Biographical Information

I was born on the 16th July 1960 in Whiston the second of four boys in a hospital near Liverpool. My father was a the Paster of the Liverpool City mission, and although he had a vocation for that kind of work, he went back to sea to earn enough money to save a deposit for him to put down on a house.  He would never been able to do that in the ministry as many non-conformist ministers are notorious badly paid  He had been an able seaman just after the war before he went to Cliff College, one of his older brothers was a Shipwright and Loftsman, and another was a Ships Engineer. Therefore, my family has a history of strong connections with boatbuilding and the sea. I studied the CMS post graduate diploma at the MMU though I never took the exam. I learned to sail at fourteen but didn't go to the IBTC until August 1993 after owning a Motor Factors and Car Accessory shop in Nantwich, and living with a wonderful girl in Crewe, Cheshire until 1990 in my late teens done a diploma of Phys Ed and been a centre assistant. After doing the 48-week full-time Boatbuilding Course that got me a City and Guilds at the IBTC. I went on to the Falmouth Campus of Plymouth University to do a degree in Marine Studies. To go to Falmouth I needed somewhere to live and then I lived in a room in a student house. I was diagnosed with having a astrocytoma in December 1992. I decided I wanted the tumour cut out. They did it in June in the nearest hospital to my parents home in Audlem on the Cheshire/Shropshire border a Neurosurgical department, Heartshill, Staffordshire the next county from Cheshire. When I continued my degree the next year 1993, I decided I wanted to live on a boat, and a wooden Folkboat was what I wanted. What I did was go to my bank manager. I managed to get a loan to buy a boat to live on while I was studying. From the moment I purchased 'Lyra of Mylor', I was living on her. She is a Carvel Mahogany Folkboat built in 1961, 25ft 3in long a 3/4 fractional Bermuda rig. Whilst I was at college, I got the plans from the association then I in putted the offsets of the Folkboat into my design program Hullform. It seemed that there were no boats with long keels to use as examples in the statics part of the program. Whilst I'd been at the IBTC, I evolved the build method epoxy-strip-plank/resorcinol-cold-mould. I'm not the first to want to build in that method but the combination of epoxy and resorcinol seemed to me to fit the characteristics of the glues with the particular uses they where to be put to. I had to withdraw from college again I'd broken my pelvis I was helping a friend do up a kitchen a I fell off a ladder. As that year was shot when I came out of hospital an acquaintance from the bar talked me into designing a replacement for his 43ft steel ketch. We formed company as I think that's what you should do you should to build a big boat. And he was already; the MD of one and he wanted to keep them separate from his own finances. That company needed a name, Yachtbuilders was the name that I had used for my designs for years and I foolishly offered that, or at least see if it was free. I was happy for a while but as summer unfolded more idea's were broached to me, twin asymmetrical twisting dagger boards. a cockpit as dingy store. My acquaintance who was now the MD of Yacht-builders had installed his wife as a director The MD wasn't at all happy when I told him roughly how much the boat would cost to build. Later the MD and his wife called a special AGM and asked for my resignation, I kept my 50% share of Yacht-builders, but later he dissolved our company, and as I had left Yachtbuilders partly because I was unhappy about all the sharp practice going on.; Soon after dissolving Yacht-Builders Ltd he formed a company called Yacht-Builders UK Ltd as yacht builders was free. I took that opportunity to buy the name Yacht-Builders back hopefully to build resorcinol/epoxy yachts to my design.