Gavin Atkin's weblog for the sort of people who like looking inside boat sheds. It's about old boats, traditional boats, boat building, restoration, the sea and the North Kent Coast
An introduction to the film Noble Life. I can’t say I like the music (a barge film works best with the kinds of songs old bargemen sang and knew, in my view) but hey it’s always great to have such an interesting record of the barges on line!
There’s more on artbargestudio’s channel.
So that’s what a fisherman does in his little clinker-built boat!
This clever little stop-motion video was apparently all shot using a Nokia N8 mobile phone.
I wonder how they attached it to the tripod? And isn’t it remarkable how a fisherman has nothing to fear from hazards such as drowning and explosions? I guess it would be best not to take it all too literally…
PS – I didn’t get a chance to do it earlier, but I’ve now seen a YouTube about YouTube vid about how Gulp! was made. Try not to miss it. Yes, to make a film like this you need a mobile phone with a good camera, but you also need loads of people and – as Dale observes below – a crane that’s really quite large.
Weir Quay Boatyard has published a tribute to River Tamar fisherman Allen Jewitt that can only be called beautiful.
The Tamar has clearly lost one of its characters, and many of his neighbours will miss a treasured friend.
Allen Jewitt, who died suddenly a few days ago at the age of 70, lived on the water for many decades and was the last full-time net fisherman on the river until that business had to be ended in order to sustain stocks. From that time he caught eels until just last year.
In reading the Weir Quay folks’ obituary, I feel I can almost hear the snap of another link with history being lost forever.
YouTube has a nice documentary in which he talks about his life and demonstrates how he made his living catching eels in the lovely River Tamar, and it’s immediately clear why he was held in such affection by his neighbours on the river.
I particularly like one line that makes me smile in particular: ‘They call these things danbuoys – they must have been named after a man called Dan Boy.’