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

Plans for boats, sailing yachts, motor yachts, rowing boats, sailing boats, dinghies, dories, canoes, skiffs, oars, sails – may be free or paid-for

Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007

Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Wolstenholme Mallard Jackson’s Cracker

Adam Claridge’s Wolstenholme Mallard

Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Oughtred Mole Talpa Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Chris Partridge Wolstenholme Sprite Snarleyow Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Phil Oxborrow Selway Fisher Prospector Tonawanda

Graham Davies’ Oughtred Mole Talpa; Chris Partridge’s Wolstenholme Sprite Snarleyow; Phil Oxborrow’s Selway-Fisher Prospector Tonawanda

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Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Richard Rooth Oughtred Elf Inwe Home Built Boat Regatta meeting 2007 Hen Party

A general messabout-style beach photo; Richard Rooth’s Oughtred Elf Inwe; canoe Hen Party

Chris Perkins, the Watercraft award-winning builder of Scotch Mist, an award-winning Iain Oughtred Macgregor sailing canoe, has kindly sent me these photos of this year’s Home Built Boat Rally national meet at the Cotswold Water Park near Cirencester. It’s great to see a British version of the American messabout movement emerging, and perhaps we’ll see some more home boatbuilding in the UK as a result.

There’s an earlier post about the HBBR here: http://intheboatshed.net/…1st-and-2nd-september/

HBBR have a Yahoogroup at http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/uk-hbbr and a website at http://www.uk-hbbr.co.uk/uk .

Amazon has just a few of Iain Oughtred’s classic paperback on plywood clinker building: Iain Oughtred plywood boatbuilding book

Irish curragh skin fishing boats on the Dingle Peninsula

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Irish curragh fishing sikin boats on the Dingle Peninsula

Irish curragh fishing skin boats on the Dingle Peninsula Irish curragh fishing skin boats on the Dingle Peninsula

The legendary Irish curragh skin boat is still used for fishing and racing on the remote and beautiful Dingle Peninsula

My good friends Jim and Eileen Van Den Bos recently visited Eileen’s family in Ireland, and along the way Jim managed to bag these photos showing important details of modern curraghs.

There are some features to notice here: the traditional square-section, non-feathering oars are still clearly in use for auxiliary power, but the boats have outboard wells in what is otherwise very much the hull form you see in old photos and books. Also, these are long, narrow hulls with very round sections, and they also have no skeg and no more than a very slight rubbing strake. These features will allow seas to slide under the hull rather than throw it around, and their low wetted area will also contribute to these boats’ speed under oars or outboard. I’ve several times heard these boats described as canoes, although they’re not really paddling boats.

I’d guess that on such an exposed Atlantic coast these are exactly the characteristics that have enabled this amazing ancient boat type to survive into the 21st Century.

I’m also struck that there may be a suggestion that these boats may have a Continue reading “Irish curragh skin fishing boats on the Dingle Peninsula”

My Mouseboat appears on the Wikipedia!

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Mouseboat

A Mouseboat doing what it does best – providing a light, easy to build and stable platform for a kid learning to use a boat, though it has to be said that they’re also popular with adults. This one was built by John Hellwig. I must say the skiff in the background looks very fine. Could it be a Whisp, like the one the Slipway Collective were selling recently?

My Mouseboat design for a small boat for kids has earned a mention on the Wikipedia!

This is a long way off topic for intheboatshed.net, but I had to report the news nevertheless, and who knows – a few people who drop by here might be interested in building a little stitch and glue paddler that’s eminently suitable as a first boatbuilding project and is a lot of fun to use by everyone from five or six years upwards, so long as they don’t weigh much more than 200lbs.

Small enough to be built on many people’s kitchen tables, it props out of the way under any 8ft garage roof and it’s also light enough to be carried and roofracked by an adult. She’s a plain little puppy, it has to be said, but I don’t think anyone could regret building a Mouseboat, and getting on for 200 people have done so.

There’s a rowable version also at the Yahoogroup devoted to Mouseboats, by the way, and various sailing and flat-bottomed developments.

Here’s the Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stitch_and_glue

And here’s a link for the Mouseboats Yahoogroup: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mouseboats/