Water Craft magazine for January-February includes more boat plans

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Water Craft January

Water Craft editor Pete Greenfield has written to say that the January-February issue of his magazine will be in the newsagents from the 17th December. Here’s what he has to say:

Well, if you’ll permit the conceit that a boating magazine can have a sub-plot, this issue’s can be summed up as: What a difference a wooden boat specialist can make.

Wooden boat specialists like…

Alec Jordan of Jordan Boats who joined forces with the Scottish Fisheries Museum to launch the Scottish Coastal Rowing Project, commissioning Iain Oughtred to design the 20ft (6m) St Ayles Skiff, which local groups can build from a modestly priced pre-cut plywood kit. Amateur wooden boat builder Chris Perkins describes how they built the prototype.

Wooden boat builder and designer Matt Newland of Swallow Boats combines ply-epoxy hull construction with water ballast and carbon spars to produce the 20’ (6m) Baycruiser, the most innovative and exciting small cruising yacht in years.

Wooden boat designer Francois Vivier whose p-ractical pocket gaffer Meaban is now also available as a pre-cut plywood kit for home completion.

Wooden boat builder and designer Paul Gartside of Nova Scotia gives us full plans + offsets for a traditional round-sterned workboat with so much character you’ll want to get a craftsman to build her for you. But who? Perhaps one of the members of the…

Wooden Boatbuilders Trade Association. Wherever you live in the UK and whether you want a wooden boat built or restored, using traditional or modern methods, there’s a WBTA member not too far away with all the skills to do the job.

And one wooden boat builder who will be long remembered around Cornwall and beyond…

Ralph Bird, the great Cornish pilot gig enthusiast who sadly passed away in November, having built no less than 29 gigs and enthused a whole new generation of rowers.

It sounds like another great issue packed with material to me. It’s nice to see the old practice of magazines publishing plans coming back, and good also to see the WBTA getting itself some publicity, by the way.

Subscribe to Water Craft now

A waterside stroll around Plymouth

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Smeaton’s Tower, Plymouth Hoe. As usual, click on the thumbnails for much larger photos

Today we have one of intheboatshed.net’s waterside strolls – and this time it’s a series of photos taken by my wife Julie Atkin on a recent trip to the old maritime city of Plymouth.

The town shows the scars of having been devastated by a notorious wartime bombing raid in 1941 but still has quite a few old gems of buildings left from earlier times. It also has some striking large and small monuments, many of which are rather touching.

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Cattewater Harbour Commission; the impressive Royal William Victualling Yard built in the 1820s; the wonderful 1935 Tinside tidal swimming pool; and the site where they make the fabulously fragrant Plymouth Gin

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Apart from the smack in the first group of photos there weren’t many interesting old wooden boats around, but she found these  – the one on the left is for sale

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The Sir Francis Drake monument; the Mayflower monument; a list of the Pilgrim Fathers (click on the image to see it at a readable size); Roanoke Colonies; Tolpuddle Martyrs; iron pipes!

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Monuments on the wall of the Royal National Lifeboats Institution shop make loss and survival at sea intensely personal: see how the name Launder comes up several times, and the memorials to the crew of the Pescado, the last of the old time trawler skippers and the last steam trawler skipper. And don’t miss the memorial to the elderly couple whose long lives are attributed to eating a lot of fish


Boatbuilding Academy student launch day, December 2009 – some early photos

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Reader Brian Pearson has kindly given me permission to put up a few of the photos he and his son took of the Boatbuilding Academy’s student launch day last Saturday. Thanks Brian!

He tells me that it was a really nice event with lots of people, a watery winter sun – which was great after all the terrible weather we’ve been having – and lots of lovely boats and happy boat builders with their families.

There will be more when principal Yvonne Green manages to send some over together with details of the boats, as I hope she will – and perhaps with luck the students themselves will chip in also.

I must say there are some delightful pieces of work here – particularly the pram with no metal components of any kind. Take a bow, boatbuilding students of Lyme!

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