How I became Chance's present owner

 The story starts back in early 2000's when my path crossed Chance (Token) when the then owner asked me to do some repairs to the boat. The boat was on the the river Thames at a small boatyard. Having done the work I was contracted to do. The boat then when away, it going in one direction and my work taking me to work in another part of the country. Then by chance I was searching Facebook and came across Chance. This time she had moved to the North West of England near Preston. Having made contact with the owner before I  took over ownership of Chance, he wish to restore her himself with help from a boat builder. We talked over the project and after a period of time. He said that he was not in a position to restore her and other projects were going to take much more time. So he made the difficult decision to hand the boat on to me to do the restoration on Chance. As I  have worked on Heritage craft over my 44 years as a boat builder  he felt that I would give Chance  best chance of getting back to a sea worthy boat once more.  


I have set myself a reasonable time scale of 3 to 5 years to restore Chance. Doing much of the work myself around my day job which is a boat builder and so this will help in the early stages of deconstruction  as I will know how much needs to come off the boat and will be able to make informed decisions on what needs to be done and in what order to help the structure of the boat intact. 

Over the period of the restoration I will employing young people to give them traditional  boat building skills  and work experience. Once that Chance is restored she will be used as an educational boat show casing traditional boat building skills and also used a a floating class room.  

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