LaunchofWexford’s firstconcreteboat

June 1979

Residents of Waterloo Road must have been surprised to wake up on Tuesday morning to find a large crane taking up half the roadway outside the home of their neighbours, Mr and Mrs Harry Bond.

The crane was there to help move a two-ton concrete boat from its perch in the Bond’s yard onto a trailer. Once on the trailer, the boat was taken to the slipway at the Wexford Harbour Boat Club for its launch.

The boat, which is the first of its kind to be built in Wexford, is 22 feet in length and is totally home-built.

It has taken Harry Bond and his wife Jo a year and four months to build, and between them they have done all the work, including the coachwork on the cabin and the deck.

Altogether, the building of the boat has cost Mr and Mrs Bond some £1,600. But had they wanted to buy a ready-made boat of the same size, it would have cost them in the region of £4,000 to £5,000.

Having successfully transferred the craft from its perch onto the trailer and made it secure for the short trip to the Harbour Boat Club, the boat was moved without any great difficulty through the town.

The launching at the Boat Club also went without any hitches, as the boat was successfully lowered into the water at 3 p.m., at high tide, on Tuesday afternoon.

The boat is not yet ready to go on its maiden voyage, and it will stay at its moorings until it is ready. As it is a sailing craft, there is no engine, and one of the final tasks for the Bonds will be to make the mast and the stays which will hold the sails.

Harry reckons that this will take him another couple of months to get suitable pieces of wood, plane them down, and erect them on the boat. When this is completed, the boat will be ready to sail.

The most difficult and time-consuming part of building the boat was the making of the concrete hull.

This involved the lacing of chicken fencing wire around which the concrete was placed, to avoid porousness in the concrete. It was made with a one-to-one measure of sand from granite chips.

The hull made, the super-structure was then built onto the boat.

When the boat is completed and has undergone sea trials, the Bonds say they are thinking of taking a trip to the Azores, a group of islands several hundred miles out into the Atlantic off the Portuguese coast.

Mr Bond said that they might also consider sailing to Africa, or even to South America in a transAlantic voyage.