Pristine white sails billowing above a gleaming deck, Alva barely seems to caress the water as she speeds towards Falmouth harbour. It’s a scene of timeless beauty, but despite her wooden decks, shining brass and classic lines, this yacht is less than a decade old.

She represents a resurgence of age-old boatbuilding techniques that is underway in Cornwall, where a raft of master craftspeople are marrying their love of working with traditional materials with a worldwide demand for beautiful boats that stand out from the crowd.

Cornish shipwrights such as Dave Cockwell, Ben Harris, Luke Powell and Peter Williams may have different approaches to business, but they all share a love of ships and the sea, a dedication to keeping alive traditional boatbuilding skills, and an ability to make boats capable of turning heads in any harbour from Montevideo to Monaco.

From cabinets to boats

Based in Falmouth, Harris began his career as a cabinet-maker before moving to the southwest to fulfil his urge to create boats. Today he and a small team make dinghies and sailing craft by hand, using techniques that would probably be familiar to the craftsmen of the 18th century.

Alva is one of his creations; a wood-built beauty based on the vessels that would once have worked in and around Falmouth’s harbour, specially created with shorter masts so they could pass beneath the rigging of ocean-going sailing ships.

“The great satisfaction of building a wooden boat is seeing her come together plank by plank from the keel up,” says Harris. “It’s an amazing feeling sailing a boat when you’ve known the trees that have made it. It feels like an extension of yourself in a way; a second skin keeping you safe on the water.”

Falmouth is also the base for husband and wife team Luke and Joanna Powell. Luke has spent the best part of 30 years as a boat-builder, while Joanna is an accomplished sailor in her own right.

Their Working Sail business combines a sailing tours business with a boatyard that is designed both to produce traditional craft and train young people in the skills needed to make wooden boats.
Luke says: “I realised traditional working, wooden boats were disappearing and I thought somebody needed to build new ones. I suppose I felt I was as good as anyone to do it.”

“We need young people to come through and keep boat building alive. It’s an endangered craft.”

Supplying something special

That desire is echoed by his near-neighbour Dave Cockwell, who runs Cockwells at Myler Bridge, a couple of miles up the coast.

“I’ve probably trained 20 or 30 people over the years and we’ve always got at least three or four apprentices,” he says. “Our clients want something special and we look for people with a natural ability to see how things should be.”

Among Cockwell’s projects are superyacht tenders and motorlaunches, in addition to custom-built projects for clients around the world.

Dave adds: “Boats are very simple things, really. If they don’t look right they aren’t right and they won’t work. When you’re using natural materials like wood you have to follow its natural form and shape. Water and wind are also natural things, so everything combines together. If you work within those confines everything flows nicely and works well. Wood is a medium that gives back.”

More than just a pile of planks…

A similar vision inspires Peter Williams, based 30 or so miles up the coast at Fowey. Williams is Cornwall born and bred, his father worked at the local docks, and himself took up a boat-building apprenticeship in his teens.

Nowadays he combines making boats from scratch with restoring existing craft. Among the vessels he has brought back to live include Concorde of Mersea, a 1930s Cornish yawl (two-masted yacht) that had once belonged to a writer and artist named Archie Wright; some of whose surviving paintings provided valuable guidance when Peter was renovating the boat.

Even so, it was a challenging project and one that called on Williams’ eye for form, function and the natural capacity of his raw materials.

The result of his labours, like Ben Harris’ Alva, is more than just a beautiful functional object. As Peter says: “Every wooden boat is different, each with their own personality. They’re far more than just a pile of planks.”

Peter Williams (peterwilliams-boatbuilder.co.uk)
Ben Harris (benharrisboats.co.uk)
Luke Powell (workingsail.co.uk)
Cockwells (cockwells.co.uk)

Cornwall’s master boat builders rekindle traditional skills

Tweet