There’s a line in a 20-year old Alan Jackson song called Drive, which reads “You can’t beat the way an old wood boat rides”. Whether that’s true or not, you certainly can’t beat them for style. There are some fabulous fibreglass boats out there but wooden boats always seem to have an intrinsic rightness to their lines that’s never quite matched by GRP. That’s partly down to the era that most wooden boats hail from. For the most part, GRP took over as the boat builder’s (and buyer’s) material of choice in the late 1960s but a few specialist builders are still turning out brand new (and surprisingly modern) wooden boats, an example of which we’ve included this month...
PRICE: £190,000
BOAT: Philip 50 DATE: 1963 LYING: River Dart CONTACT: Network Yacht Brokers www.networkyachtbrokers.com
PRICE: £90,000
BOAT: Fairey Super Swordsman 33 Aft Cabin DATE: 1974 LYING: Southampton CONTACT: Nicolle Associates www.findaboat.co.uk
PRICE: £390,000
BOAT: James Taylor & Bates DATE: 1933 LYING: France CONTACT: Sandeman Yacht Company www.sandemanyachtcompany.co.uk
PRICE: £169,000
BOAT: Swallow Whisper 300 DATE: New LYING: NA CONTACT: Swallow Yachts www.swallowyachts.com
PHILIP 50
BUILT: 1963 Price: £ 1 9 0 , 0 0 0
Philip & Son was a boat and shipbuilding yard on the River Dart, which is now home to Premier Marina’s Noss On Dart marina. The yard built passenger and cargo steamers, tugs and tankers. It even built the Trinity House light vessels. In the early 1960s, in an era before any of the big British names like Princess Yachts even existed, the company decided to embark on luxury motorboat building - and the Philip 50 was its first foray into this new sector. Costing £20,000 and weighing in at more than 30 tonnes, it was testament to the yard’s ambition, particularly given that it took Princess more than 20 years to build up to a 50ft craft.
Six were built, four remain, two are back on the River Dart and one – this one in fact – has come home to Noss On Dart Marina.
INTERIOR
When the boat was 25 years old, it was repatriated into the UK and a major restoration followed. Happily, the new owner’s family business was all about high end aircraft and yacht interiors, and a lot of that expertise went into a refit sympathetic to the style and age of the vessel. The layout was modified slightly, losing the forward crew cabin to create a forward guest cabin. There are two cabins back aft - adouble and a smaller bunk cabin that share an en suite. Between them, the wheelhouse was extended and there’s also a well-equipped galley on the lower deck forward.
EXTERIOR
Extending the wheelhouse meant losing the cockpit area just aft of it, but sliding side doors open the wheelhouse to the elements And there is also lots of space on the foredec
