In the ‘about and overview’ section of this website I have recounted the moment at which I first became interested in ironwork. At the same moment I became entranced by the idea of building myself a boat in order to better pursue the life of roving discovery that I was at that time enjoying.

The pursuit of the interest in ironwork led on to the life at the anvil that this website attempts to present.

The pursuit of the interest in boats led, in the spring of 1986, to the purchase of Sylvia 2.

Her details, as per her registration document, were as follows.

Motor sailer

LOA. 49 ft

Beam. 10 ft 6 inches

Draught. 3 ft

Displacement 19 tons

Rig. Yawl

Sail area. 660 sq ft

Designer Cox and King

Builder. Beazley & Kemp

Year built. 1915

Hull. Pitch pine below waterline, teak above

Deck. Columbian pine

Ballast. Lead ballast keel

Engine. Morris, Henty & Gardner Patricroft 40 HP until 1958, thereafter Parsons Pike conversion on 4D (as in Fordson Major)

Sylvia had had 3 owners.

William John Dowding was the first registered owner, and we believe that it was he that commissioned her in the first place. The name of.the boat at this time seems.to have been "Sakhara”.

She then passed into the ownership of Edward Claude Maby ( 1893 - 1967) in October of 1924.

He owned her until 1957 when she was sold.to the Williams family of.Weymouth. "Pop" Williams used and.lived on her, a well known figure on the waterfront at Weymouth over the next 30 years, until his daughter Margaret persuaded him.to move onto land in 1986 after he had injured himself in a fall.

At this point he sold.her to us. She was not a wreck, but even to my inexperienced eye there was a lot to do.

Quite how much there was to do did not fully dawn on me until we had gurgled our way across Lyme bay one bright and windy June day, and drawn her up on a slip next to our houseboat just behind Dartmouth.

A number of things then became apparent, many of them serious enough to be quite prohibitive to anyone in their right mind; but this latter I clearly wasn’t and, undaunted, I proceeded to pull her apart.

The works done in the next two years included the making and installation of new bronze keelbolts throughout, the forging and installation of new steel strap floors throughout, the replacement of one half of the keel and the deepening of the whole run of the keel by 4 inches (the aim of this being to increase the amount of sail she would be able to carry by lowering the 1500 kg of lead that hung off the bottom of her).

Inside about 75% of the rock elm steamed ribs came out, which I replaced with oak, (as I could not get hold of rock elm at the time) and I replaced the garboards and more than half a dozen hull planks on the turn of the bilge with pitch pine planks.

I then enlisted the help of shipwright friends Mark Rolt and Brian Cumby to caulk her up to the waterline and pay her off.

This saw us in to 1988.

At this time we had an opportunity to purchase a cottage nearby. An expanding family and the cramped living conditions on the houseboat upon which we had been living for the previous 6 years made this an attractive proposition.

We duly upped - or perhaps more accurately abandoned - anchor to move about 2 miles sideways and 180 metres vertically. This simple manoeuvre, however, had a number of unanticipated , though not really very surprising, consequences, all of which turned to the detriment of Sylvia. At a stroke, she morphed from being the primary focus of my energies to being little more than a deadweight. In my head I began to think of her as The Albatross…..

Life on the water had meant that I was able to live very economically and devote large periods of my time to the works detailed above rather than to the earning of money. Life on land, on the other hand, demanded that everything happened through money and I soon found that the most pressing aspect of my life lay in the earning of this annoying commodity.

In order to achieve this I set myself up with a workshop and, as mentioned elsewhere on this website, gradually built up a reasonably viable business with hammer and anvil.

This endeavour plus the demands of family life left almost no time for Sylvia. Although a frequent visitor to the 3 a.m. panic stations slot, she received a bare minimum of attention in real time. Every 3 or 4 years I would manage to soak her with linseed and paraffin inside, in between whiles shuffling her patchwork of tarps around to redirect any leaks from above that might appear.

The endlessly tolerant and patient owners of the yard shunted her from one place to another in a (probably futile) search for the least irritating and inconvenient spot and, by the time our family had grown up and left home and she began to creep back up the ladder of ‘things to deal with’, the options seemed limited.

I had made various attempts to sell her over the years, but without success. I now tried giving her away, but found, 3 months later, that I was still paying the monthly rental for her berth; I felt this didn’t quite work as an arrangement. So I went back down there with my shipwright friend Mark to have a good look and assess the options. A chainsaw was most certainly one of them at this point!

Whether rightly or wrongly we came to the conclusion that she was still a viable concern . The illustrated ‘diary below attempts to tell her tale.