About me

 Sam — Builder, Sailor, Writer

I live in Nottingham in an old bungalow our midwife once called a warren, with a large messy garden and a boat building area in the gap between the house and the neighbours under an old tarp. Five children, ranging from six to twenty-three. A day job doing boring stuff. Evenings and weekends in the slot under the tarp.

I have sailed since I was a child — learnt to sail dinghies on the river, moved to yachts when my father bought an old Newbridge Spinner 27 in the late 1980s moored in Brigthlingsea, crossed the North Sea and cruised the Baltic with him as a teenager. At eighteen I went to the Isle of Wight to train for offshore yachtmaster qualifications at UKSA. Worked briefly on yachts around the Med but didn't enjoy being away from my family, so moved back to Nottingham and stayed.

I sailed extensively on the East Coast, the Channel, and the French, Belgium and  Dutch waters for years — looked after the Spinner when my father passed it on, sailed it with my own children until maintaining a proper yacht with a young family stopped making sense. Passed it on to my brother. Bought a Fireball to keep sailing, but rigging a racing dinghy with small children is nobody's idea of a good afternoon. Bought a canoe instead. Sold the canoe when the last two children were born and time disappeared entirely.

When the youngest got old enough that time reappeared, I built a skin on frame canoe. It was the most interesting thing I had done in years. When something hooks me I go deep and stay there for years. Natural materials, traditional boat building, the old sources, the testing — it hooked me. The work on this site is what that obsession produces.

I am self-taught in traditional boat building and natural materials finishing through obsessive reading of primary sources and years of trial in the slot between the houses. I studied design engineering at the OU but everything on this site I learned by making things, breaking things, reading what people wrote before synthetic materials existed, and trying again.

The builds documented here are plastic-free and toxin-free not as an aesthetic choice but because I want the boats my children sail in to compost when they are done with them. The field notes are written in real time as the investigations happen. The books are underway. The shed has no doors and is cold in February and I am usually out there anyway.

2026. Nottingham.