PAST MEETS PRESENT
On the Dorset coast, traditional boatbuilder Gail Mcgarva is breathing new life into a fascinating but threatened craft
Traditional boatbuilder Gail Mcgarva breathes new life into a fascinating but threatened craft
Long and slender with the subtlest of curves, hers is a beguiling shape. Quick yet graceful, she slips through the water, which glints in the hot July sun, with an unparalleled finesse. It’s a captivating performance – so much so that even the landlubbers in the crowd on Town Beach feel compelled
to watch her progress. But the person observing her most attentively is Gail Mcgarva, who is standing in a pair of waders, having just helped launch the vessel. Named Black Ven, the boat is a 32-foot traditional Cornish pilot gig, which Gail, a boatbuilder based here in the Dorset town of Lyme Regis, has created mostly with old hand tools and a passion for breathing new life into this once-endangered type of water vessel. “These working boats are strong and robust, yet the lines are truly elegant,” she says, with a wide smile. “The perfect combination of form and function.”
In the boathouse – a long narrow white shed on Monmouth Beach, a pebbly stretch away from the holiday crowds – Gail applies a coat of oil to another of her creations named Rebel, the aroma of linseed mingling with the shed’s salty scent. Like Black Ven and her other sister Tempest, she is also a pilot gig, a craft that had its heyday in the 1800s when it was used to transport an expert in the local waters to any ship that needed help navigating its way into a harbour. Due to the competition between communities for this work, each of these vessels, propelled by six oarsmen, became lighter and faster in order to win business, hence her modern-day racing prowess. Gail runs the brush over a thwart, or seat, and points out the beautiful grain of the interior’s principal timber. Created in elm, it features marks that resemble the shape of a cat’s paw pads here, the form of a flame there. But her boats are far from museum pieces: “I prefer the term ‘daughter’, because they are similar to the original, yet each has a life force all of her own.”
To hear Gail talk about her trade, you’d think she had come from a long line of mariners, but it wasn’t until the former British sign-language interpreter lived in a houseboat in Bristol Docks that her love of watercraft took hold. “I went on a journey to the source of the Thames to work out what I might do with this new passion,” she says. When she returned and heard about the Lyme Regis Boat Building Academy, her new vocation revealed itself. “As soon as I walked through the doors, I knew this was what I wanted to do,” Gail says. There, in 2004-5, she embarked on a nine-month City & Guilds course and fell in love with the construction of clinkers: vessels with lapped planking. With just a handful of gig builders working at the time, she was joining a threatened profession, a fact that only encouraged her.
Seized by her new ardour, after her training Gail set out to gather knowledge and skills from experienced traditional boatbuilders – something that took her all over the British Isles. These men were, to her delight, only too glad to support a female novice. Two of her mentors were Ralph Bird, who helped revive the popularity of the Cornish pilot gig, which had lost out to motorised crafts in the 1920s, and Willie Mouat on Unst, Shetland, who had conserved the ‘Gardie’ boat from 1882, a double-ended clinker indigenous to the islands. It was the ‘Gardie’ that inspired Gail to make the first of many ‘daughters’ by eye (without the use of designer drawings or construction plans), returning to Lyme with hundreds of measurements, photographs and pocketfuls of Shetland copper nails for extra integrity. Not satisfied with the feat of producing a replica, eight
months later she returned to the remote island to launch her vessel from the same slipway the original had first entered the water 120 years previously and named her Georgie Mcdonald, a combination of her Scottish grandmothers’ names.
Today, after oiling Rebel, Gail carries out some maintenance work on Georgie, replacing rivets with the time-honoured ‘dolly’ and ‘rove’ tools. Typical of traditional boat-building methods, it is a labour-intensive technique involving ten separate stages, and there are several thousand such fixings to make. “This craft is about problem-solving, patience and accuracy,” Gail says. There is nothing fast about her line of work, with most new-builds taking around nine months. For her, just as important as the construction process and crafts is the culture of the community that created them: “Every vessel has a story to tell about its role and the nature of its seas.” This interest has given rise to her latest venture: The Story Boat, a tiny mobile oral-history recording studio made out of Vera, built in 1923 and one of the last surviving lerrets, fishing crafts particular to Chesil Beach. Rather than traversing the waves, the vessel will be upturned and become the roof for the Story Boat, fitted to a bespoke wagon with wheels created by wheelwright Mike Rowland. An unusual project for both, Gail and Mike are relishing working together, sharing skills and challenges: “I’m used to worrying about the sea coming up through the hull, while Mike is concerned with the water-tightness of the roof.” Once finished later this summer, it will be a place where locals can come and share their experiences and memories of the boats in the area – these will then be recorded to be listened to by visitors. Ultimately, Gail hopes to combine them into a performance piece.
It isn’t only the maritime communities of the past that Gail is interested in, however. In 2007, while working as an assistant
instructor at the Boat Building Academy, the Lyme Regis Gig Club was formed and commissioned the Academy, with Gail as project leader, to build them a gig, based on the boat Treffry from 1838: “I had to think hard about whether I could take on such a big project and it was only when Ralph Bird offered to mentor me that I felt it was possible.” Now, with a further two gigs and a skiff for the over-eights to use, around 200 members are rowing and racing throughout the year. Gail relishes the fact that her boats are part of the town’s life. She sees it as a two-way process, operating an open-door policy at her workshop, so people can also become involved with the craft’s construction.
During the building of a Cornish pilot gig, once the ‘whale ship’, or ribcage, is finished, Gail holds a fortnight-long ‘Knees Up’ event. During this, anyone – rower or otherwise – can come along and make one of its 42 ‘knees’ (the right-angled brackets that help strengthen a boat), which is then marked with their name or a message of their choice and fitted into the hull, forming an unshakeable bond between Lyme’s residents and their vessels. “It’s essential that communities feel a connection to the boats I make, right from the first plank, and foster custodianship, so they take good care of them and continue the sport of gig racing.” With an ambassador like Gail at the helm, traditional boatbuilding is sure to have a safe passage.
For more about Gail’s work, visit wbta.co.uk/gailmcgarva. The Story Boat is supported by Arts Council England and will be in residence at the Marine Theatre, Lyme Regis, Dorset (marinetheatre.com) until September.