Can you remember getting into boating? Chances are a wooden boat made sense because you could pick one up in quite good condition for a few thousand pounds, and that is still true. I
remember buying Salote, a 30ft (9m) 1953 Scarborough Sloop at a fabulous bargain price – shared between three of us.
The dream was to sail away, anchor in out of the way places, escape London at the weekends and, having worked on a schooner recently, not having to swallow the anchor completely, or at too young an age.
The reality, of course, was different. If I didn’t understand the discipline of tides fully before I began sailing her then the river Thames would teach me, properly, with just the right amount of drama to make sure that I was keen to enrol on that night school course and learn about tidal diamonds and how to interpolate the rates of the stream.
Did I say we went, unceremoniously, aground on our very first voyage? We even abandoned the boat, with a heap of anchor chain left out, on a late autumn night and faced a muddy trek to civilisation across the drying heights of the Swale. Next morning the boat was fine of course.
Looking back it feels like I was a bit green, although I’d been confident enough around the rig of a Tall Ship and also in taking charge of smaller vessels. To be honest I knew about tides too, I just thought that I could wing it. No one got hurt so it was a good way to learn; you can’t wing it.
Somewhere between the romance of owning, or part-owning our own boat, and the reality of sailing (or sometimes not sailing) and keeping up with the upkeep of an old wooden boat, I learned new ways of looking at the world. Sailing off on your own certainly teaches you to respect nature, and while it’s hardly all sunsets and secluded bays it’s a great way to acquire a skill and to grow, as a person.
How much this had to do with wooden boats per se is difficult to judge. During those years we cruised with friends as well, almost always in glassfibre modern yachts and the experiences are just as valid.
Last year I was lucky enough to be in Italy, visiting a guru of the wooden boating world – Federico Nardi, of the Cantiere Navale Dell’Argentario, a well respected yard for restoring some of the finest classic wooden boats around. But Federico was distracted during my visit. He was online going through one boat after another saying the great bargain in sailing at the moment was the plethora of fabulous seaworthy designs from the early stages of GRP (glass reinforced plastic). “These are great boats, and now coming down in price to €10,000 or €12,000 (£8,600) and you can sail around the world in these boats. They are seaworthy, they built them like wood back then – with thick hulls to be super strong. And with a long keel they can be balanced and sailed with one or two, in comfort… or more!”
His enthusiasm was infectious. And you can see – from his finds in our design pages, that he is making a great point.
So I think it’s time to embrace all those classes of boat which have been regarded as outsiders by many wooden classic boaters before now. After all when I acquired Salote she was 36 years old. Many early glassfibre designs are way older than that.
Perhaps it’s because their condition has not declined as markedly as a wooden boat that we feel they are still that modern plastic fantastic thing, to be slightly shunned on the notion of some inverse snobbery over a wooden boat.
The main thing in messing around in boats, old or new, is to actually get some messing done. And hopefully our feature on page 46 will enthuse a few to get going and get afloat with some of the bargains that are out there. Let us know how you get on.

By Dan Houston