Category: Modern boatbuilding

Modern and plywood boatbuilding and plans

The first Barton skiff will soon be afloat

Brian King's Barton skiff

Brian King's Barton skiff Brian King's Barton skiff Brian King's Barton skiff

 

The excitement is rising at Intheboatshed.net Towers as launch day approaches for Brian King’s low-powered Barton skiff made from free boat plans available from this website.

My thanks go to Brian for permission to publish his photos.

He plans to use his homebuilt boat for exploring the large natural harbour of Milford Haven. Naturally, I’m delighted and particularly pleased to see that once translated from the drawings into three-dimensions the little boat looks like it means business.

It has a highish, bouyant prow to turn back waves; a little tumblehome to make the water accessible to someone in the boat without having to lean too far out for comfort; and a seating and outboard arrangement intended to make the boat sit well on the water when it’s loaded light with only one person and the outboard. From the builder’s perspective, it also has a central girder construction to ensure the boat comes out the right shape, and which also lends rigidity.

For more on this boat, see earlier posts.

For more plans, see the free boat plans page.

Legendary work and cruising boat designer William Garden passes away

Bill Garden plank on edge cartoon

‘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.

Light Trow Onawind Blue flies past (reprise)

 

Ben Crawshaw sailing Light Trow Onawind Blue in ‘entertaining’ conditions

I’ve posted this clip before, but can’t resist doing so again, after the chap who runs out local chandlery and I watched it again this afternoon. ‘It’s not a slow boat,’ I said, a little surprised as I’d forgotten how well the little Light Trow looks in this clip.

‘It’s a great advert,’ he said, ‘in fact it’s creaming along.’ I said little, but I can tell you that the designer blushed with pleasure!

There’s a serious message here for all of us: even in the UK this could be you, this summer. Get or build a boat and let’s all go sailing! (See the free boat plans page for a set of drawings for building this boat.)

For more posts about our friend Ben and his Light Trow, click here.