Iain oughtred has been a friend and collaborator for all of my professional boat making life.

Its been a privilege to work with him, and the friendship has had a steadying effect in the best of times, and a reassuring quality in the worst.

I recent years that friendship has been enhanced by the connection with our mutual friend, Alec Jordan, of Jordan Boats in the UK

Alec has played an important role in digitising a large number of Iain's designs for the purpose of making kits of all the plywood components of iain's boats, especially the planking, which takes time in scratch building, and can be a forbidding concept to many newer builders. As a result, Iains designs are now accessible to many who thought they never would be build such beautiful shapes, and for those confident builders, the access to kits leads to speedier building and very neat outcomes.

His generic clinker plywood instruction manual has a similar quality, as does his catalog. Learning materials, both of them.

I think Iain works from what Jung describes as 'archetypal memory', where form springs from subconscious recollection of the ancient, first boat builders, where form truly followed function, honed by the truth of the sea. Such shapes touch that memory in all of us.

Iain’s wee ships touch everyone.

No computers here, just the unseen guide, the pen and the moving hand.

Late at night, out in the workshop, builders of Iain’s boats have often admitted to feelings of invisible company, of being part of something much bigger; a strong sense that in the act of working with such beauty they too have become part of that great pantheon of boat builders.

Inspired, and with invisible friends.

Welcome to the community!