Bill Samson builds a baidarka

Bill Samson builds a baidarka

This scrap of YouTube video is a trailer for Daphne Barbieri’s half-hour film about a project to build a Aleutian Islands baidarka, a traditional skin-on-frame kayak.

The builder here is Bill Samson, who is probably best known to the boatbuilding community as an early builder of Phil Bolger’s Chebacco boat, and long-time editor of the newsletter Chebacco News. The newsletter is still available in the archives section at the website www.chebacco.com.

 

March/April issue of Water Craft out soon

Water Craft March-April 2011

That’s an impressive looking lot of sail!

The March/April 2011 issue  of Water Craft will be in the newsagents from 24 February.

Inside, you’ll find:

  • Colin Buttifant’s latest Broads yacht is fast – she can hold her own with the stripped-down local racers but she’s as cosy as a country cottage down below, according to Kathy Mansfield.
  • In Pen-Hir, leading French naval architect François Vivier has created an elegantly simple cruising yacht he calls a ‘Folkboat for the Future’ – and his son’s boatyard Icari is building her in sustainable birch plywood.
  • Boatbuilding materials are rarely – if ever – cheap, so when Ian Parsons decided to build his first boat, a stitch-and-tape Stornoway 14 dayboat, in order to avoid expensive waste he bought a pre-cut kit of plywood parts.
  • When Dick Phillips took over Phil Swift’s Willow Bay Boats range, he was undecided whether to offer the popular dayboats as bare hulls for home completion. So he went to see two of Phil’s customers who had done just that..
  • Gentleman-chandler Moray MacPhail leads a fact-finding mission of East Coast luminaries to Klassieke Schepen, the Dutch traditional boat show.

This is not to forget all Water Craft’s other features, regular and irregular, and – inevitably – a reminder from the editor about the Cordless Canoe Challenge at the Beale Park Boat Show, in which contestants compete to win a bag full of brand new Makita power tools worth over £1200.

Click here to order your subscription now!

Redwing dinghies racing at Looe in 1963

Redwings racing at Looe in 1963

Spotted on Youtube: artist and filmakerStuart Armfield shot a series of films between 1958 and 1970 in and around the port of Looe in South Cornwall, including these clips of Redwing dinghies built to Uffa Fox’s design.

It’s lovely footage, but it’s a shame we can’t hear more of what’s being said in the background, as it sounds interesting. I picked out a snatch of an old boy saying ‘A Redwing hadn’t been capsized before, and I was the first one to do it.’ No doubt there are a few good stories in there somewhere…

Armfield’s original footage is held by the South West Film and Television Archive.