The reason for doing the restoration on Chance, to safeguard a piece of maritime history



The reason for doing the restoration on Chance, to safeguard a piece of maritime history

My mission is to restoration my James Silver Western Isles Motor Sailer Chance. She built in 1948 at James Silver’s Yard at Rosneath in Scotland to a John Bain design. Chance was a change to the normal boats that James Silver was renowned for as Chance was a 50/50 Motor Sailer and not a motorboat which the boatyard was building before Chance was built and after her launching.

In that way she is unique in that she only had one other boat built to her design, the whereabouts of which is unknown at the present time.

So over the next few years, my family, which is my wife Tricia, and son Michael and I, my brother John and friends have taken on the restoration Chance to bring her back once more to sail the high seas.

The last 6 months have been challenging with the Covid pandemic making it difficult to go to Chance which at present is in Woodplumpton in Lancashire and I live in North Essex 300 miles away. So that working on her as needed a lot of planning to go to the boat and work on her in the spare time I have between working on my clients’ boats as I run my own boat building business in Essex which keeps me busy.

So if you have been following my previous videos on the work that my family and I with the help of my Brother John, you will see that the first few trips to Chance have been about removing as much of the rubbish and rotten wood from inside the boat and getting to a point where we can start to see the hull and the extent of the task ahead of us over the coming months and years.

Much of what has been done so far is to photograph as much as possible the interior of the boat to rebuild it in the way it was originally built and to remove parts that were not there when she was launched.

One major job to be done after the Christmas break , is to tackle the hull planking and any frames or ribs that need replacing so that we can transport it down to my small boatyard in Essex to continue the restoration near to where I live and work.

So when this happens, there will be hopefully more videos of the work we can undertaking on the boat.


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