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
Here’s a present from the wonderful Broadland Memories website – this morning they tweeted this fabulous little 15-minute film about Oulton Water and Lowestoft in the late 1950s.
I must say I particularly like the terrifying water-borne dodgems powered by electricity brought down from chicken wire above… though I think we can see why they didn’t last into the modern age!
This, British chums, is how they build a flat-bottomed outboard skiff on the other side of the Atlantic.
I’m sorry about the odd layout, but it seems to be how the latest version of WordPress and Jetpack seems to be doing it – no doubt they’ll change it shortly as the revisions usually come pretty rapidly.
The Brits tend to believe that flatties don’t work as boats because there are so few in our boatbuilding and boat-using tradition, but it ain’t so. Admittedly the British coast is probably not the best place for a beamy flattie like this one, but it represents an easily built, inexpensive and affective model for more sheltered areas.
With a building method that involve using a Spanish windlass to form the stern, you might say it’s another fine example of how people elsewhere in the world do things in very different ways!
In fact, this is an example of the famous plywood Brockway skiff being built by – among others – Tim Visel, aquaculture coordinator at The Sound School at New Haven.
The Brockway skiff was in production at the Brockway Boat Works in the Floral Park section of Old Saybrook, Conneticut for more than half a century, and became popular on the Connecticut River, New England and the Chesapeake Bay.
In 1982, Mr. Earle Brockway agreed to have plans produced for the 16ft extra-wide version of the skiff to be used by US aid and Peace Corps efforts. I think this boat has a remarkable pedigree!
Plans for the Brockway skiff are available here, some additional material is here, and Google Images reveals some nice photos of finished boats here.
My thanks to Susan Weber and Tim Visel.
 
This is a small sample of a larger collection of delicious photos of East Anglia taken by Victorian-era American photographer Peter Henry Emerson published this week on the 70.8% weblog.
The activities shown are catching eels and harvesting the famous Norfolk reed for use in making thatched roofs for houses and other buildings – and one shows one of the Broads’ wherries making its way along a dyke.
There are lots more to see at 70.8%Â so do go over to have a look!
My thanks to 70.8% weblogger Thomas Armstrong for pointing this one out via the 70.8% Facebook group.
PS – A Ward has written in to recommend Emerson’s book, which is available from Amazon. See the comment below. Needless to say, my copy is on order…