Standing The Test Of Time

Traditional construction is easier and more satisfying, I say

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Five years ago Sally turned 75, which means she’s an octogenarian. How time slips past. Five years ago we rafted up in a little bay opposite Ullapool and toasted the old girl with a magnum of champagne. Now we can do it all over again.

In 1937 boats like Sally were built plank on frame. It was the only way her builders, Elkins of Christchurch, knew. No strip planking and epoxy/ply, let alone glassfibre. She was stitched together with grown oak frames, a couple of steamed timbers in between, pitch pine planking, copper fastened, bronze strap floors, elm keel, lead ballast keel, bronze bolts, the kind of construction in small yachts you don’t see much of these days, although there are exceptions, one of them being Thembi, an Ed Burnett cutter built by workshop-sharer Tim Loftus, single handed in a shed in Cockenzie, east of Edinburgh and now moored close by Sally in Loggie Bay.