Where it all began
Sometime around when I was 9 or 10 years the bug for building boats was implanted within me as my father decided to build himself a boat, he found a set of plans for a Jim Young sailing dinghy and purchased the necessary materials. As a young boy I was infinitely curious but not allowed anywhere near it, I distinctly remember the smells of plywood and epoxy resin coming from the garage and would watch from the doorway as he made it. This was the start of my addiction to the sea, boats and the water
My dads first and only boat build
Fast forward a few years and my father purchased a trailersailer called Simba which was a Sabre 22, every 2nd weekend or so we would sail off on friday to a little island or lake somewhere and have adventures, these were some of the best memories of my child hood and replete with memories of homemade cooking on the boat(food just tastes better at sea), new friends, remote beachwalks, fishing in little bays, jumping off the boat and swimming, rough weather sailing. I learnt to sail, steer a boat, manage weather conditions and rig and derig a boat.
our mobile caravan
Fast forward another couple of years and I am completing my second year of a science degree poorly when i get the offer from some missionary friends of my parents to crew their boat to bouganivlle island with relief medicines for the island which was in conflict at the time. this thoroughly appealed to my adventurous spirit and so i said yes embarking on a journey that was to change the course of my life. We sailed through the middle of a category 2 cyclone, visited remote villages, sailed to other countries, dived on world war 2 wrecks, got arrested, left a country without permission and navigated across reef infested seas using only the sun to navigate narrowly missing being arrested by the PNG navy before arriving in Australia where again the course of my life was changed but this is the story for another page as this page is about boatbuilding.
fast forward a few more years again i have been teaching up the top of Cape York having adventures camping, spearfishing and the occasional swim with crocodiles, I now have 3 kids and we have moved down to Cairns temporarily. my Father in law mentions that he would like to go around Australia for 2 years and would we like to look after his house before going back up into the Cape. At this time both him and my father had been reading the Multihull magazine and getting excited about the idea of building a large catamaran. I catch this bug and filled with wild imaginations of sailing my family around the world ask him if he would mind me building a boat in his backyard. What experience did I have in this none whatsoever…. Amazingly he said yes, and the boat started out at 32 ft grew to 35 before settling on a 37 ft design by a guy called Peter Snell. I believe that we are made in the image of God, I did not grow up in a Christian home but became one somewhere around 13 years old. One of the first things you read about God is that he is a creator, and I believe that that creative spark is buried in everyone, for me it comes out in the art of building a thing from scratch.
I sold my 2 boats and purchased a set of plans but when they arrived fell into depression as they did not seem like plans to build a boat at all, the project was huge and the starting point was not obvious, my wife suggested I ring the designer which I did and he informed me that the best way to see a large project through to completion was to break it into smaller chunks and work on these to completion and so began my boat building journey. Did I have the skills for this project, no, did I learn that motivation is a great teacher, yes, can you teach yourself absolutely.
