Month: June 2007

Gorgeous Oughtred sailing canoe wins 2007 Watercraft boatbuilding prize

Scotch Mist

Scotch Mist Scotch Mist Scotch Mist
Built to Iain Oughtred’s Macgregor design, Scotch Mist was the winner of the 2007 Watercraft boat building competition

Scotch Mist’s builder Chris Perkins built his beautiful sailing canoe to Iain Oughtred’s Macgregor design in an attempt to create a boat he could launch and recover on his own.

The name came from a definition in the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that seems to have tickled Chris’s fancy: Continue reading “Gorgeous Oughtred sailing canoe wins 2007 Watercraft boatbuilding prize”

Cooke on anchoring, mooring, stowing away, and running aground

Cooke

Chapter IX: ‘No anchor, no matter how good its proportions and shape may be, can be expected to hold a boat if the cable be allowed to fall in a heap on top of it.’

Cooke Cooke Cooke

Cooke Cooke

Chapter X: ‘There is probably no manoeuvre in the practice of seamanship that causes the novice so much misgiving as picking up moorings.’ Continue reading “Cooke on anchoring, mooring, stowing away, and running aground”

A fabulous day with the craftsman boatbuilders at Beale Park

Beale Park Thames Boat Show

Beale Park Thames Boat Show Beale Park Thames Boat Show Beale Park Thames Boat Show
Early morning at Beale Park; a Wharram catamaran; Joan Jardine-Brown with a boat she designed when she was just 19; a classic Thames skiff

We’ve had a great, if tiring day today with the professional and amateur boatbuilders and boat clubs at the Beale Park Thames Boat Show. As always it was quite an event, with boatbuilders finding spare moments to socialise between visitors, and the clubs devoted to particular types of boats enjoying their own extended picnics, while the general public oohed-and-aahed over the boats themselves. We oohed and aahed quite a lot ourselves, and I discovered later that I had taken 480 photographs, and my partner Julie took a fist-full of good shots too – that’s one of hers at the top of this post.

There were some nice surprises, the best of which was that we met [ad name=”intheboatshed-post”] Continue reading “A fabulous day with the craftsman boatbuilders at Beale Park”