About us

Three Generations and a Shed Full of Drying Timber

The yard was opened in 1958 by a shipwright who built fishing boats and gradually found himself repairing pleasure craft as the fishing fleet shrank. His son took it through the decades when everybody said wood was finished, kept the timber store stocked when there was almost no work, and refused to convert the sheds to fibreglass. His daughter runs it now, and the timber store is the reason clients come: air-dried larch, oak and mahogany that has been seasoning here for years cannot be bought at short notice from anyone.

We work on everything from small traditional working boats to classic yachts of twenty metres, and the approach is the same regardless of value. A hull is opened enough to understand it before any quotation is written, because rot travels along grain and behind fastenings in ways no external inspection reveals, and a price given without that inspection is a guess that both sides will come to regret. Owners receive photographs of what we find, including the parts that turn out to be sound.

Five shipwrights work here, two of whom trained with the previous generation, along with an apprentice who is four years into a long education. We take on more apprentices than the size of the yard justifies, because there are very few people left who can spile a plank, set a rivet or caulk a seam properly, and in twenty years there will be fewer still unless someone keeps teaching it.