Build a 14ft skiff
Fancy building your own Nigel Irens-designed 14ft rowing/sailing skiff? Nic Compton explains how to get the plans for free
Free plans for building your own Nigel Irens 14-footer
When Nigel Irens designed the Western Skiff 22 years ago, boatbuilding as a hobby was enjoying a modest but significant revival in the UK. Designers such as Iain Oughtred, Selway Fisher and Andrew Wolstenholme were developing expanding portfolios of plans for amateur construction, and a highly successful amateur boatbuilding competition (ABBA) was established, which is still going to this day.
Not content with just creating a dinghy for amateur boatbuilders, however, Nigel Irens, the designer of record-breaking multihulls such as B&Q, ENZA and Cable & Wireless decided that kit boats would be the logical next step forward.
‘There’s more than a whiff in the air that kit building is in for a revival,’ he wrote. ‘Partly because, as in the post-war years, people are again looking for a way to get afloat without mortgaging their soul, and partly because there’s some new technology about that makes the whole idea more accessible to those who cannot claim to be master builders.’
The technology he was referring to was of course the new interface of CAD programmes and CNC cutters, which had by then been developed to a high level by mainstream manufacturers and was now ‘filtering down at the right price to ordinary mortals in cottage industries like boatbuilding’.
The boatbuilding revolution has indeed progressed as Nigel predicted, and most of the boat plans offered by Oughtred, Fisher, Wolstenholme and others are now available in kit form through the likes of Jordan Boats and Fyne Boats.
What’s perhaps surprising is that those ‘kits’ are increasingly used by professional boatbuilders who appreciate the saving in their time, even if they already have the skills to build the boats without the help of a CNC cutter.
The Western Skiff
The design Nigel came up with all those years ago was a slender 14ft clinker plywood dinghy, with an upright stem and elegantly raked transom. Although primarily a rowing boat, it was fitted with a modest lug rig (just 61sq ft/5.7m2), complete with daggerboard and rudder. In fact, the sweeping tiller (in two sizes: a long one for sailing and a short one for rowing) was one of the defining characteristics of the designs. There was no provision for an
outboard, and the transom was deliberately raked at such an angle to make it very difficult to fit one – although I eventually found a way around this!
Much of the detailed drawing work for the boat was done by up-and-coming young designer Ed Burnett, who was working for Nigel at the time. Ed, who died in 2015, went on to design a string of highly regarded ‘contemporary traditional’ yachts, including the Queen’s ‘rowing barge’ Gloriana, which led the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pageant on the Thames.
The Western Skiff was and still is the only dinghy designed by Nigel and is typically uncompromising, designed to be efficient on the water (or ‘slippery’ as Nigel would have it) rather than merely functional. It was an idealistic rather than a pragmatic design, and quite different to any other boat on the market.
The boat was very much aimed at the amateur builder and the kit made in such a way as ‘to ensure that the average person can assemble a boat to a high standard with no more than handyman skills and some common sense.’ The plank joints, for example, were made up of long fingers, designed to maximize the glueing areas, which were slotted together in batches before being popped out of the sheets of ply. This not only speeded up the process but also ensured the planks were lined up correctly. Likewise, the traditional bevel (or ‘land’) where one plank is jointed to the next was disposed of. Instead, the angle between the planks was filled with epoxy, creating a series of incredibly strong and foolproof joints which also helped to stiffen the boat fore and aft.
The first Western Skiff was built by Anton Fitzpatrick of the Devon Dinghy Workshop during the winter of 1996-97, and three more were built as ‘guinea pigs’ soon after to test the kit and the instructions. I was one of those ‘guinea pigs’ and built my skiff over a period of about four months – starting in my mother-in-law’s garage near Falmouth, Cornwall and finishing in my local rowing club in Lewes, East Sussex. I was editor of Classic Boat at the time and was keen to increase the practical content of the magazine, so the Western Skiff kit became one of my pet projects – as well as the first and only boat I’ve built from scratch.
The commercial side of the kit gradually faded, as we all moved on to other things, but I kept my skiff – briefly called Hara (‘joy’ in Greek) and then Sally (my mother’s name) but mostly referred to simply as ‘the skiff’. Indeed, while I’ve owned a succession of bigger boats – from a 36ft wooden yacht to a 22ft fibreglass dayboat (also designed by Nigel) – the skiff has remained a loyal companion, and I’ve never been tempted to sell her.
Living in Lewes in East Sussex, I rowed the boat regularly up and down the River Ouse, and I also had some great sails down as far as Newhaven, shooting bridges on the way, and then out to sea along Seaford Beach. On one memorable occasion, a non-sailing friend came with me and, halfway down the Ouse, produced a flask and some china teacups and proceeded to pour us both a cup of tea as we careered down the valley
(past the point where Virginia Woolf drowned herself) with the outgoing tide and a following breeze. After years without a boat, it was thrilling to feel personally reconnected to the sea.
