Lifeboat conversions
Britain was four years away from declaring war on Nazi Germany when Maurice Griffiths, editor of YM, was commissioned by Hutchinson’s Pocket Library of Sports & Pastimes to write Yachting on a Small Income. It was the second in a series which the publishers hoped would be as successful in the ‘how-to’ world as the 1935-launched Penguin Books was proving in the literary canon.
Peacetime was as full of ‘pastimes’ as it was of poetry and such pre-war innocence saw the young MG enthusing about the worth of ‘tore-outs’, ‘riz-ons’ or ‘nondescripts’ as the plethora of obsolete wooden ship’s lifeboats around the UK coastline were known. Fitted with keels, decks, cabin tops – the ‘riz-on’ – masts and sails, they were the means by which the man in the street became the man in the creek.
‘These boats are nearly always very reliable boats at sea, as their prime purpose was, of course, to act as lifeboats, and if the man who has converted the boat knows his job, a very successful cruiser will result. They can often be bought very cheaply indeed,’ Maurice penned all those years ago and even sailed a 17ft one himself, Vahan, which he nearly wrecked on Deben Bar during a winter’s day delivery trip from Woodbridge to her Ipswich mooring on the River Orwell.
Some 25 years before Maurice explored the Essex rivers, Erskine Childers, author of The Riddle of the Sands, based his novel on a real cruise made to the Baltic in 1897 aboard a converted lifeboat, named Vixen.
But who would have thought we would ever see the like of such craft again? Yet, remarkably, the lifeboat is back, albeit a GRP version. The orange, Totally Enclosed Lifeboat (TELB), which sailors will be familiar with pointing at a 45º angle off the back of all freighters great and small, are being converted to houseboats, motor-craft and even yachts by impecunious DIY boaters.
They range in size from 7m to 12m and cost up to £100,000 new yet once they are past their rescue-by date fetch anywhere from £10,000 to as little as £2,000 each. And no longer are their crews cramped up in a linoleum-covered ‘kennel’ as Maurice described Vahan’s cabin. Even the smallest TELBS can carry upwards of 40 shipwrecked mariners so the accommodation is impressive.
One such is the Alan, a 26ft TELB, being converted in a Thames Estuary creek, into a mission ship for an Arctic ice expedition by explorer, scientist and extreme ski-er, Alex Hibbert, 35.
Alex, the son of a Royal Naval admiral, Richard, and who trained for the Royal Marine Commandos, is to make an unsupported attempt to ski to the North Pole. To get there he plans to have Alan transported by road to the far north of Norway from where he will sail 1,200 miles into the Arctic ice until she can get no further. From there he and two others will ski the final 500 miles to the pole itself.
The former lifeboat, which was designed to carry an astonishing 65 crew – the equivalent of 12 tonnes in weight – has had to be loaded with steel bars to ballast her down. Alex obtained these on ebay from an obsolete chicken farm. She has a Bukh 48 HP three-cylinder diesel engine, but Alex is researching the option of adding gyro-controlled para sails to save on the 2,000 litres of fuel she will carry.
Alex, who has written books about the Arctic and lectures about his many visits to the area, has already been contacted by several universities eager for him to take saline samples, measure for evidence of microplastics and to deploy smart buoys which will measure temperature ranges. Maurice Griffiths does not have to turn in his grave; indeed he would be proud that the legacy of his penny-pinching yachting lives on.
Impecunious DIY boaters are converting Totally Enclosed Lifeboats into motor-craft and even yachts