Techniques – Page 165 – intheboatshed.net

More on the book Cockleshell Canoes by Quentin Rees

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Mark 7 military canoes. Photos supplied by Quentin Rees
and published with permission

Quentin Rees’s recent book Cockleshell Canoes is a thoroughly researched and well illustrated celebration of a group of people who have become part of canoe history.

Some, such as Blondie Hasler and the team of commandos who took part in the daring Operation Frankton are already well known. Commemorated in a major film titled Cockleshell Heroes, it was an attack by ten commandos in canoes on Bordeaux Harbour in occupied France during December 1942. British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill believed the mission shortened World War II by six months, and Admiral the Earl Mountbatten deemed it as the ‘most courageous and imaginative of all the raids ever carried out by the men of Combined Operations Commands‘.

Sadly, most of the brave individuals involved were eventually captured and shot by the Germans, who at that time regarded commandos as equivalent to spies.

However, the roles of many others have previously remained unsung. In this book Rees has weaved together real-life testimonies from the stories of the courageous soldiers who used the canoes, their military commanders, and the canoes’ inventors and designers, and tells of an epic journey of progress that took canoe development took from Cornwall, all along the Southern English Coast and beyond – even to the tropical island of Ceylon.

The canoes proved to be valuable in many of the theatres of WWII, and thousands of the various models were sent worldwide, often being used by the various Special Forces, including by the the espionage specialists of Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Click here to buy a copy from Amazon – The Cockleshell Canoes: British Military Canoes of World War Two.

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Making a moustache fender using manila

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Michelle makes a moustache

I was pleased to find a post including some nice photos of the making of a ropework moustache fender over at Scott B Williams’ weblog Scott’s Boat Pages.

There’s a lot of interest in old-fashioned rope fenders and moustaches, not least because modern plastic types look so out of place on an old-fashioned hull, but also because there aren’t too many suppliers around to make them up. What’s more, they look as if they could be a lot of fun to make during the winter. See the links to earlier intheboatshed.net posts on ropework fenders at the bottom of this post.

The story Scott tells is of how his ropework specialist girlfriend Michelle made a moustache fender for a rowing boat being built to Iain Oughtred’s Guillemot design. The new boat is to spend its life as a tender to a 1929 John Alden schooner, Summerwind, and its new owner wanted a fender that would was just right for the job.

Made from 1/2in manila, the fender has a protective section 36in long, with 3in eyes at each end. The central section is 5in thick, tapering down to 3in at the ends; the taper was achieved by adding varying lengths of the 1/2in manila, and binding them in position with smaller cord. Shorter lengths were bound into the aft side to create the bent shape.

Michelle covered the whole thing with a series of continuous half-hitches, using 1/4in manila. There are a lot of half-hitches and a lot of line in a fender like this – this small one swallowed up over 200 feet of the 1/4in stuff, and Scott says that it takes a lot of patience to pull all that through a half hitch hundreds of times over.

I’ll bet it does – and I’d guess that you need to physically quite fit to be able to do it from a cross-legged position and keep smiling!

Earlier posts about ropework fenders:
A question of puddings and moustaches
How a moustache is made
Almost certainly not the final word on puddings, fenders or whiskers…

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Chris Old and Chris Stone build a glued-clinker Whitehall at the Boat Building Academy

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As promised, Boat Building Academy principal Yvonne Green has sent us some more photos from the big student launch day at Lyme last month.

This is despite being frantically busy setting up a new eight-week course on woodworking skills – the course needs a new workshop, and I gather the Academy’s short courses in particular are attracting huge numbers of enquiries.

Here’s what she has to say about the boat in these photos:

‘Chris Old, a doctor of oceanography from New Zealand, and Chris Stone, and aerospace industry computer engineer by background, built a very elegant glued-clinker Whitehall skiff. The offsets and lines were taken from a book by John Gardner, founder of the Mystic Seaport Museum’s boatbuilding courses.

‘White paintwork was highlighted by varnished khaya gunwales, thwarts and trim. Lyme Regis’ Mayor Sally Holman was particularly taken with this boat, as am I.’

I gather the boat was built to a set of offsets for a 14ft Whitehall included in the Gardner compendium volume Building Classic Small Craft: Complete Plans and Instructions for 47 Boats, which includes plans for an impressive 47 boats and is currently available for the knock-down price of £19.99 from Amazon. See more Gardner books at Amazon here.

For more posts relating to the Boat Building Academy, click here.

I think we may be seeing an increase in interest in Whitehalls in the UK. For more posts relating to these boats click here, and for posts relating to John Gardner click here.

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