In her Dorset workshop, boatbuilder and teller of stories Gail McGarva makes traditional wooden vessels, the old-fashioned way
Words: Alice Wright Photos: Justin Foulkes
An intimate relationship with trees and timber is at the heart of Gail McGarva’s work. To build a wooden boat that combines form, function and beauty, she says, it is vital to understand the nature of every log used. It is this relationship that first drew her to the craft. “I just love that synergy between the living tree and the journey that you’re persuading it on, to become a boat that dances with the waves.”
I meet Gail outside the gig club boathouse on Lyme Regis’ Monmouth Beach. She seems very much in her natural environment and greets me with a friendly smile. With a warm and open manner, Gail speaks thoughtfully, with a great feeling for description – it’s clear she is a born storyteller. Indeed, Gail previously worked in theatre and education, then as a sign language interpreter, so taking up boatbuilding was something of a leap of faith. Although her family are originally from the west coast of Scotland, she had never lived by the sea. But she had lived on riverboats for many years, and the affinity she felt with them brought about an “overwhelming” desire to put boats at the centre of her life.
After reading an article about the Lyme Regis Boatbuilding Academy, Gail decided to visit them. “It was like a homecoming,” she remembers. “It was everything – the smell, the industry, the activity. And the excitement of these skeletal forms and what they were going to become on the water.”
Gail was in her late 30s when she joined the academy in 2005. Although a practical person, she had never learnt technical skills, nor worked with power tools. The academy’s nine-month course was intensive. For the first three months, the students learned how to build using tools before embarking on building a boat. The foundation stage felt like being thrown into a whole new world, says Gail, but when she started work on her own boat it all became more tangible and her fears largely melted away.
DAUGHTER BOAT
The boat Gail chose to build was modelled on a vessel known as the Gardie Boat. Built in 1882, it’s the oldest surviving example of a Shetland boat and it lives in the Boat Haven Museum in Unst, the northernmost of the inhabited British Isles. Once again, Gail was inspired by reading an article, this time about a man called Willie Mouat
