Category: Designs and designers, boat plans,books of plans

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A well-travelled skiff

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Venus the well-travelled skiff in Victoria

Venus, a well-travelled Thames-style skiff spotted in Australia by Jeff Cole

Lest we get too doomy, and serious I’ve decided to post this photo of an 1880s single-scull Thames-style skiff hanging in a country nursery at Victoria, Australia. Jeff Cole, who spotted and photographed Venus for us, says the story is that she was imported from Scotland, and was built by the nursery owner’s great-grandfather.

It’s clearly very well-travelled for a small river boat. I wonder what the rest of the story may be – did a River Thames boatbuilder move to Scotland? Did a Scot learn boatbuilding on the banks of the Thames? Or was great-grandfather an amateur who worked from a book? Or were skiffs of this kind far more widespread in the last 19th century than we tend to think?

Whatever the answer, the boat in the photo looks very much like the one shown in this earlier intheboatshed.net post.

Once again, my thanks go to Jeff Cole. To see some earlier material he has sent us, including some mouthwatering shots of early 20th century racing yachts, click here.

For some photos of later skiffs with rather more sheer at Ruswarp on the River Esk in Yorkshire, click here.

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Watertribe Everglades Challenge 2008

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Everglades Challenge start

Link to a video clip of the start of the EC 2008 race shot by Root

It’s that time of year again – the time when each year I stare at the pages of the Watertribe website, trying vainly to work out the meaning of the results from the Everglades Challenge, and to try to identify the entrants’ boats.

My family really has no idea why I do this, but I can explain it – it’s simply that a 300-mile race involving an assortment of kayaks and small sailing boats along the Florida coast seems to me to be a hugely challenging event. The fact that most of the entrants seem to be in middle age or beyond only adds to my admiration. These are people like me! And the winners arrive at the finish in just a few days or fewer – this year, the winners were sailing a Tornado catamaran (corrected thanks to Jamie’s comment below) and completed their run in less than two days.

Generally, I get the impression that the whole thing has become more professionalised, with lots of moulded plastic expedition boats, and so is less quaint than it has been in years gone by. Still, the lads who came second were sailing a plywood vee-bottomed sharpie-derived ketch that most home builders would have not trouble constructing for themselves, and the fourth home was the always astonishing Matt Layden in his self-designed and self-built 8ft pram dinghy with a lid, Sand Flea.

The positive side of the growing professionalism, I suspect, is that the entrants are taking greater care over their safety each year, which must be a good thing with so many small, vulnerable boats strung out along the Florida coastline.

But the rabbit punch is that some of these people will be going on to attempt the Ultimate Florida Challenge, a circumnavigation of Florida involving a portage across the northern part of the state.

So here are the relevant web links:

The Watertribe website.

Videos of the event hosted at YouTube.

A picture gallery by someone called JC.

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More Bolger – this time on canoe yawls

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Bolger canoe yawl

Phil Bolger’s plywood canoe yawl

This fascinating article from the Phil Bolger describes a hard-chine deep-vee section water-ballasted canoe yawl and makes many references to Albert Strange, George Holmes, William Garden and W P Stevens. I think it’s vintage Bolger, full of his kind of explanatory logic. It’s a damn shame the drawings don’t seem to have ever been completed!

And of course it’s whetted my interest in a big way – what did Stevens’ Snickersnee look like?

Of course, many people interested in canoe yawls might also be attracted by John Welsford’s 6m Whaler. Although it could be argued that it comes from a different tradition, the Whaler has a canoe yawl-like two-stick rig and is now available with a cuddy from boatbuilders Simmons & Broome in the UK. See John’s 5m whaler page.

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