Category: Small boats

A mystery boat – can anyone identify this old clinker-built dinghy?

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clinker, dinghy, spider T

clinker, dinghy, spider T

A mystery dinghy with a rather nice old-fashioned shape. But what is she, and how old?

Mal Nicholson has sent me these two photos of a boat he has bought, and which he intends to fettle up for use as a tender with the Humber sloop known as Spider T. Read all about her here.

She’ll fit neatly on Spider T’s carling hatches – but what is she? Mal says he has a mast and sails, but there’s no centreboard and there seem to be no identifying marks.

I’d say she was about 16ft in length, or may be a foot or two longer, and that she has a rather nice shape.

By they way, on the 13th and 14th March Mal and friends will be holding an open day from 10am to 4pm at Spider T’s home moorings at Keadby Lock near the A18; she will be open from 10 am to 4 pm on the Saturday and 11 am to 4 pm on the Sunday. If you get along, do mention intheboatshed.net – I gather you might just get a guided tour!

Reports and photos from the first Melbourne Wooden Boat Show

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Check Rule 15 – was it sponsored by the department of marine regulation at the University of the Bloody Obvious, or do the organisers have an off-the-wall sense of humour?

Riva, melbourne, wooden boat show wood, crank, melbourne, wooden boat show

Sticker on a beautiful Riva, hand-cut pedal crank made from plywood


The good folks of Melbourne, Australia, have just held their first Wooden Boat Festival, and local Wooden Boat Association member Richard Monfries has put a nice report on his weblog Wooden it be Nice, and this excellent Flickr set of photos.

Another local and regular intheboatshed.net correspondent Dale Appleton also took some photos of the show. From his relatively smaller collection, I particularly liked best is the one at the top of this post about piratical behaviour at the top of this post, closely followed by the sticker on a beautiful Riva speedboat that quietly announces that it has been serviced by a company in Monaco in Europe, which even in our times must seem very exotic and distant to many of the folks of South Australia, and the beautifully made hand-cut plywood crank mechanism. After all that painstaking effort, I wonder how well it works?

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Keep Turning Left film-maker Dylan Winter in the Walton Backwaters

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Round Britain slow sailer and film-maker Dylan Winter has put up an 18-minute piece of film about sailing around the Walton Backwaters, and about the explosives dock at Oakley Quay.

The video is part of his ongoing Keep Turning Left video project and is his first paid-for film download – for the princely sum of $0.99. There’s a taster on his homepage.

Dylan calls the new video 18 minutes of pleasure and the next best thing to sailing. It seems a trifle hyperbolic as claims go – but as we emerge from yet another nasty winter of bad weather and grimmer news and disasters, I’d say that he definitely has a point.

Just looking at the taster, clock the lovely yawl pictured in evening light early on – do I recognise a well known and recently built Alfred Strange yawl? I think perhaps I do…

The Backwaters are a small area of estuary packed with islands and channels, and make an interesting sheltered sailing areafor visiting boaters with a series of quays and settlements around its perimeter. I haven’t been there myself, but it’s definitely on my agenda, and it happens that I’ve been reading about the area while travelling to work in London this week, along with the sad, tired army of London’s commuters.

My companion on the train has been FB Cooke’s unconventional pilot Coastwise Cruising, which turns out to be as refreshing as Dylan’s film. For more on Cooke, click here.

He starts for the Backwaters from the Stour, and as he setsoff I can just smell the sea and the hot summer day to come.

‘After studying the chart we come to the conclusion that we must start at about 8am to make sure of carrying the ebb out of the Stour and down Harwich Harbour to the Cliff Foot buoy… It is a jolly morning, with just a suggestion of haze which means heat later on. We are sorry to say goodbye to Wrabness, but at the same time we are anxious to visit Walton Creek and Hamford Waters which on the chart look intriguing.

‘Getting our anchor, we start away down the Stour close-hauled on the starboard tack.’

Ahhhhh! I think Dylan and old FB Cooke have a lot in common…

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