People get a lot of satisfaction when they build something themselves. But when you build a wooden boat out of beautiful timber using traditional methods dating back hundreds of years, the satisfaction gets amplified immensely.
The members of the Seaworks Wooden Boat Building group take great pride in what they have learned and the skills they have gained building wooden clinker dinghies, kayaks and motor boats in one of the sheds at Seaworks.
The group – made up of Ian Black, Rod Page, Peter Tantau and Tim Fergus – has its origins in the wooden boat building night classes run by the former Newport TAFE school about 30 years ago. The classes were run by legendary boat building instructor and former Williamstown Sailing Club commodore, Bill Pride OAM.
About 20 years ago, the Newport TAFE was interested in moving its night boat building school to Seaworks. But nothing eventuated from those discussions and the TAFE management closed down the boat building school instead.
The boat building group members made their own decision to relocate to Seaworks, becoming its first tenant.
Peter Tantau said it was a good fit with the site: close to the water, a slipway nearby and fitting in
with the Seaworks maritime philosophy and plan. “I wanted to see how boat builders traditionally built vessels. Bill showed us how to do that,” he said. There were no power tools used, just traditional tool such as hand planes and copper rivets. The group focused on building 12-foot clinker dinghies, taken off the designs of ketches five times as big.
Rod said they began the process right from scratch. “We didn’t just learn from Bill how to build a boat. We spent a whole term doing preliminary work from drawings of boats to actual scale,” he said. “We made our keels and transoms, then added moulds which determined the shape of the boat. Timber was cut according to the drawings and fitted to the moulds. “So, we went all the way from the drawing board to the finished article.” Ian said Bill taught them to build their dinghies to perfection.
“Bill told us: it’s got to look fair. ‘Fair’ is a term for looking exactly right and beautiful. “Bill would say: ‘stand back and look at that plank and see whether it looks fair’.” Bill’s students came from all walks of life but none of them were boat builders, carpenters or engineers.
But they all relished what they have achieved. “We all learned absolutely fantastic skills that are probably useless to today’s society,” Rod said. “But it allowed us to get satisfaction and pride out of building something.”
