intheboatshed.net

The WBTA has decided to find out about the kinds of people who buy and own traditional boats, where they  go and where they get their information - and it has engaged an independent market research firm to run a survey.

I was very pleased to be asked to put up this link to the short survey questionnaire, as it’s potentially an excellent step, and hopefully will elicit some really useful answers.

I’d be most grateful if as many of you as possible fill it in - it really won’t take long, you might win one of Kathy Mansfield’s very nice calendars, and you will be contributing to keeping wooden boatbuilders afloat business-wise during the hard times to come.

Yes - you heard right. There are PRIZES to be won!

It would be an added bonus if you could also please find somewhere to say that you came from intheboatshed.net - there’s at least one little window you can use to convey this essential piece of information, and I’m sure we’d all like to see the WBTA making more use of intheboatshed.net’s ability to communicate with the big wide world.

Finally please pass this on to your friends - all you have to do is to email them the link for this site (http://intheboatshed.net of course!), as I’ll leave this post at the top of the pile for a few days.

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Norm Lehman’s superb sailing canoe built to
Michael Storer’s Beth plans

Michael Storer’s flat-bottomed Beth sailing canoe looks wonderful to me - fast, fun, beguilingly good looking in photos on the water, and simple to build. So it’s nice to hear of a new one being built by Norm Lehman. See the Woodwork Forums thread, Norm’s Flickr photo collection, and of course the Michael’s own web page about Beth.

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Hannu’s coracle. His site offers plans for a range of
small boats derived from traditional types

Hannu Vartiala has just let me know that he has moved his website to a new address - so I’d like to take this opportunity to direct intheboatshed.net readers over there for a happy few minutes.

It’s true that Hannu’s chosen boatbuilding material isn’t mainstream for intheboatshed.net, but those of you who yearn to build a small boat and are happy to do so in plywood may well find his plans interesting, for as well as the coracle pictured above, he has included some interesting boatbuilding plans and material on flat-bottomed swamp boats, drawings for a useful-looking 12ft flat-bottomed skiff, various variants on the Auray punt theme including Chapman’s Ekstock boat, and a couple of light-weight plywood dories. Well worth a look, I’d say.