Keeping traditions afloat

In her Dorset workshop, boatbuilder and teller of stories Gail McGarva makes traditional wooden vessels, the old-fashioned way

- Alice Wright

An intimate relationship with trees and timber is at the heart of Gail McGarva's work. To build a wooden boat that combines form, function and beauty, she says, it is vital to understand the nature of every log used. It is this relationship that first drew her to the craft. "I just love that synergy between the living tree and the journey that you're persuading it on, to become a boat that dances with the waves."

I meet Gail outside the gig club boathouse on Lyme Regis' Monmouth Beach. She seems very much in her natural environment and greets me with a friendly smile. With a warm and open manner, Gail speaks thoughtfully, with a great feeling for description - it's clear she is a born storyteller. Indeed, Gail previously worked in theatre and education, then as a sign language interpreter, so taking up boatbuilding was something of a leap of faith. Although her family are originally from the west coast of Scotland, she had never lived by the sea. But she had lived on riverboats for many years, and the affinity she felt with them brought about an "overwhelming" desire to put boats at the centre of her life.

After reading an article about the Lyme Regis Boatbuilding Academy, Gail decided to visit them. "It was like a homecoming," she remembers. "It was everything - the smell, the industry, the activity. And the excitement of these skeletal forms and what they were going to become on the water."