Category: River boats

Video: The Sea Bright skiff – working on the Jersey Shore

Seabright skiff building

Here’s a charming half-hour film about fishermen and traditional boat builders working with Sea Bright skiffs – and if you’re patient it comes with some very nice music on the melodeon, or accordion, if that’s what you like to call it, starting at about 14.40 minutes. If anyone knows what it’s called, I’d like to track it down.

While we’re at it, this shorter clip about a pirogue maker in Louisiana working with an adze is pretty good too. Is that a fretless banjo in the background? And who is that singer? Finally – here’s a video about the Cajuns by Alan Lomax. It’s not about boats, but you do get some real culture round here, doncha?

Thanks to Thomas Armstrong of 70.8% for pointing out the Sea Bright skiff video on Facebook.

Mike Lowson helps rescue an unusual pram from becoming a prize-winning flowerbed

Kinloss pram dinghy repaired and restored by Ian Lawther of NorthboatsKinloss pram dinghy repaired and restored by Ian Lawther of Northboats

Out here in what we laughingly call the real world, I think we know that boat restoration isn’t all about swept teak decks, priceless customised bronze castings and acres of spotless Dacron subtly shaded to imitate the best Egyptian cotton.

But I was nevertheless tickled to hear that Aberdeenshire-based boat builder Mike Lowson, proprietor of Northboats, has helped save a 40-year old pram dinghy from becoming a flower planter in the Moray town of Forres.

The 11ft 6in dinghy was apparently built in the late ’60s or early ’70s by personnel at RAF Kinloss, a few miles from Forres, for use by the Kinloss base’s angling club. The  boat spent most of its life at a nearby inland loch.

With the announcement earlier this year that the base was to close, the boat was earmarked to become firewood or to end its days in the town as an ornamental flower bed – Forres is a five-time overall UK Britain in Bloom winner.

‘A former employee at the base heard of the plan and, thankfully, rescued her from an ignominious fate that no wooden boat should face,’ Mike told intheboatshed.net. ‘He and his son then began stripping her back to start the process of making her fit for a return to angling duties.’

Mike was asked to re-frame her and to tackle some of the other deficiencies caused by the ravages of time.

‘The boat was rustically built, to put it politely, and the utility-timber planking is not of the best, but by carefully removing the remaining cracked frames one at a time to keep her shape, I was able to fit new frames of Scottish oak, traditionally nailed and roved in place.

‘I also added a couple of new floors, too, plus a new aft seat in matching oak and a new quarter-knee to replace one that was missing.’

The boat’s owners now intend to make the boat watertight and return her to her original mooring.

Mike added: ‘She is much too interesting to be scrapped and I look forward to her being filled with fresh-caught brown trout rather than begonias and geraniums.’

Mike is a 2008 graduate of the Boat Building Academy at Lyme Regis, and in January 2009 set up Northboats near Insch, some 30 miles north-west of Aberdeen.

Currently, he is completing a faering built to Iain Oughtred’s Elf design, restoring a small yacht tender and refitting a 35-year-old Westerly Centaur.

Mike Lowson can be contacted via his business’s website at www.northboats.co.uk.

The first volume of Rudder online

Rushton ad The Rudder magazine

The first year’s issues of the famous 19th century stateside boating magazine The Rudder placed online by Mystic Seaport is liberally sprinkled with strongly expressed views that seem deliberately calculated to offend someone or other.

Today, it all seems quaint but slightly crazy – yet many magazine editors will wish they could be so forthright today.

‘In a paper I saw the following wonderful what is it offered for sale : “A keel sloop, cutter rigged.” We shall soon hear of keel schooners, sloop-rigged and cutter-rigged catboats being bought and sold. How a yacht can be both sloop and cutter at one and the same time is something beyond me. The truth, sad to relate, is, very few if any of our large single-masted racing yachts are sloops; many of the best of them are cutters or that bastard rig which is so far nameless.’

I guess the writer means the rig with a single foresail on a jib. What is that called?

Again:

‘One thing strikes the buyer who reads the catalogue of J H Rushton: it is the perfect way in which everything is described. The most minute details of construction and finish of his craft are put down in plain English so that a purchaser knows just what he is going to get for his money. For that reason it is one of the best tracts for the suppression of profanity we have ever seen: he leaves the worst cranks no chance for a growl.’

And again:

‘The black-blight that invades and destroys the racing spirit in yacht clubs is the steam yacht. What quality of blood runs in the veins of a man who will willingly exchange the exciting and exhilarating pastime of sailing for the monotonous privilege of being driven around in a kettle? With obligations to the late Lord St Vincent, we remark that a yachtsman who descends to running a steam yacht is d——d for the sport!’

Thanks to The Good Old Boat Redwing weblog for the linking to these entertaining sets of scans.