Month: February 2012

Sara and Will Stirling to sail 14ft dinghy to Eddystone Light to raise Wateraid cash

Stirling and Son 14ft dinghy ashore in the mud

Intheboatshed.net regular correspondent Will Stirling and his wife Sara  are to sail from Plymouth to the Eddystone Lighthouse and back in an open 14ft clinker dinghy. (See more of the boat here.)

But it’s not for a bet as you might think – it’s to raise money for the charity Wateraid, and to demonstrate the dinghy’s seaworthiness.

Will is an sailing adventurer as well as a historian and boatbuilder – he runs the boatbuilding firm Stirling and Son – and has spent the last five summers sailing in the Arctic, most recently as skipper of the support boat for the Old Pulteney Row to the Pole expedition last year.

In March Sara and Will plan to sail their 14ft dinghy from the Mount Batten Centre
in Plymouth to the Eddystone Light and back, a trip of 24 miles. In fact, it’s to be the first of a series of increasingly adventurous trips that Will intends to make, including one across the English Channel in the dinghy this summer. The third outing is to be a trip through the Magellan Straight, at the southern-most tip of South America.

To sponsor Sara and Will, click here. I’m told a gift of £12 can buy two taps for a village waterpoint, £20 can buy 25 metres of pipe, £46 can buy a family toilet, £50 can buy a hand-pump and £60 can buy a rainwater collection jar.

San Francisco artist Lawrence LaBianca uses the Light Trow in his work

Loomings, featuring a quotation from Melville's Moby Dick

Lawrence LaBianca art work installation Lawrence LaBianca steel boat sculpture

California artist Lawrence LaBianca has been using the hull of my Light Trow design in his artwork, we were delighted to learn this morning.

Lawrence got in touch this morning to tell us that he’s been working with boat forms and a variety of themes, including Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick , that among others he has used the hull of the Light Trow in some of them. Click on the big image and you should be able to read a quotation from the first chapter of Melville’s novel on the bottom of my little boat.

I really like that idea!

More recently he has been working on creating works that record environmental phenomenas such as wind, water – see an example here – and is  now in the process of making several buoys, which he intends to deploy in the waters around the San Francisco Bay. He also says he’s thinking of building a full-sized Light Trow to use in placing the buoys, and for rowing and sailing on the bay.

Naturally we’re curious about the buoys – and delighted to hear that there are plans afoot to build another Light Trow. Great good luck Lawrence, and thanks for your news and photos.

PS – Regular readers may be trying to remember when Ben Crawshaw’s Light Trow appeared in artist’s work – in fact, it appeared in an illustration by Spanish artist Elena Val for a child’s book: click here to see the post.

PH Emerson photos from the Fens and East Anglian coast appear on Retronaut

 

Photos taken by the Victorian photographer PH Emerson and published in the book Pictures from Fen and Field, dated 1887. More great shots by Emerson of fishing boats and turf boats can be found on the wonderful Retronaut, and and also here, and prints to hang on you wall can be bought here.