Category: Modern boatbuilding

Modern and plywood boatbuilding and plans

Share your boatbuilding and restoration stories

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Some recent boatbuilding posts at intheboatshed.net, including making a moustache, boats built to plans by Iain Oughtred and Tad Roberts, a birch bark canoe and photos from Newlyn. Click on the images above to see them all

Amateurs and professionals If you’ve got a restoration or boatbuilding project you’d like the world to know about, why not send us something about it we can post? We will of course link back to your website or weblog, if you have one, or include contact details if that’s what you’d like. It’s a great way to get a project weblog or new website known to the tens of thousands of visitors who drop in at intheboatshed.net each month* – and it’s entirely free.

All we need from you are photos and some interesting words – the background to the the project, perhaps a little history about the boat type or the boat itself, something about the interest the boat holds for its owner and builder.

Of course there’s more to boating than boats, and more to the sea than water, and intheboatshed.net ranges broadly in its boating-related topics. However, the beating heart of it is its interest in old boats, boat restorations, and boatbuilding projects with just a little of the traditional about them – and so that’s what we’d love to hear about from you.

*As of this morning, Statcounter reports that intheboatshed.net has received 13,596 visitors in the last 30 days. Send us a story at gmatkin@gmail.com and some of them could be coming your way.

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More on the book Cockleshell Canoes by Quentin Rees

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Mark 7 military canoes. Photos supplied by Quentin Rees
and published with permission

Quentin Rees’s recent book Cockleshell Canoes is a thoroughly researched and well illustrated celebration of a group of people who have become part of canoe history.

Some, such as Blondie Hasler and the team of commandos who took part in the daring Operation Frankton are already well known. Commemorated in a major film titled Cockleshell Heroes, it was an attack by ten commandos in canoes on Bordeaux Harbour in occupied France during December 1942. British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill believed the mission shortened World War II by six months, and Admiral the Earl Mountbatten deemed it as the ‘most courageous and imaginative of all the raids ever carried out by the men of Combined Operations Commands‘.

Sadly, most of the brave individuals involved were eventually captured and shot by the Germans, who at that time regarded commandos as equivalent to spies.

However, the roles of many others have previously remained unsung. In this book Rees has weaved together real-life testimonies from the stories of the courageous soldiers who used the canoes, their military commanders, and the canoes’ inventors and designers, and tells of an epic journey of progress that took canoe development took from Cornwall, all along the Southern English Coast and beyond – even to the tropical island of Ceylon.

The canoes proved to be valuable in many of the theatres of WWII, and thousands of the various models were sent worldwide, often being used by the various Special Forces, including by the the espionage specialists of Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Click here to buy a copy from Amazon – The Cockleshell Canoes: British Military Canoes of World War Two.

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Chris Old and Chris Stone build a glued-clinker Whitehall at the Boat Building Academy

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As promised, Boat Building Academy principal Yvonne Green has sent us some more photos from the big student launch day at Lyme last month.

This is despite being frantically busy setting up a new eight-week course on  woodworking skills – the course needs a new workshop, and I gather the Academy’s short courses in particular are attracting huge numbers of enquiries.

Here’s what she has to say about the boat in these photos:

‘Chris Old, a doctor of oceanography from New Zealand, and Chris Stone, and aerospace industry computer engineer by background, built a very elegant glued-clinker Whitehall skiff. The offsets and lines were taken from a book by John Gardner, founder of the Mystic Seaport Museum’s boatbuilding courses.

‘White paintwork was highlighted by varnished khaya gunwales, thwarts and trim. Lyme Regis’ Mayor  Sally Holman was particularly taken with this boat, as am I.’

I gather the  boat was built to a set of offsets for a 14ft Whitehall included in the Gardner compendium volume Building Classic Small Craft: Complete Plans and Instructions for 47 Boats, which includes plans for an impressive 47 boats and is currently available for the knock-down price of £19.99 from Amazon. See more Gardner books at Amazon here.

For more posts relating to the Boat Building Academy, click here.

I think we may be seeing an increase in interest in Whitehalls in the UK. For more posts relating to these boats click here, and for posts relating to John Gardner click here.


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