Rowing boat – Page 53 – intheboatshed.net

Thames rowing skiff built by Stirling & Son

Thames rowing skiff by Stirling & Son

This very handsome little boat is a Thames rowing skiff built recently by Devon-based Stirling & Son. As usual, click on the images for much larger photos, including the lower-middle shot showing the boat’s gold leaf detail.

Will Stirling is a great historian, so I don’t doubt it’s an accurate example of the type, and I gather the new boat’s owners are keeping her on the Thames at Henley. I’ve a half-cooked plan to get over that way this week, so will look out for her from the water if I get the opportunity.

Also new from Stirling & Son is the 12ft pulling boat named Impulse – see the photos below.

Stirlings will be at the Southampton Boat Show, and plan to display a pulling boat and a 14ft sailing dinghy.

The 14ft dinghy is currently on the drawing board, but will be of mahogany on oak with copper and bronze fastenings, bronze fittings, spruce spars and clipper canvas sails with traditional ash blocks. However, boatbuilding will have to wait – as Will himself is in North West Passage skippering a BBC camera boat for an attempt by explorer Jock Wishart to row to the Magnetic North Pole to highlight the extent of ice depletion in the Arctic.

Stirling & Son offer traditional yacht building and wooden boat repair and are based in Tavistock. Contact Will via the website or call 01822 614259.

Stirling & Son 12ft Thames rowing skiff Impulse

12 ft pulling boat by Stirling & Son

Bert van Baar’s Hanze Yawl rowing and sailing boat – some computer modelling images

Bert van Baar tells me that the prototype of his Hanze Yawl design drew a lot of praise at the Beale Park Boat Show. The images above were produced using the Rhino modelling software.

Plans for the ply and epoxy boat are for sale for €199, and I gather a plan is being hatched to a kit to build the boat available by the end of the year.

Another piece of news is that in February 2012 Bert plans to run another boat building course in which the project will be to build another Hanze Yawl – he’s offering a discount of 10 per cent off the €825 cost to any British student.

See an earlier post on this boat including photos of the prototype Hanze Yawl here.

Contact Bert via the De Bootbouwschool website.

Photos from the Beale Park Boat Show 2011

1894 Desvignes-built steam launch Pierette, photographed by Pete Williamson

Reader Pete Williamson has sent in some snaps of this year’s Beale Park Boat Show, including this shot of the wonderful steam launch Pierrette, and some entries for the kit section of the Water Craft amateur boatbuilding competition (Pete’s boat is the dark blue Selway-Fisher coble made from an Alec Jordan kit).

Also there’s something very unusual here: an entrant for the cordless challenge, in which entrants were asked to race each other around a course on the water using motor power derived from by battery driven cordless power tools. There are a couple of jolly pieces of video showing some of the entrants craft’ at Graham Neil’s weblog and at the Water Craft website. It makes you think, doesn’t it? At least some folks found a use for some old tools…

Finally, I’m not quite sure what the boat in this collection may be or who made it, but I remember being told that it contains a lot of old timber from somewhere, and thinking that the builder had done a nice job when I dropped in at the Barton Home Built Boat Rally meet at Barton Turf at Whitsun. I’ve posted some of my own photos of this craft taken at Barton below.

Thanks Pete!

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