Rowing with the Stars (3)

I wasn't rowing with the stars this week, but Gail McGarva and colleagues at the Boatbuilding Academy at Lyme Regis were. They featured in Britain's Heritage Heroes on the BBC, in which John Craven and Jules Hudson drive a Landy round the country in a tour of craftsmen, woodsmen, steam men, cheese men and a rich tapestry of countryside obsessives.

The tone is relentlessly lowbrow, our presenters spending the first five minutes listing what they are going to see and the last five listing what they have just seen, in case we are too stupid and daft to remember.
The section on the Academy and Gail's new lerret, a fishing boat unique to Lyme Bay, was a delight. They launched the boat in the traditional way, the crew getting in and being bodily hurled down the beach into the surf, neatly demonstrating why the boat is short, fat and double-ended.
You can see the programme on BBC iPlayer (UK only, sorry).
Hudson seemed to be making a decent fist of pulling the traditional heavily-balanced blades but Craven made a complete horlicks of it, being completely unable to row and talk at the same time.
Readers with long memories may recall I saw Gail and the lerret at Beale Park last year.

Spitzl

At the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis, graduation day is approaching. A record twelve boats are being launched on June 12, including this lovely and interesting Spitzl by Uli Killer from Germany.
The Spitzl is a lake boat, very much like a Thames skiff designed for larger waters with a more angled stem and a bigger transom while keeping the wineglass shape. Uli has based his design on boats from Tegernsee in Bavaria.
He has done a wonderful job. Almost the last process was to oil the hull rather than varnish it. Oil has to be applied every half an hour or so, apparently, until the wood can take up no more, so Uli started work at 7 in the morning and religiously applied oil every 30 minutes until it just flowed off - 26 coats later. The day of incredibly hard work paid off, as the wood then had to be left for a week for the oil to impregnate properly. Uli took his family to Cornwall for a well-deserved break. There is lots more on his blog (it's in German but if you load it in Google Chrome it will translate it for you automatically. It won't translate it very well, but for non-German speakers like me it gives the gist).

Tegernsee has its own traditional rowing boat, with a long beak-like bow and a flat bottom. All the illustrations show one man rowing and a load of passengers doing nothing but admiring each others' dirndls or lederhosen, so it it is obviously designed as a ferry rather than a pleasure boat (pleasure for the oarsman, that is).

Kayaking in Lyme Regis

This is a boatbuilder. You can tell he's a boatbuilder rather than a manic kayaker for what he has committed and omitted. He has omitted the lycra, helmet and plastic bag containing all his electronic gizmos, but he has committed a pencil behind his ear. I suspect he doesn't even know it is there.
The picture was sent over by Emma Brice at the Boatbuilding Academy in Lyme Regis to promote an interesting new course/holiday they are doing. The idea is that budding boatbuilders and kayakers stay at a farm near Lyme for ten days, during which time they will build the traditionally-styled West Greenland kayak and a paddle.
At £1,700 each, it would be an expensive holiday, or an expensive kayak, but for both it is great value for money. Click here for details.
OK Emma - how about doing a rowing boat for next year?