YARD NEWS

Craftsmanship

Yard News

Edited by Steffan Meyric Hughes: +44 (0)207 349 3758 Email: steffan@classicboat.co.uk

ANDREW GILMOUR LEVINGTON, SUFFOLK

Keel and wheels

C/O MARTIN NOTT

COWES, IOW

Sibbick flyer

Cowes-based boatbuilder Martin Nott is progressing well with Merry Maid, his 24 foot linear rater. Designed and built by Charles Sibbick and launched in 1906, the very lightweight original hull planking has now been covered with two layers of thin mahogany veneer. Principal other work has included new timbers, fastenings, bronze floors, beamshelves, deck beams and a plywood sub-deck. Re-launch is planned optimistically for later this year, or realistically early next year. Here is Andrew Gilmour’s 1959, Tucker Brown-built Stella Timoa about to be towed away from Suffolk Yacht Harbour by his 1959 Austin A35. Hang on, I hear you say! That’s a 34hp car and a 2.7-tonne yacht. Not to worry – it’s a joke photo – no towing took place! Andrew bought his first A35 as a penniless student for £15, made it roadworthy, welded an angle iron to the back bumper, and used it to trail his OK dinghy to races. The boat, too, has a story. It belonged to Andrew’s father in the 1960s and he remembers racing it on the east coast before the family sold it in the mid-1970s. Andrew found it neglected in a boatyard in Looe 12 years ago, bought it back and restored it at Suffolk Yacht Harbour with his grown-up children and some boatbuilder help at the yard. The family have raced it ever since. This year they plan to step up the campaign, racing as always at the Suffolk Yacht Harbour Regatta in June, and adding the July British Classic Week in the Solent to their calendar.

MALDON, ESSEX

Three-masted lug dinghy

Boatbuilder Jamie Clay has been busy refurbishing Aethelfleda, one of three unusual large dinghies owned by King Alfred School in Golders Green in London. The boats were designed by Nigel Irens and built by the staff and pupils under a boatbuilder about two decades ago. The hulls are in yellow cedar stripplank, and the first was sheathed externally with epoxy and glass, the interior receiving only sealing coats of epoxy resin. The subsequent two hulls were also sheathed internally before internal fitting out and have fared well over the years. That first boat though, over a long period of time, has taken up moisture which has caused some distortion of the planking and glue failure in the plank joints. Jamie’s trickysounding job has been to cut panels out of all the buoyancy chambers to gain access, then to strip all areas of the internal hull surface in order to apply epoxy glass sheathing, before a complete re-fairing and repaint. The boats are three-masted luggers and are rowed or sailed, each boat taking 8-10 children. They are well used and have travelled as far as Falmouth Week, Scotland’s Great Glen Raid, The Great River Race in London, even France and Croatia.

JAMIE CLAY

Clockwise from left: Ice boat and Rinamara; Caramba; A pair of Snekkes

PLYMOUTH, DEVON

It never rains, it pours

There’s never a quiet day at the No1 Covered Slip overlooking the busy waters of Plymouth Sound. It might be a Scheduled Ancient Monument, Britain’s oldest covered slip (1763), and a place originally conceived of to build battleships for the days of sail, but it’s no museum. It has been home for some years to Will Stirling & Son, and it’s one of the busiest traditional yards in Britain. The huge, wooden, Norwegian ice-class boat is now “seven eighths” of the way through a major refit and is taking a bit of time to take up at nearby Mayflower Marina. Meanwhile, the yard built her two 16ft (5m) launches, both powered by inboard diesel engines.

The 50ft (15.1m), 1968 McGruer yawl Rinamara has been another sizeable job, this time for a new owner. She’s now ready to launch for sea trials. Rinamara is of the cruiser/racer recipe that is typical of James McGruer: elegant lines but a wheelhouse for shelter – “good looking but tough as old boots” as a previous owner put it. She sailed around the world in 1980 and had many successes racing under CIM in the Med in the 1990s and 2000s.

Also just finished is Caramba, a 63ft (19m) 1963-built twin-screw diesel yacht (TSDY) designed by Fred Parker and built by Samuel White. This was a thorough overhaul – “she’s like a little ship inside” says Will. The third motorboat of the moment, and on the slip now, is a 1950s Philips of Dartmouth TSDY of 50ft (15.1m), in for annual work. There is a Stirling & Son team at Mayflower Marina working on the systems of the 52ft (15.6m) bermudan cutter Carillion, built of kauri pine in 1974 in New Zealand, to a design by Bruce Clark.

The little (38ft) race-winning pilot cutter Edith Gray built by John Raymond-Barker is in for a bit of work and Nin Dar Anna is having a major overhaul over the border in Cornwall at Treluggan Boatyard run by Will’s wife Sara. She is a 35ft (10.7m) Arthur Robb- designed Bermudan yawl, built of teak at the Cheoy Lee Shipyard of Hong Kong in 1963 and is having new bronze floors, keelbolts and deck. “People think ‘out of sight, out of mind’ with bolts,” says Will. “But I always wonder what’s holding a boat together, other than force of habit?!” In whatever spare moments were left over the winter, the yard built three new clinker dinghies, taking the total to 49. With the 1897 Nicholson schooner Greylag and the 60ft trawler yacht Dawn Hunter on their way into the yard soon, Stirling & Son needs more staff – specifically a yard manager for Treluggan; and for No1 Slipway, an experienced finisher, a welding engineer and at least two experienced shipwrights.

From top: New paint for Sybil of Cumae; Dinghy No 49; Bronze floors for Nin Dar Anna

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILL STIRLING