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

Skol ar Mor – a new boat building school in the Loire-Atlantique

This photo shows their first student launch day of a new international boat building school at Mesquer in the Loire-Atlantique department of France – François Vivier told us last year that it was being established and that he was associated with it.

Skol ar Mor is led by a boat builder from the USA, Mike Newmeyer, and recently celebrated the opening of its premises, a restored salt warehouse.

Read all about it at François’ weblog Boats to make the sea more beautiful – the relevant posts are here and here.

By the way, the sweet little grey skiff in the photo is a Vivier design – the Charlotte skiff.

Also, see videos here, here and here.

 

BBA students build a Eric Hvalsoe-designed rowing and sailing dinghy in cedar

  

  

Photos by Emma Brice, Philippa Gedge and Jenny Steer

This lightweight Hvalsoe 16 rowing and sailing dinghy built in cedar was made by Boat Building Academy students Rob Murphy and Matt McGlade with the help of Matt Cowdery.

Read about the Hvalsoe 16 and its sister the Hvalsoe 13 at the website of  veteran Seattle boat builder and designer Eric Hvalsoe.

Rob wanted a boat that he could enjoy with his family, and chose this design as he wanted a lightweight boat that he would be able to use in protected waters and be able to launch by himself.

I gather Rob is ‘chuffed to bits’ with Skylark – he’s pleased with her light weight and finds it easy to manage, launch and recover the boat by himself. He has now sailing her in Poole Harbour and Stithians Reservoir – a fresh water lake in Cornwall – with his family on a recent holiday.

Skylark sails and rows very well and Rob says that his kids haven’t managed to break any part of her yet!

Rob has recently taken over a new workshop in Briantspuddle near to Bere Regis in Dorset and is starting a new boat building and repairs business to be called Blue Lias Marine. Once it has been set up, he has promised to let me know his web address, which I will post here.

Before attending at the BBA, Matt McGlade completed 20 years in the army during which time he acquired a range of useful skills. Having learned woodwork and boatbuilding at the BBA, he has now moved to Bolton, where he is continuing his studies.

Matt Cowdery who had previously worked on superyachts worked on Skylark in its earlier stages but moved on to a glass fibre restoration  project. He’s now working at Reading, building wooden frames for restored Bentleys – a line of work that that has a lot in common with boat building.

Sailing Canoes – a brief history, published in 1935

 

This 1935 history of sailing canoes originally published by the American Canoe Association is well worth a look.

It has been republished online by the editors of the excellent Skinny Hull magazine. (There’s another link to this document at the Dragonfly Canoe Works website (I’m guessing this may be the original source).

The photos in the brief history may be a little fuzzy, but they tell an amazing story of early diversity before the uniformity of the ACA classes was established, and extreme sailing long before the invention of the wetsuit.

The text itself is US-oriented, as might be expected, but interesting nonetheless, and makes a good job of summarising the development of the decked sailing canoe on both sides of the Atlantic, starting with John Macgregor’s Rob Roy.

I wonder what happened to Nathaniel Herreshoff’s beautiful but scary-looking proposed class of 1935?

Turning to Skinny Hull magazine itself, I’m particularly taken with an article in the first issue – it’s by John Summers of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, and features what I think is a fabulous little craft. There are supposed to be stitch and glue plans to buy too, though it might be necessary to contact Mr Summers directly as I can’t see them where they’re supposed to be.

Finally, there’s this sequence of photos on YouTube to consider…