February 2011 – Page 3 – intheboatshed.net

March/April issue of Water Craft out soon

That’s an impressive looking lot of sail!

The March/April 2011 issue of Water Craft will be in the newsagents from 24 February.

Inside, you’ll find:

Colin Buttifant’s latest Broads yacht is fast – she can hold her own with the stripped-down local racers but she’s as cosy as a country cottage down below, according to Kathy Mansfield.
In Pen-Hir, leading French naval architect François Vivier has created an elegantly simple cruising yacht he calls a ‘Folkboat for the Future’ – and his son’s boatyard Icari is building her in sustainable birch plywood.
Boatbuilding materials are rarely – if ever – cheap, so when Ian Parsons decided to build his first boat, a stitch-and-tape Stornoway 14 dayboat, in order to avoid expensive waste he bought a pre-cut kit of plywood parts.
When Dick Phillips took over Phil Swift’s Willow Bay Boats range, he was undecided whether to offer the popular dayboats as bare hulls for home completion. So he went to see two of Phil’s customers who had done just that..
Gentleman-chandler Moray MacPhail leads a fact-finding mission of East Coast luminaries to Klassieke Schepen, the Dutch traditional boat show.

This is not to forget all Water Craft’s other features, regular and irregular, and – inevitably – a reminder from the editor about the Cordless Canoe Challenge at the Beale Park Boat Show, in which contestants compete to win a bag full of brand new Makita power tools worth over £1200.

Click here to order your subscription now!

John Macauley-built lugger Freyja needs a good new home in Scotland

My friend Ian Duffill is looking for a new home in Scotland for Freyja, the John Macaulay-built 16ft clinker dinghy seen at the Beale Park Thames Boat Show.

Here’s the story of Freyja, as Ian tells it:

‘In 2000 iconic traditional boatbuilder John MacAulay, who has his workshop at Flodabay on Harris was asked to build a boat suitable to sail across the Minch to the Shiant Islands.

‘The owner of the Shiants is Adam Nicolson, author and television presenter, grandson of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicolson of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.

‘After one epic voyage to the Shiants, described in Adam’s book Sea Room (see below), the boat Freyja was stored and not used again. She is an open16ft transom dinghy, clinker built in larch on oak with sea-kindly and dramatically tight turns to the bilge to make a good deep keel. With a single dipping lug she travels swiftly from A to B.

‘Through sheer serendipity, Adam came to give Freyja to me. We both hoped I would be able to get her sailing again and use her in her element – the sea. Although I cleaned her up and got her in the water, matters conspired so I never managed to sail her on the sea.

‘Now we have moved to North Norfolk, where I find that short tacking into Blakeney Harbour’s narrow, shallow channel with many sandbanks is asking too much of her. She now sits forlornly in a cavernous barn on a nearby farm and needs a new home where the local sailing conditions are more suitable for her.

‘I have spoken with Adam and we have agreed that a return to Scottish waters would be ideal. Most of all she wants an owner who can give her the chance to roam in open water. If she could be made available for youngsters to experience handling this traditional style of boat, so much the better. A youth organisation, club or private individual – it doesn’t matter. She just needs a chance to come alive again.

‘She was given to me and neither Adam nor I expect any payment – just to see her in action once more.

‘She comes complete – mast, oars, rudder, tiller, sail, floorboards and custom built road trailer but has been out of the water for too long and needs to be immersed for some time to take up again. I might be able to deliver – we can talk about it.’

Sea Room is published by Harper Collins, London and is available from Amazon.

For more on Freyja at intheboatshed.net, see our earlier post.

If you’re interested in Freyja, email me at gmatkin@gmail.com and I’ll pass your message on to Ian.

PS – Freyja’s future has been decided she is to return to Harris where she will be sailed by local groups. She will also be under the care of her original builder, John Macauley.

London’s ship in a bottle

This giant ship in a bottle artwork in Trafalgar Square, London, by Yinka Shonibare commemorates Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar.

It also raises the time-honoured ship-in-a-bottle question: how on earth did they make it?

Having seen it at close quarters and read about it, I still don’t know the answer. What we are told, however, is that the ship’s 37 sails are made of exuberant and richly patterned textiles commonly associated with African dress and is meant to convey the complexity of British expansion in trade and Empire, made possible through the freedom of the seas that followed victory at Trafalgar.

The bottle’s context is intriguing. Trafalgar Square is the usual destination of big demonstrations in London, and as I passed through on Saturday a crowd of Egyptians were celebrating the previous day’s events in Tahrir Square, and their countrymen’s victory over an oppressive regime supported by so many Western governments. I sincerely hope the cause of their understandable happiness lasts, although I fear Egypt is a country where there must be many dangerous people who have reason to fear the justice that democracy could bring.

Atop his column, meanwhile, Nelson serenely looked out over the River Thames and the Empire from atop his wonderfully impressive column. There’s something symbolic about the way he so resolutely turns his back on the political gestures and statements that ordinary mortals make in the square – I don’t know if it was the intention of the original architect and artist, but his stance could have been calculated to represent the establishment’s view of most of what happens behind him.

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