Tag: boat plans

BBA student launch, December 2012

  

This is photographic evidence that this year’s winter student launch at the Boat Building Academy really did manage to take place in decent bright, if chilly, weather despite the variable autumn we’ve had.

Apart from the students and staff, the shots show the launch of an Iain Oughtred-designed Fulmar named Florence after the builder’s daughter born a week ago and also a Humble Bee pram dinghy also designed by Oughtred.

Eight boats built by the class of March 2012 hit the water, and details of the boats and the students who built them are here, and there are more photos here.

The BBC and ITV were in attendance, and their reports are here (the launch report starts about 21 minutes in) and here.

BBA students build a Eric Hvalsoe-designed rowing and sailing dinghy in cedar

  

  

Photos by Emma Brice, Philippa Gedge and Jenny Steer

This lightweight Hvalsoe 16 rowing and sailing dinghy built in cedar was made by Boat Building Academy students Rob Murphy and Matt McGlade with the help of Matt Cowdery.

Read about the Hvalsoe 16 and its sister the Hvalsoe 13 at the website of  veteran Seattle boat builder and designer Eric Hvalsoe.

Rob wanted a boat that he could enjoy with his family, and chose this design as he wanted a lightweight boat that he would be able to use in protected waters and be able to launch by himself.

I gather Rob is ‘chuffed to bits’ with Skylark – he’s pleased with her light weight and finds it easy to manage, launch and recover the boat by himself. He has now sailing her in Poole Harbour and Stithians Reservoir – a fresh water lake in Cornwall – with his family on a recent holiday.

Skylark sails and rows very well and Rob says that his kids haven’t managed to break any part of her yet!

Rob has recently taken over a new workshop in Briantspuddle near to Bere Regis in Dorset and is starting a new boat building and repairs business to be called Blue Lias Marine. Once it has been set up, he has promised to let me know his web address, which I will post here.

Before attending at the BBA, Matt McGlade completed 20 years in the army during which time he acquired a range of useful skills. Having learned woodwork and boatbuilding at the BBA, he has now moved to Bolton, where he is continuing his studies.

Matt Cowdery who had previously worked on superyachts worked on Skylark in its earlier stages but moved on to a glass fibre restoration  project. He’s now working at Reading, building wooden frames for restored Bentleys – a line of work that that has a lot in common with boat building.

Sailing Canoes – a brief history, published in 1935

 

This 1935 history of sailing canoes originally published by the American Canoe Association is well worth a look.

It has been republished online by the editors of the excellent Skinny Hull magazine. (There’s another link to this document at the Dragonfly Canoe Works website (I’m guessing this may be the original source).

The photos in the brief history may be a little fuzzy, but they tell an amazing story of early diversity before the uniformity of the ACA classes was established, and extreme sailing long before the invention of the wetsuit.

The text itself is US-oriented, as might be expected, but interesting nonetheless, and makes a good job of summarising the development of the decked sailing canoe on both sides of the Atlantic, starting with John Macgregor’s Rob Roy.

I wonder what happened to Nathaniel Herreshoff’s beautiful but scary-looking proposed class of 1935?

Turning to Skinny Hull magazine itself, I’m particularly taken with an article in the first issue – it’s by John Summers of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, and features what I think is a fabulous little craft. There are supposed to be stitch and glue plans to buy too, though it might be necessary to contact Mr Summers directly as I can’t see them where they’re supposed to be.

Finally, there’s this sequence of photos on YouTube to consider…