Plan boat

Why clinker Part 1

The custodians of old wooden boats are honoured as saints and suspected as madmen in equal measure. Somehow owning and caring for an old, traditionally built wooden boat seems to confer nobility; they are doing good works.
But if a wooden boat goes to the chainsaw it will rot away gently leaving its fastenings to corrode and perhaps some lead to be reused. Theres no crime there. The trees will grow again and we can build more wooden boats.
I own an old boat; older than I am. Its fibreglass. Sometimes I feel like a geriatric nurse. I have to contend with its misplaced buoyancy that makes it round up as it heels, its poorly conceived baby stay that makes tacking its ridiculous genoa a chore in three parts and its thin deck that means every fitting needs a lump of plywood behind it. And few have.
But I love that boat.
It wont rot, wont get iron sick, wont get worms and wont pine and commit suicide if I dont visit. And theres the rub. It wont die. When an owner finally give up on their fibreglass boat and sends it to the chainsaw it will spend perpetuity in a landfill site.
When I next buy a new boat it will be an old fibreglass boat. There is a special place in hell reserved for those who buy new fibreglass boats. Dantes itchy and scratchy level.
And its right that boats should die and be replaced. Working boats evovled over the millennia to serve purposes that often no longer exist. Thames barges were the articulated lorries of their time. Imagine, if they had been built in fibreglass, how their hulks would now litter the East Coast of England. Instead of being the beloved and sentimentalised treasures that they are today we would see them as a nuisance and a hazard to shipping.
Yacht design moves so fast that Steinlager II, the bleeding-edge carbon composite ketch of my youth, is now worth less than a small house in North London.
Boats are transient. Build them to rot.
So lets honour the custodians of old fibreglass boats. They keep the landfills manageable and the channels clear. And if we must indulge ourselves with new boats (and lets face it - we must) lets build them of wood.