plywood production improved a huge amount during the second World War. As a result of this , the shortage of solid timber and rising labour costs, the 1950s and 1960s saw a boom in the design and building of plywood boats. As so often with...
read moreWild Goose
Every now and again a boat comes along that leads me to break my rule about not buying any more boats. The excuses this time are: She is a well known local boat with a local sail number and a reputation for sailing well so she should be easy enough to sell when she is...
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A new plank for Leila
Leila is probably the most elegant boat I have yet worked on. She is a William Fife designed 6 metre racing yacht built in his family yard at Fairlie on the Clyde in 1912. Much of the backbone and the larch lower planking has been replaced and now we are selectively...
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No boat is ever perfect
All boats are to a greater or lesser extent built to a price; this means that even well build new boats can benefit from some careful additions. Parker Yachts are well known for their build quality and in latter years the internal joinery was particularly high...
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Iain Oughtred – Little Tern “Skute”
Although he lives on the the isle of Skye, Iain Oughtred is in fact Australian and was born in the outskirts of Sidney. During the many years he has lived in Britain, Iain has become one of our most highly regarded designers of small wooden boats with well over 100...
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Stem Repair
Estralita, a 20 foot clinker motorboat spent much of her life carrying tourists in Salcombe harbour. She is now around a hundred years old and in need of a fair amount of repair. One of the most troublesome leaks was around the the stem where an old repair in the stem...
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