There’s a line in a 20-year old Alan Jackson song called Drive, which reads “You can’t beat the way an old wood boat rides”. Whether that’s true or not, you certainly can’t beat them for style. There are some fabulous fibreglass boats out there but wooden boats always seem to have an intrinsic rightness to their lines that’s never quite matched by GRP. That’s partly down to the era that most wooden boats hail from. For the most part, GRP took over as the boat builder’s (and buyer’s) material of choice in the late 1960s but a few specialist builders are still turning out brand new (and surprisingly modern) wooden boats, an example of which we’ve included this month…
Philip & Son was a boat and shipbuilding yard on the River Dart, which is now home to Premier Marina’s Noss On Dart marina. The yard built passenger and cargo steamers, tugs and tankers. It even built the Trinity House light vessels. In the early 1960s, in an era before any of
