Luke Powell’s Working Sail is back!
The success of Christian Topf’s epic production From the Loft Floor to the Sea shows that interest in traditional wooden boatbuilding, and the pilot cutter as an exemplar of it, is unabated. We’ve now reissued Luke’s 2012 account of his life in wooden boats – covering the entire bevy of his earlier pilot cutters.
You can learn more and secure a copy here.
Truly, a place apart
It’s not just about the boats, but their presence is strong in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes. We had a lovely weekend in November accompanying author Gloria Wilson – who was brought up here – to local signing sessions. Local historian James Stoker gave us a grand walking tour of this hardy, self-reliant, eccentric, and now much changed settlement, for which the term ‘higgledy-piggledy’ might have been invented.
Let Gloria guide you too on a stroll around the village she loves; start here.
How it all began
George Holmes was an influential figure in the design and sailing of small boats from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. His prolific writings, drawings, etchings, and designs had never been collected when, in 2009, my friend Tony Watts of the Humber Yawl Club agreed to take on this task, and incorporate a biography of Holmes. The success of Holmes of the Humber, our first book, got Lodestar Books off the ground.
Holmes is finally out of print, but you can now enjoy a copy in PDF form – click here.
Hole Haven
Despite its unprepossessing name Hole Haven, the creek to the west side of Canvey Island on the lower Thames, is a welcome bolt-hole for those bound up- or downriver needing to get some rest or wait out a tide. It has fulfilled this service since at least the 1890s...
A legacy of riches
When barely sixteen I spent two months with my slightly younger brother Dave hitch-hiking, and often rough sleeping, around Scotland watching birds. We went as far north as the Shetland isle Fetlar to see the snowy owls which bred there, and managed to cadge an...
The Yorkshire Coble
Perhaps the most curious craft which is found in use by the fishermen round the coasts of Britain is the Yorkshire coble [writes George Holmes in 1912]. Along with the Sheringham boat—referred to and described in a former number—this type is used for crabbing by the...
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Handy with a toolbox
Martin O'Scannall has enjoyed a love affair of more than forty years with his 1913 gaff cutter Sauntress, beginning with her rebuild and culminating in the glories pictured here. Below is his account of her sojourn in a boatyard at Brentford on the Thames in west...
Like a box of jewels
Someone, somewhere wrote that George Millar was incapable of writing a dull sentence, and never was that more true than in his three books of sailing memoirs. Oyster River, set in the Morbihan in Brittany, and Isabel and the Sea, relating a voyage through the French...