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
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I’m officially on holiday, but here are some links to keep regular readers going!
Five Years in Siam From 1891 to 1896 by H Warington Smyth
Lowell’s Boat Shop, Amesbury, Massachusetts
A short but also long report from Brest 2008
Concern over ‘abandoned’ boat
Sunk Brits’ four-day raft storm hell
A History of Shipbuilding by Per Åkesson
Glimpses of Traditional Boatbuilding in Goa by Johan Roque
Elderly fella making very nice models
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The gifted Dylan Winter has excelled himself this time with his latest short YouTube video series Keep Turning Left. In this one he drools over a series of gaff-rigged yachts and smacks, and praises the English for their amazing reasonableness.
Hopefully someone, somewhere will one day have the vision to commission him to do a series of properly budgeted videos – if nothing else this hugely enjoyable series must be a great advert for his skills and screen persona. Maybe the lucky man will even be offered the rich prize of a book contract!
It seems churlish to say it but one thing I slightly regret is that chooses a lot of Irish music for these videos. Maybe he knows and has rejected the wealth of great English traditional music that might seem a more approriate accompaniment to videos that are at least for the moment centred on the English coast, but my feeling is that the Scots, Irish and Welsh will no doubt get their turns later…
PS – I was delighted to find this exchange in the comments to this video on YouTube:
‘What are you watching,’ my wife asked. ‘You’ve got that look on your face.’
‘What look?’ I replied.
‘That look that says I want to be doing what they are doing – you’re not watching porn on that thing are you?’
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Airborne lifeboat at the Museum of the Broads. Notice
the unusual Saildrive engine it used on a stand in front,
and also the Norfolk punt on display beneath. Click on
the photo for a larger image
This airborne lifeboat is one of the Museum of the Broads’ great treasures. Note the Saildrive engine on a stand just in front of the boat – I gather many of these were volunteered by yachtsmen for use in the the airborne lifeboats, which couldn’t use anything else.
These boats were designed to save the lives of bomber aircraft crew – if a crew ditched in the sea and could be found, a bomber aircraft would drop one of these in the hope that the men below would be able to climb into the boat and sail or motor it home. In practice they saved many lives and made something of a hero out of the the inventor.
After the war, along with many other bits of war surplus equipment they were often bought for small sums and and converted into something more conventional – in this case they often became fully rigged sailing boats, and were frequently used for racing. You can’t keep a good Uffa Fox hull down, can you?
For more posts on topics relating to Uffa Fox, click here.
Poster showing lifeboat equipment. Click on the photo
for a larger image