Category: Rowing boat

BBA students build a Whitehall rowing skiff

  

Boat Building Academy students Luke Cooper, Casey Milburn and Seby Rubatto built this 14ft 9in by 4ft Whitehall rowing skiff made of glued plywood this summer.

Luke, who is from Devizes, was 18 years old when he joined the academy and had just completed A levels – the story goes that he met BBA graduate Ian Thomson at the Southampton Boat Show and  immediately decided to sign up for the long course.

(Ian was at the show exhibiting his now well known Nestaway boats range of nesting boats, which he’d started to develop when he was on the 38-week BBA course.)

When Luke visited the academy for an interview before joining the course, he noticed a similar Whitehall skiff that 2010 season student Matt Cotterill was building at the time, and so Luke decided to build the same boat on his course. There’s a diary of Matt’s build here.

The boat itself was built from a Robert A Pittaway design obtained from the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut, and appears in the book 87 Boat Designs – a Catalogue of Small Boat Plans from Mystic Seaport. The plan dates from 1973, and the original boat is said to be still in service at Mystic.

The book Aak to Zumbra- a Dictionary of the World’s Watercraft states that a Whitehall skiff was originally used on the Columbia River in the mid-19th century.

I gather Luke is pleased with the boat and plans to keep it as a rowing boat for himself and his family to use.

Before relocating to Lyme, Casey lived in Antibes in south-eastern France, raced Optimists and Lasers, and from the age of 15 began spending his holidays teaching sailing at Club Nautique D’Antibes.

He completed his Yachtmaster qualification at the age of 18, and then spent three years crewing on super yachts before attending at the BBA.

Casey has returned to France where he is working with friends developing a boat repairs and maintenance business.

Seby came to the BBA from Trieste in Italy – it was his first visit to the UK, and so he spent his time both learning boat building and improving his English. Seby has now returned to Italy and is looking forward to starting a career in boat building.

BBA student Shane Butcher builds composite copy of traditional dinghy Barnacle (offsets included below)

Shane Butcher's composite dinghy 'Dreamer' Photo - Jenny Steer Dec 2011 Shane Butcher's composite dinghy 2 'Dreamer' Photo - Emma Brice

Shane Butcher's composite dinghy 'Dreamer' Photo - Emma Brice Shane Butcher's composite dinghy 'Dreamer' 3 Photo - Emma Brice

Boat Building Academy student Shane Butcher built a gaff-rigged 10ft sailing dinghy while on the BBA’s 38-week course, and launched it on the big student launch day in December.

Shane’s previous life was in civil engineering, however he has always had a passion for sailing and woodwork, and to him a change of career starting with a course at the Academy seemed an obvious next step.

Shane’s build was Dreamer, a composite-built copy of a clinker-built rowing boat belonging to the Academy.

The BBA folks reckon that Barnacle’s stem hull is a good general shape for rowing and sailing, and Ollie Rees, who was on the 2010 long course also built a copy of Barnacle, although  he used traditional clinker construction methods.

The BBA has kindly agreed to share a set of offsets for Barnacle for anyone who would like to build their own version of the boat. They can be downloaded here: Barnacle 10ft stem dinghy offsets provided by the BBA. It’s nice to be able to get something like this for free – thanks BBA!

Penobscot Marine Museum online photo archive expands

Circa-1905 image of the steamer Verona being launched into the Penobscot River, photographed by Preston Williams. From the MacEwen Photo Collection at Penobscot Marine Museum

Photographer "Red" Boutilier captured the converted fishing trawler Natalie Todd being rechristened for use as a passenger-carrying windjammer in this image from the Boutilier Collection at Penobscot Marine Museum. Monhegan Harbor, with the northern end of Manana Island in the background. From Penobscot Marine Museum's David J. Lindsay Photo Collection

Our pal Bob Holtzman has been in touch to say that the Penobscot Marine Museum at Searsport, Maine, USA has added new collections to its online photo archive that bring the database up to more than 50,000 images. The material is available free at www.PenobscotMarineMuseum.org.

One of the new collections is that of well-known Maine photographer Everett ‘Red’ Boutilier, who captured the Maine waterfront from the 1950s until shortly before his death in 2003. His work was published in Downeast, National Fisherman, Sail, Yachting, Soundings and other magazines and newspapers.

Boats, fishing, and shipyard scenes from Maine’s midcoast area dominate the more than 20,000 photos in his collection, whose acquisition by the museum was made possible by a gift from another frequent publisher of Boutilier’s work, the magazine Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors.

Two other newly-added collections with strong maritime content are:

  • the MacEwen Collection, which includes the work of amateur photographer Preston Williams, who shot early 20th-century scenes of the waterfront at the Maine commercial centre of Bangor
  • the Lindsay Collection of photographs by David J Lindsay, whose work boats and shipyards, mostly in Lincoln County, Maine, but also in Massachusetts and Vermont

Thanks Bob!