Boat Ownership [1268]

530
De Bois
Ken Jones
1972
2020 email
Yes, still got DB530, though only just. Poor old thing, badly in need of some TLC which hopefully it is about to receive, courtesy of my daughter and her partner who have just bought a cottage in Somerset with sufficient under-cover space to work on a Dayboat. He’s a keen Firefly racer; goes all over the country and abroad in pursuit of competition, but felt (quite rightly!) that Kate wasn’t going to be very keen on that kind of sailing but fancied the Dayboat for relaxation afloat. Sort of ironic as the reason I stopped using it was that neither Kate nor my wife enjoyed open-water sailing! When the children were big enough, around 1990, I spent a springtime sprucing the ‘boat up and we had a couple of wonderful summer holidays camping at Watermillock, sailing on Ullswater, playing at ‘Swallows and Amazons’ but after that it’s been unused.
DB 530 is named De Bois – at the time it seemed like a good idea, a tongue-in-cheek dig at Cliff Haskins and Golden Arrow Mouldings who were pushing their GRP smoothies taken from one of Ron Blakemore’s beautiful triple-diagonal smooth wooden dayboats and bad-mouthing Lew Walker and his clinker boats. From memory, at the time the only people building clinker Dayboats were Walkers at Leigh-on-Sea and Alec Stone on the Salcombe estuary, with Walkers having the shorter (12 weeks) lead time. I think Alec was preoccupied with wooden Solos and clinker Salcombe Yawls