Category: wooden boat

The entrance to Whitby Harbour, captured by Dylan Winter

It’s usually about this time of year that I start dreaming of sailing in good weather.

Sometimes my dreams settle on faraway places, but this time my eye has been caught by this little video in which Dylan Winter of Keep Turning Left fame captures the dramatic and impressive entrance to Whitby, a place I know well from playing at the town’s remarkable folk festival.

Walking out onto the arms of the harbour, I have often wondered how it looks from a boat, and now we know. Some day perhaps I’ll do it myself…

If you don’t already know it, Keep Turning Left is well worth keeping an eye on – Dylan is clearly Marmite to some people, but for the rest of us he’s entertaining and often illuminating and a very good with a lens – if I ever sail into Whitby, I don’t expect to get half such good images.

PS – While poking about at KTL this morning, I also found an ancient TV film about the Tobermory race of 1968. More summer sailing dreams just made for the middle of winter!

PPS – The Peggy Bawn Press folks (see comments below) have informed me that they have some oline background on this race, and they do – an article by director Louis Miller, no less! Read it here.

 

Teal’s Life in Ireland – a weblog to watch

I’ve just been reading and greatly enjoying Adrian Nowotynski’s weblog about the restoration of the Teal, a well known Falmouth Quay punt. 

The boat celebrated her 100th birthday just before Christmas, and from what I can see she’s not so far off returning to the water.

Like many of her kind, Teal makes a lovely looking little cruising boat and Adrian seems to be hugely enjoying the job – it’s a darned good thing from Teal’s point of view that he’s a carpenter by trade and so comes to the job with certain advantages many of us would lack.

One of the best things about Adrian’s weblog is his willingness to discuss the nitty gritty of the job – so there’s plenty to read and think about, another is good clear photographs. Read what he has to say here.

Well known US boat building instructor David Nichols to give online boatbuilding courses in association with Fyne Boats

Fyne Boats wooden-canoe-building-2

Chuck Leinweber has been in touch to say that his friend David Nichols has decided to concentrate on offering real-time interactive internet boat building instruction – this is instead of travelling long distances to teach at places like the WoodenBoat school and the Great Lakes School of Boat Building. (Chuck is a Texan pal who runs the excellent and long-established online Duckworks Magazine and Duckworks Boatbuilders Supply.)

David is to work with the Lake District-based boat and surfboard kit supplier Fyne Boats – the students are expected to be mostly in the UK, while he webcasts from his home in Texas.

Students have a computer with a webcam next to their boat so that David can give one-on-one help when needed, just as in a real classroom.

David brings decades of boat building experience to bear and will guide and instruct boat builders as they work on their boats in their own home or other premises – many people in the USA have learnt to build boats from David Nichols, both online and offline, and from his range of books.

Chuck tells me he thinks the advantages of the approach are tremendous and probably not fully understood yet.

The first boatbuilding course will be for stitch-and-glue boats only (most of our kits use the stitch-and-glue construction method). The 9-day course will run from Saturday 10th to Sunday 18th May 2014.

Read all about the new courses here.