This is the long boring bit, My introduction to the blog ,
This is how it came to be and what we plan to do with our new boat, a 1914 Falmouth quay punt named
“Teal”
I'll build a clinker dinghy I thought, I bought the book, set up a workshop and even dragged some 15ft logs of Larch out the woods. This was the answer, build the dinghy, learn the techniques and some time in the future buy a project boat, Probably a folkboat and restore it. Great
First problem as it turns out, I don't really want a dinghy and secondly I don't want to wait, Not that it
would make a difference as I have no money to begin with.
Finally after many, many a evening sat in Ken's kitchen going back and forth over what we
wanted and how we could possibly afford one, a utterly useless attempt to beat to weather in Ken's
Mirror offshore put the final nail in the coffin and we put it on the market with a rather low price tag
and made a sale, so we now had about half enough money to buy something worth while so the next option was to sell the only other thing I had of any real value and got rid of my van.
A trip straight to Hegarty,s boatyard planted a new seed, maybe, just maybe we could afford a traditional boat, perhaps a Gaff rigger , a prewar Hillyard or something even more interesting,
We heard about falmouth quay punts, Liam Hegarty was expecting to get one in himself but she
turned out to need more work than we were really up to. We watched and waited for something to turn up but lost hope of finding a quay punt and turned our attention back to folkboats and various other
rotting hulks, but not much was turning up and we had become more and more sided towards a gaff rig.
Eventually a boat turned up in Scotland, A quay punt at that, So I made several phone calls and inquiries about transport and decided to go have a look, We narrowed it down to a few dates that suited to travel but on looking at the cost of flights they had sored up, Ken decided to take a quick glance to see if anything else had popped up, and there it was, TEAL just up for sale and at a price we could afford.
I had read about Teal on several occasions but had looked past her as she was way out of our price range but had a very interesting history and a lot of pictures of her looking very pretty under full sail.
Although I had previously stumbled on a forum post saying she would soon be for sale again I hadn't realised that the previous ad was several years older and she now needed work again.
Contact was made and flights booked without delay, I took a one day trip to London where her owner, A very nice guy called Rob collected me a drove me down to Kent to see her.
There she was, just as described and looking surprising bigger than her 21'6” but with beautiful classic lines. Shes a gaff yawl, built in 1914 for a writer named Percy Woodcock and has had an interesting life, she was sailed engine less to the Baltic and spent two seasons there before she was put ashore this time. I won't go too in dept into the history at this stage as most of it is already available on line and it'll be more interesting when I have got some good pictures and the work is in progress. Any way the story goes on and a deal was made and I flew home ( bit ironic flying to buy a boat that was built long before you could have flown anywhere I thought).
For now thats where the story ends, Hopefully in the next week or two she will be on the back of a lorry on her way to Hegarty's where we can get stuck in and try and bring her back to her former glory
or at least get her back on the water for the time being.
I'll be keeping the blog up to date as we progress from here for anyone who shares an interest.
Welcome along.
