Southampton Boat Show

I have been working in Portsmouth for the past week and could not let the opportunity pass to get my father down to Southampton and go and chat to John Lack, (a boat builder who sells new Devon Yawls and also restores older ones) at his stand at the Boat Show. John was was exhibiting DY 1, the original Devon Yawl in its restored state. I also had a chat at the Ullman sails stand which proved very useful.

Thanks to some very helpful e-mails sent to us by Ted Timberlake (a very knowledgeable member of the class association) there were strong grounds to suspect that some restoration work had been carried out on DY171 in the past, possibly by John Lack. John said that he will get back to us if he has any info and also give us some quotes for work ie a retro fitted well on the stern for the outboard.  Its a shame that John does not have a website as I do most of my Devon Yawl related research and fact finding at very unsociable hours, but I'm glad to have had a face to face chat with him.

All in all we had a very successful time at the show, I was most impressed with our chat with Ullman sails, who offered us a very competitive price on new sails and also suggested that they would work closely with Allspars (a Plymouth based rigger) to spec, tune and rig our yawl. I'm not wanting to re-invent the wheel with regard to rig but there are several personal touches both my father and I would like to make for example a good fly away pole system, which would require close work with both the sail maker and the rigger.

Photos of DY1 can be found on my flickr photo stream on the right hand side of the blog, or here