A day in the lake district and visiting the Windermere Jetty Museum

Yesterday my wife Tricia and I when to the Lake District to talk to the staff at the Windermere Jetty Museum about their work on the restoration projects they have underway at the present time and the methods they use to restore and converse the craft they have at the museum.


They have to make many difficult decisions about which craft to restore, which to conserve and which to just hold until a decision as been made to go in either direction.


Having talk to the manager of the restoration team about the work they are doing on the vessels in their workshop, we both are using very similar methods gained over many years of doing traditional boat building methods to restore and converse the vessels we both work on in different parts of the UK.


One point, we agreed on was, that we need to train the younger generation in the skills they will need to restore and maintain the historic vessels we have around the UK and beyond. Some areas of the UK appear to be able to engage with the younger generation and other areas it is not so easy to engage with the younger generation. So it is up to people like myself to show that it's a pathway to pursue and that there is sense of reward that you have saved an historic vessel that would otherwise be lost to the historic fleet of vessels and the methods of construction that was used in their build.


The main driving force behind us restoring Chance, is that she is a unique "Western Isles" motorsailer which was a vessel that John Bain designed for her first owner, Lovett Crossley who wish to explore the western isles of Scotland during his and his wife's retirement.


John Bain was during this time the owner of the James Silver boatyard and was the James Silver boatyard chief designer during the time when Chance was build at the boatyard in1948.


While we were at the Windermere Jetty Museum we saw a couple of boats which fired my lifelong love of boats and in turn my career into boat building when I was 16 years old and which made me move from West Yorkshire to Norfolk. The two boats were the Swallow and the Amazon was were the names of the boats from novel by Arthur Ransome of the same name. These two boats which as a child fired my imagination about sailing small boats and having adventures were still in existence. They may not be original boats, however, the fact they are reproduction boats to a design of the original boats does not matter.the fact that the boats are still around for people to enjoy them and remember their own childhood is still good.


We are at the moment editing a video of our trip to the Windermere Jetty Museum and hope to have it release on Friday next week for our patreon to view before releasing it to the Public on the following Tuesday.

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