National Small Boat Collection

‘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,…

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…

Triton is an open double ended ship’s lifeboat which previously belonged to the pre-war tug Triton, which in the 1970s was used as a seamanship school in St Katherine’s dock, London. Such craft have a rather colourful history, in one sense going back hundreds of years to the ship’s boats carried by all large sailing…

Finesse is the oldest surviving British registered Finn, possibly the oldest in the world. It was one of a number built for the 1952 Olympics (see early history of the class under Seawolf BAE0020) and numbers for the class were allocated internationally, with 9 going to Germany, 5 to France, 2 to Belgium, 2 to Austria,…

This is one of several kayaks in the Museum’s collection from the drawing board of that prolific designer of small boats Percy Blandford. Blandford’s passion was to design ‘small boats for everyman’ that could be constructed at home with a minimum of tools and expertise. In the years following the Second World War there was…

Ken Littledyke was a 1950s school  woodwork teacher who was in the habit of introducing his pupils to canoeing, including helping them with building their own boats. Initially his preferred method of construction involved canvas stretched over a wooden frame, as was popular at the time. However canvas covered craft are vulnerable to damage both…