7
left: Loch Lomond,
home of Loch Lomond
Sailing Club (formerly
the Clyde Canoe Club)
pioneers in recreational
canoeing, adventure
sailing and small boat
sailing. This month we
visit Solway Dory and
look at the life of John
MacGregor and the
influence of W.BadenPowell
was with the most profound regret that he never learned to
sail. I was a bit taken aback, I thought that most people in the
navy could sail, especially officers like Philip. However, this
was the Royal Navy of the 1950s, the 1950s was the era of the
New Elizabethan in the UK, the future was for the taking, not
the past, technology ruled so why would a navy officer have
to learn how to sail a sail boat? Things are different today and
have been for several decades but at a time when the likes
of Jack Holt and Ian Procter was churning off sailing dinghy
designs like hot cakes, the Royal Navy had stopped teaching
its officers how to sail a boat.
We are extremely fortunate; the internet gives us access to
a vast pool of knowledge. An afternoon on the internet and
you can become knowledgeable about the difference between a ketch and a yawl. Frank settled for the Wayfarer’s
square gooseneck reefing system which involves rolling the
sail round the boom and securing it with a split pin, let go
of the sail when you are doing this in a blow and the boom
spins round rapidly, turning the split pin into a whirling blur
of cut fingers or facial injuries. With the internet, would he
have opted for a different system? He was innovative – he
designed an extremely clever oven for heating food on the
go, quite remarkable in a boat that size, but sharinf this was
limited to his own and his immediate circle and then people
who read his memoirs. We can share ideas with fellow sailors
from all over the planet.
Barnacle Bill Magazine has made it to issue 2. This issue was
a tough one to get out, the Christmas and New Year break
make it difficult to maintain momentum especially when the
global headquarters of Barnacle Bill Magazine, aka our dining room was evicted for the Festive Period! Issue 1 has been
a remarkable success; we have had over 6500 readers and
over 100 subscribers since launching it in early December
2015. I am hugely grateful to all who have contributed and
made this possible, to the generous support and friendship
of Duckworks and Small Craft Advisor magazines, and to you,
the readers. I said from the start when I declared that I was
going to launch a new boat building and adventure sailing
magazine that I doubted whether there were enough potential readers in the UK alone to make it economically viable
but that I was pretty certain that across the English Speaking
world there would be and the demographics of the readership tend to reflect that. Although based in the UK 45% of our
readers come from America and Canada.
We have some ambitious plans in the pipeline, with the spring
hopefully on the horizon and the start of the sailing season
again, we will hope to have the OzGoose Dinghy built by the
beginning of March. Robbins Timber have generously agreed
to sponsor the build of the boat and Mik Storer and Really
Simple Sails are kindly donating a sail. We will be following
several raids over the summer and feeding back to you, we’ll
be at the Beale Park Boat Show in June with our own Barnacle Bill Magazine Area and we have some fantastic guests
joining us there.
Barnacle Bill is about boats, building them, talking about
them and having adventures in them. We are always eager to
hear from you about your builds and adventures. From next
month we will be starting two new sections, the ‘Our Boats’
section will feature the day to day trials and tribulations of
boat ownership and we are inviting submissions for articles
from our readers describing their boat related capers, builds,
adventures or projects. We’ll be printing one a month and at
the end of the year we’ll take a vote – the winner will get a
suitable prize (I promise it won’t be a free year’s subscription
to BBM). We’ll make sure it is something decent. We’d also
like to invite letters from our readers; the re will be a prize
each month for the best letter.
I’d like to apologise for the numerous typos that appeared
in the first issue. The only excuse is late night tiredness and
stretched resources. The production of BBM is a one man
show at the moment, I do everything including make the tea.
Hopefully it won’t be like that for ever but it is until we can
establish a secure subscription base. Thanks to our volunteer
proof readers I am hoping cock ups will be minimised, if you
see any, please let me know, a wonderful thing about digital publishing is you can sneak into your reader’s living room,
take your publication back, correct it and replace it and he
need never know!
As you know we have been ‘crowd funded’ this basically
means that our subscribers fund us. To ensure we can continue to produce interesting and quality content we desperately
need to bring more subscribers on board so please, share the
news about us as far and wide as you can. We are wholly dependent on word of mouth at the moment and we need to
‘up the ante’ with subscriptions or we will judder to a halt
within a few months. We will soon be offering the magazine
as both an Apple and Android App which will allow people
to subscribe but also to purchase one off issues as well. Print
copies are still in the pipeline and I am hoping to have some
more news on this next week. In the meantime, thank you for
reading BBM and we hope you enjoy this issue.
Thanks for reading!
Richard Palmer
Editor