Tag: beale park boat show

Photos from the Beale Park Boat Show 2011

Pierette at the Beale Park Boat Show 2011

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

Cordless Challenge entrant Beale Park Boat Show 2011 Water Craft amateur boatbuilding competition Beale Park 2011

Unknown dinghy


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!

Youjay dinghy at Barton Youjay dinghy at Barton Youjay dinghy at Barton

Beale Park Boat Show: artist Claudia Myatt, Starfish Books and a coracle

Claudia Myatt Starfish Books

Artist and author Claudia Myatt has written to say she’ll be at the Beale Park Boat Show (10-12 June), where it seems her time will be divided between manning her Starfish Books stand, and messing about on the water.

‘Beale Park is the perfect antidote to big boat shows,’ she says. ‘It takes mixing business and pleasure to a fine art, which is why I spend as much time paddling my coracle on the lake as I do on the stand.’

Claudia has been exhibiting at the show since it began over ten years ago. Since then she has developed her Starfish Books range of colourful nautical designs, which now includes the Log Book for Little Ships and the popular Go Sailing series of children’s books commissioned by the RYA.

New for this year is RYA Go Green. Fun and colourful, it covers everything you need to know about the marine environment, from rivers to oceans, sharks to shopping. All Claudia’s books, cards and designs will be on the Starfish Books stand in the area of the show called the Marine Village – and colouring sheets will be available to entertain children while parents browse.

Finally, her website includes a nice child’s colouring-in drawing of boats on a lake that could easily have been inspired by the Beale Park show. If you’re bringing kids, why not print it out – I’m sure she’d like to see them nicely coloured-in at the show.

Claudia Myatt and her coracle

March/April issue of Water Craft out soon

Water Craft March-April 2011

That’s an impressive looking lot of sail!

The March/April 2011 issue  of Water Craft will be in the newsagents from 24 February.

Inside, you’ll find:

  • Colin Buttifant’s latest Broads yacht is fast – she can hold her own with the stripped-down local racers but she’s as cosy as a country cottage down below, according to Kathy Mansfield.
  • In Pen-Hir, leading French naval architect François Vivier has created an elegantly simple cruising yacht he calls a ‘Folkboat for the Future’ – and his son’s boatyard Icari is building her in sustainable birch plywood.
  • Boatbuilding materials are rarely – if ever – cheap, so when Ian Parsons decided to build his first boat, a stitch-and-tape Stornoway 14 dayboat, in order to avoid expensive waste he bought a pre-cut kit of plywood parts.
  • When Dick Phillips took over Phil Swift’s Willow Bay Boats range, he was undecided whether to offer the popular dayboats as bare hulls for home completion. So he went to see two of Phil’s customers who had done just that..
  • Gentleman-chandler Moray MacPhail leads a fact-finding mission of East Coast luminaries to Klassieke Schepen, the Dutch traditional boat show.

This is not to forget all Water Craft’s other features, regular and irregular, and – inevitably – a reminder from the editor about the Cordless Canoe Challenge at the Beale Park Boat Show, in which contestants compete to win a bag full of brand new Makita power tools worth over £1200.

Click here to order your subscription now!