Boats

Hydroplanes were developed in the 1920s and 30s as outboard engines became available and increased in size and power. Originally outboards were used on utility boats but as racing evolved and speed records were set hydroplanes were designed as a way of going much faster. This particular boat was designed by naval architect Bruce Crandall…

As leisure sailing increased in both affordability and popularity in the years after the Second World War many rivers around the UK coast had their own class of locally designed and built racing dinghies. The Helford Delta Class was designed and built by Dick Winfrey who ran a small boatyard on the south bank of…

‘Perhaps the Solomon Islands are more celebrated for their canoes than for anything else, and, if so, I think, with reason’, wrote W. Coote in his work The Western Pacific. Other writers on the Solomon Islands, a Melanesian archipelago of some 900 islands north east of Australia, wax similarly lyrical about the local design of…

Canoeing with sail and paddle became a popular sport in the last quarter of the 19th century, with the canoes used both for racing and for camping holidays at home and abroad. Kayaks of this particular type were introduced by Dr John ‘Rob Roy’ McGregor, viewed by many as the father of modern leisure canoeing,…

A design for an 11 foot single seater touring canoe was published in Light Boat magazine in August 1951, to a design by F.O.D. Hirschfield. The boat was designed to be suitable for home construction and general use and, with the combination of a relatively low price and the boom in boating’s popularity in the…

Kayaks have been used in the Arctic for thousands of years for hunting and as a means of transport, from Siberia through Alaska to the east coast of Greenland. Together with the Umiak open boat and the dog sled, sealskin kayaks have made it possible for Inuit peoples to survive in the harshest of conditions.…

Windsurfing has become widely popular since its introduction in the 1960s, yet from the beginning a bitter battle raged over who was the legitimate inventor of the windsurfer. Americans Hoyle Schweitzer and Jim Drake filed a patent for their design in 1968. Schweitzer later bought out Drake’s interest and went on to manufacture and sell…

Nomad was built by F.C. Morgan Giles at Hammersmith in 1908. It is of clinker construction with spruce planks on steamed oak frames. It is gunter rigged with a single wooden bamboo mast and spars and a cast iron centreplate and copper buoyancy tanks. It is the design of this boat that led to the development…

Thamaku is a less than half size replica of a design of outrigger canoe commonly seen all across the Pacific islands. This design of craft was used as a general purpose vessel with the main hull constructed of canvas stretched across a timber frame. The replica is around 10ft 6ins (3.23m)   length but full size…