shipshape boatbuilding
I'm a wooden boatbuilder, who specialises in building lightweight, skin-on-frame
boats and runs kayak & canoe-building courses. Designing and making simple,
beautiful and usable boats gives me huge satisfaction. At school and university
I always had access to workshops. I grew up kayaking in Devon, then much further
afield (Nepal, British Columbia, The Alps...). They were the things I enjoyed
the most. But after graduating with an MA from the Royal College of Art, I
didn’t set foot in a workshop for over a decade. I worked in a digital world,
designing good experiences for people on the web. I set up my own company and
taught design at university. At weekends and in the evenings, I did up a couple
of VW vans, and worked on our family home. When a friend died from cancer I knew
life was too short, and I had to get back in the workshop and on the water.
Looking to weave together a life-long love of kayaking, design and
craftsmanship, I moved to Lyme Regis and enrolled to train at The Boat Building
Academy. When I returned to Bristol in 2015, the Underfall Yard had just
re-opened some of their historic workshops with Lottery Funding and I took on a
unit. It’s now a place to make boats that I can be proud of, that people use and
that will last. It’s a satisfying reward when I help people build a boat and
they say “I made that!” Whether you build a boat, or I build it for you, it
would be my pleasure to help you climb aboard your very own Shipshape boat.
