Advantages
Six things that separate a repair lasting thirty years from one lasting three.
Boat timber has to be air-dried slowly to the right moisture content, and wood bought green or kiln-dried in a hurry will shrink, split or refuse to take a bend. Our store holds larch, oak, iroko, mahogany and Douglas fir laid in stick under cover, some of it seasoning for a decade, with quarter-sawn stock kept aside for planking. When a boat needs an eight-metre plank of matched grain, having it already dry is the difference between a repair this season and next.
Rot follows grain, hides behind fastenings and travels under paint that looks perfect, so an estimate written from the outside of a hull is fiction. We remove enough — interior joinery, a few planks, ceiling boards — to see the frames, floors and stem, then quote against what is actually there. Owners get photographs of every area examined, including the sound ones, which is how a quotation becomes something you can rely on rather than a starting position.
The quick modern fix is to cut out the bad wood, fill with epoxy and sheathe the hull, which stops a traditional hull swelling and seals moisture inside the structure. Within a few seasons the timber behind the sheathing is worse than before and the repair cannot be undone. We scarf in new wood of the same species and grain direction, refasten in silicon bronze or copper as the boat was built, and use epoxy only where it genuinely belongs.
Half the hulls we see have been repaired with the wrong metal at some point, and the resulting galvanic corrosion quietly eats fastenings, softens the wood around them and shows up years later as inexplicable weeping. We check what a boat was originally fastened with, keep the compatible bronze, copper and galvanised stock, sample-draw fastenings to assess their condition, and sort out anodes and bonding rather than treating them as somebody else's problem.
Caulking is a craft with a feel to it: cotton or oakum driven to a consistent hardness, seams paid with the right compound, and the whole hull left able to take up when it goes back in the water. Overdriven caulking splits planks and forces frames; underdriven leaks forever. We do it by hand and by eye, we recaulk decks as well as hulls, and we know when a leaking seam is a caulking problem and when it is telling you about a frame underneath.
Wooden boats attract alarming advice, and owners frequently arrive expecting to hear that everything must be replaced. Often the structure is sound and the real problems are a badly bedded deck fitting and rainwater sitting in the bilge. We say so, do the small job, and lose the large one. That has kept the yard busy for sixty-eight years through word of mouth alone, and it means the surveys we write are trusted by insurers and buyers.