Wooden Boats - In The Press

Buried somewhere in my corrugated iron garden shed, which is classified by the National Trust as a blot on the landscape is a set of grown t1-tree knees that is exactly my own age. I keep them because they are leftovers from the great family boatbuilding project, when Pater built an open wood launch intended, as so many boats are, to help him escape the tedious double duty of suburban living and parenthood.

If you grow up around such boats, you’re doomed to be a boat lover all your life. You have no choice – if we are to agree with the most basic of Mr Freud’s precepts. No matter how far you stray from the boats of your childhood, they are the ones that remain most evocative. No matter how satisfying the flutter of the telltales across a broad expanse of Kevlar, the vision of a bit of oiled teak or a bronze fitting is the image you take home with you at the end of the day. Two Sydney architects John Crawford and John Howard, commissioned the 9ft Nipper form builder Nigel Shannon for a number of reasons. Initially they wanted a picturesque tender for a picturesque 40ft wishbone yawl, but a secondary role became apparent.

Nipper now sits in the reception area of their converted warehouse office, hopefully as an inspiration to the designers, builders and tradesmen who cross their threshold.

Nigel Shannon, of Shannon Boats from the Sydney suburb of Balmain, built a half model, then the real thing. Balmain, until surprisingly recent years, was one of the great boat and shipbuilding areas of Australia. The premises from which Nigel works, one the last old slipways in the region, is about to succumb to the relentless onslaught of the upmarket townhouse epidemic in this area because of the large areas of industrial land occupied by the ship repair yards.

John Crawford says Nipper satisfied the nostalgia for a 9ft clinker dinghy in which he learned to sail as a child. The partners enjoyed the concept of patronage, commissioning from a craftsman what they see as their resident work of art.

Nipper is 9ft long and 5ft wide, and quite flat-floored in her aft sections. She is planked in Kalatis, which is a tropical wood almost the same as Australian Cedar – the wood is the same but the graining is more regular