intheboatshed.net

The Nancy Oldfield Trust enjoying a brisk breeze on Barton
Broad. Click on the photographs for a larger image

This is a Broads One Design, often called a Brown Boat, and they’re very common on the Norfolk Broads.

The Nancy Oldfield Trust is based at Barton Broad and provides activities including sailing, canoeing, motor boating, fishing, bird-watching and environmental studies for anyone who is disadvantaged or has a disability, and good for them - I imagine anyone stepping out of the boat at the end of this ride would have felt that life was good and that they were about ten feet tall.

Follow the link for more posts referring to the Norfolk Broads.

One of the Martham yard’s Japonicas reefed down ready
to face the wind on Barton Broad.

The Museum of the Broads’ steamer, Falcon

A typical Broadland river scene on the way to the
staithe at Stalham, and the Museum of the Broads. My
daughter loves coiling unused mooring lines. And note the
ubiquitous Broads mud weight!

Punt in boatbuilder’s workshop, photo from the
Wikimedia Commons, taken by Thruston

I really can’t add anything to this excellent Wikipedia entry on the punt - one day all its entries will be like this.

Do you know there are still people out there, particularly in publishing, who think the Wikipedia is useless? I once had a rancourous argument with a senior director for a magazine and events company when I dared to suggest that the model was a good and useful one. No doubt sour grapes can grow almost anywhere…

The names of a punt’s component parts, image from the
Wikimedia, drawn by Thruston

See also:

•Henry Taunt’s 19th Century photos of the Thames

•Punts galore at Oxford

•Free online boatbuilding plans for a racing punt

Waveney One-Designs in action. Photo from Alan Davies
of the Museum of the Broads

Alan Davies of the Museum of the Broads has kindly agreed to allow us to republish a short article telling the story of the Waveney boats that he wrote for the museum’s newsletter. Many thanks Alan!

Waveney One Designs

Length 20ft, beam 6ft 2in, draft 2ft 11in, sail area 290sqft, gunter rig

Designer W S Parker

The Waveneys were designed in the early 1920s by William Parker of Oulton Broad, after the Waveney Sailing Club proposed to have a one-design boat. The first four or so boats were built along similar lines and developed into a consistent set of drawn plans in 1928.

The first seven were built before World War II and, instead of sail numbers, had the letters A-H in alphabetical order of build. This was later changed to numbers with a ‘W’, both in red. They are all named after wild marsh flowers.

The first six were built by the Evans Yard at Kirkley. Horace Jenner built Number 7 and Number 8 was built at Richards’s Shipyard. The rest were built by Tim Flower and his sons in a boat shed in their Lowestoft garden with exception of Number 24, which was built by Selwyn Watson.

WODs are occasionally mistaken for the more numerous Yare & Bure One Designs, but an easy way to tell them apart is the red sail numbers of the WODs and the fact they have two shrouds on each side as opposed to the Y&BODs’ single shroud. Another difference, only seen when the boat is out of the water, is that the keel is a ballasted metal plate rather than a ballasted wooden one.

By the early 1990s many of the 26 boats had already had to undergo major restoration and it was felt that as with the Y&BOD and the Broads One-Design the cost of building and maintaining new wooden boats would be too expensive. so local boat builder Jimmy Toplis decided to take a mould of his WOD, Penny Royal. By September 1994 the first GRP Waveney, Celandine (Number 27) was launched.

The new boat had to be assessed to make sure its performance was similar to the wooden boats, and once the weight was corrected the new boat’s performance was on a par with the older boats.

To date five more GRP boats have been built, taking the numbers to 32, with orders for two more. One of them has gone to Lake Windermere, and interest has been expressed in developing the hull as a small two-berth Broads cruiser, as has happened with the Thurne Class, which is based on the Y&BOD’s hull.