Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
Traditional carvel plans and boatbuilding
Here’s another gallery of Matt Atkin’s photos of traditional craft from around the world. Today’s photos of fishing boats come from Vietnam, somewhere a little north of Saigon.
My brothers commented that in taking them he had a strong feeling they were rather special, and that he was photographing a diminishing existence. Yuloh enthusiasts will notice that are several to be seen in these shots.
For more of Matt Atkin’s photos, click here.
‘I love to design boats. Rather design boats than eat. Often do. So let’s get going on the perfect ship before you are so old that you have to be carried aboard.
‘I have drawers full of stock plans and a head full of boats that want to be launched.
‘Whether you want the ultimate in a motor or sailing yacht or a one cylinder clam hound, I can fix you up with a plan to suit.’
So wrote the legendary William Garden, who died last week. Born in 1918, he was a Canadian boat designer who drew boat plans for many hundreds of craft in a long career, including both yachts and workboats, and anything in between.
Many of them as attractive as you’ll find anywhere.
He also created a distinctively salty and positive style in writing about his plans and the boats that could be built from them – a style that was very much in keeping with the confident and determined young man we see in the photo on this biographical Mystic Seaport web page. He also had a puckish sense of charm and humour, which is clear from the salty little cartoons he often added to his drawings and plans – such as the one above showing a contented pipe-smoking fella getting progressively less comfortable as his plank-on-edge yacht heels further and further…
Garden must have been quite a character.
There’s a particularly nice article here, and a list of Garden designs held by the Mystic Seaport Museum here.
My thanks go to Peter Vanderwaart for alerting me to Bill Garden’s passing.
The Whitstable smack afloat, Emeline has just been repainted and I was lucky enough to take some photos for publication, with kind permission of the owners and the yard.
I guess two of the main points of interest here are her hard bilges, which enable her to sit up on sand and mud, unlike other smacks from further up the coast, and that wonderful finish, which is the talk of those local boaters who have seen it. Part of the secret, I gather, is using paint conditioners – but from what people tell me about how they’ve tried the same thing without success, I’d guess there’s more to know about achieving this kind of result than what kind of additives to mix with the paint.
The story of how this traditionally built wooden boat of 1904 was discovered near Malaga in 1992 and brought back to Kent for be restoration is fascinating, and can be read at the simplywhitstable.com website.