But my skiff really came into its own nearly 20 years after I originally built her, when my family and I moved to Devon in 2015. Living a stone’s throw from the River Dart, the skiff gave us immediate access to the large and beautiful estuary – first under oar and then, after I fitted an outboard well as part of a major refurbishment of the boat (see PBO June 2018), under motor too. Interestingly, despite Nigel’s original reluctance to accommodate an outboard in his design, he was supremely relaxed about my conversion, and there’s no doubt the outboard has allowed us as a family to explore much further afield than was possible without it.
It was another year or so before I got around to refitting the rig, but I’ve had some great sails since then, both on my own in a fresh breeze, when I kept up tack for tack with a club Wayfarer, and with the family on board in lighter weather.
One notable afternoon I sailed with my son off nearby Galmpton, with a seal shadowing us for several minutes, before the rest of the family (dog included) climbed on board and we drifted home on a zephyr, the whole river bathed in gold by the evening sun. At that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else or on any other boat.
Supply and demand
Over the years, the skiff has attracted a lot of favourable comments and Nigel has received repeated requests for plans to build the design. There’s even a forum thread entitled ‘Nigel Irens’ Western Skiff, need drawings, plans, anything!’ where someone called Scott Church confesses that he and a friend built several skiffs in Key West by scaling up the 8in cardboard cutout model which was given away with the Classic Boat magazine when we first launched the project. “The boat was a huge hit, gorgeous and fast,” he says, before begging readers to send him a contact for the plans. A lively conversation ensues with Ed Burnett discussing the merits of copyright, as well as the compromises needed to design a boat that rows well and yet still sails tolerably well too.
Until now, however, the answer to demands for plans has been a straight ‘no’. The original drawings were specifically intended to be fed into a CNC cutter to produce parts for the kit and it was no simple matter to convert them into a set of construction plans. Nigel didn’t have the time to do that, and I didn’t have the technology or the knowhow. So the drawings stayed buried in a computer, and the idea of relaunching the design remained just an idea.
It was the response to my skiff restoration article in PBO June 2018 that provided the impetus to get the idea going again, and this time we found a willing partner in the shape of Jack Gifford, a former GL Watson draughtsman who had recently set up shop on his own in Falmouth. Jack agreed to turn the drawings into a set of PDF files, complete with full-size templates for many of the parts, which could be sent out to aspiring amateur builders.
Nigel generously suggested making the plans available free of charge for personal
use only, in the spirit of ‘open source’ software, which Jack willingly agreed to. PBO has also agreed to distribute the plans free of charge. The only thing we ask is for you to make a voluntary donation to the fund set up in the memory of Ed Burnett (see justgiving.com/ fundraising/bill-burnett1).
Anyone wanting to build the boats for profit, will need to contact Nigel directly (at nigelirens.com) to pay a royalty.
Study plans
The Western Skiff was always conceived first as a rowing boat, second as a sail boat and not at all as a motor boat! For rowing, a long pair of oars is essential – the original kit came with a pair of 8ft oars, which seemed to do the job nicely. With one person rowing the boat is a bit light, and some form of ballast up forward – in the form of bottles of water, rocks, an outboard or, in my case, a dog! – trims it up nicely. With two people rowing, she’ll need trimming down by the stern slightly.
The sail plan shown is the original configuration which, it should be noted, was not judged a success by the boat’s designer. The challenge for new builders is to design an improved rig, keeping the rig strictly within a set sail area (the exact size is yet to be decided – but it will be smaller than the current set-up). This can be based on any configuration and using any materials that take the builder’s fancy.
Rules are meant to be broken and, although the boat was not designed to carry an outboard, there are ways and means. After 15 years, I eventually succumbed to the inevitable and fitted an outboard well on my skiff – and it performs extraordinarily well under motor with a
very small outboard (the 3.5hp we have is excessive; 2.8hp would be ample). Being so easily driven and yet impossible to plane, it would be a natural contender for an electric outboard, budget permitting.
Neither the plans nor the kit include the outboard conversion, which will vary greatly according to what outboard is chosen, but they will include a description of how I did mine.
What you need to do next...
Over the next few months PBO will be following the construction of the first Jordan Western Skiff kit by PBO reader Jeremy Butler in Devon. Although Jeremy was a boatbuilder for a few years and is therefore familiar with the techniques needed for epoxy ply construction, he now works as an IT consultant and hasn’t messed with the ‘sticky stuff’ for quite a while.
You can see how he gets on in the next few issues of PBO – or you can build one yourself ‘in parallel’ by getting the free plans from PBO or ordering a kit from Jordan Boats.
It’s been a long time coming, but at last the Western Skiff is available again. The motivation for this new initiative is simply to get a lot more of these wonderful boats on the water, giving pleasure to many more builders and owners.
If the project gives others even a fraction of the pleasure I’ve had out of my Western Skiff, it will have been worth the effort.