On the WaterJun – Aug
Wooden Boat Day
A shape that never had to change
There is a whole culture here around clinker-built wooden boats — overlapping planks, riveted, a shape that has not needed to change in a thousand years because it was right the first time. Plenty are still in use rather than in museums.
A day in one is slower than a day in anything modern and that is the entire proposition. A lapstrake hull under sail is quiet in a way a glassfibre hull is not, because the water is moving past wood rather than past a drum.
Some are old working boats kept going by owners' associations. Some are new ones built the old way by yards that never stopped. You will be told which, at length, and with feeling.