Editor
Welcome to Issue 1 of Barnacle Bill Magazine. We hope you will enjoy January, our first ever issue and hope it is the first of many. We've worked hard to find content that you should find enlightening and enjoyable and have spoken to some very interesting people in the course of working on this issue. We are hugely grateful to all who have contributed to get the edition out.
It sounds obvious but without you we can't and won't exist. Our first 1500 or so subscribers become Patrons of the magazine as we are a crowd funded venture. Please, if you enjoy the magazine, subscribe - 12 months for £2 per month for a digital subscription would help us grow the publication, commission designs and build boats, sponsor events and organise raids.
If you have any adventures you'd like to share with people, send them in. Also we welcome your photos
At points throughout this month, you might find adverts that look a bit 'dated'. these are by Pete Vassilakos who is renowned for his work with vintage and polar inspired art, reproduced into wooden signs.
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Thanks for reading,
Richard [email protected]
Thanks for picking up our 1st issue, we hope you find the magazine a good read. First and foremost we want to inform and entertain but we also want to introduce those new to the water or considering sailing or boating as a recreation to the 'alternative' approach from the highly commercial one. We work with many others to keep the knowledge of traditional boats and rigs, our inheritance, ours. You don't need a carbon fibre mast on most boats - for 7 thousand years, wood has worked fine.
January 2016, Issue 1 Barnacle Bill Magazine. BBM is the result of a 30 year fascination about boats, boat design, traditional boats and adventures by river, coast, lake, loch, sea and ocean. To many of us, in our hectic 21st century lives, boats provide affordable and deployable access to the great outdoors and allow us to see nature and the planet in all her moods, from a very different perspective to what you can see from land.
Sadly, boating and sailing, like many facets of modern life, has become highly commercial over the last 30 years and access to sailing in particular in the developed world has become synonymous with wealth and with this the idea of sailing as a sport has become me the default rather than as a recreation or simply a form of transport. There's deep irony here because sailing wasn't always a rich man's game, as late as the 1960's there was a huge rise in sailing and boating as a recreation especially in the United Kingdom where the availability of marine plywood and a plethora of clever designs by the likes of Jack Holt allowed families to build boats at home for not a lot of money and to enjoy the water. Over the next few issues we'll be looking at affordable ways of getting on the water without compromising safety or satisfaction. A huge part of this is a project identifying and building a family dinghy for the same relative price and with the same capabilities as the Mirror dinghy had when it was launched in 1962. Sadly, it will cost you near £3.5k to get a kit Mirror on the water, nearly 3 times the relative cost of the kit in 1962. Can we build a family boat with the same capabilities for what a Mirror cost in 1962? Find out in this issue.
Our technical section will contain tips from several experts, professional builders and amateurs as well as a question and answer section, this month we're delighted to host John Welsford, the renowned and prolific New Zealand boat designer. we'll also be visiting Overwater Boats in England's Cumbria. Gavin Atkin's highly popular Minimouse plans are included free in this issue.
Adventure will always be at the heart of BBM, the idea of 'relative adventure', that anyone can have an adventure in a boat, is a theme we will continue to explore. We interviewed Polar Explorer Rob Small about his forthcoming Shackleton inspired expedition to the South Pole. We also take a detailed look at the life of Henry 'Chippy' McNish and the Endurance's lifeboat the James Caird, enlisting the help of Seb Coulthard, the world's leading expert on the James Caird who is currently fitting out the most accurate replica to date. Seb has some very interesting research on the James Caird, previously unpublished and drawn from eyewitness source and unpublished diaries.
None of us would have a passion for boats if we hadn't been inspired at some point. Many of us owe Arthur Ransome for inspiring us to take to the water, we're on the track of his boat 'swallow', where it all began We also have a feature on a "Swallow" inspired classic dinghy, Mike Field's lovely boat the Aileen Louisa.
Please, enjoy this issue, give us your feedback and come back next month!
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