Craftsmanship The Troy maker
YARD NEWS . BOATBUILDER’S NOTES . TOOLS
Marcus Lewis specialises in Fowey’s local dinghy classes, but has plans for expansion, by Nigel Sharp
M
any people’s careers are shaped by luck and unexpected circumstances, and Marcus Lewis’s life as a boatbuilder in Fowey is no different.
As a schoolboy growing up in the Cornish harbour town he would buy up old rowing boats, do some work on them and sell them on for a small profit. When he left sixth-form college in 1982 he worked for an architect who sailed a Fowey Troy – the generously-canvassed 18ft (5.5m) bermudan keelboat class designed in 1928. At that time the whereabouts of four of the original
Troys were unknown and Marcus and the architect decided to try to track them down. They found one in Gateshead in 1983 and bought her a year later. Marcus brought her back to Fowey. “Or rather the AA did as we had a bit of a trailer issue.”
They put her in a shed at Hunkins boatyard across the river in Bodinnick, and Marcus spent quite a lot of time there that winter. One day in the spring Maurice Hunkin asked him to help launch a boat, and a few days later to antifoul another – and so on until Marcus found he was working there full time. “I just sort of stayed there really. I was never formally offered a job.” However, in 2001, lack of work and Maurice’s ill-health forced a
He has also built seven of the Fowey River class – 15ft (4.6m) clinker boats based on a Yachting World design of the 1940s, and which traditionally have a wide variety of coloured sails, which “tests the creativity of the sailmaker,” as Marcus puts it.
“I was making MDF speaker cabinets. It was time to move on”
change. “I was making MDF speaker cabinets. It was time to move on – probably for both of us.” So he set up on his own and this gave him the chance to quickly complete the restoration of a 1970 Looe-built motor launch that he had been working on in his spare time. This led to a contract to build a new Troy for the owner of the engineering company which had worked on the motor launch; a second order followed very quickly from the engineer’s crew – in fact as soon as he stepped ashore after the new boat’s first race. Marcus has since built two more Troys and also races his own, normally near the front of a fleet of up to 15 boats. “It’s good that Troys are so popular. It keeps the price up so people don’t mind spending a bit of money on them as they are not losing it straight away,” he says. “If they sell it two or three years later there is a chance they will get some of that money back, which is pretty unusual for a wooden boat.”
80 CLASSIC BOAT FEBRUARY 2012
He is currently trying to spread his market beyond Fowey and has recently built a Plymouth Mayflower – a 14ft (4.3m) clinker sailing dinghy, a hundred or so of which were produced by Skentelberys in Plymouth, but none for the past 40 years – which he exhibited at the Southampton Boat Show. He took the lines off two existing boats, but “one had hogged quite severely and other one had been chocked up at the ends so it was difficult to work out where the keel was meant to be.” Marcus has in mind that the new boat would be suitable for “someone who wants something for the grandchildren to learn to row and sail in.” The Mayflower’s planking is Canadian spruce although many of the originals were mahogany. But Marcus says the mahogany available now is of poor quality. “I’m not quite sure what it is to be honest. It’s susceptible to worm holes and shakes, and 20 or 30 years ago you wouldn’t have used it for packing crates.” Marcus has been a lifeboatman for 22 years. He is senior helmsman
on Fowey’s inshore lifeboat as well as crew on the Trent class. He constantly has a VHF radio on in his workshop scanning eight channels, and this often gives him advance warning of trouble brewing before his pager summons him down to the harbour.
He has carried out a number of “substantial rebuilds” and another rescued Troy awaits. This one was found in Benbecula in the Hebrides. Already wrecked, by the time she was brought home she had suffered considerable further damage and was “strapped to three separate pallets”. Very little will remain of the original but, as Marcus says when talking about a centenarian Falmouth Oyster punt, “she’s probably had three new keels and four new stems but she’s still the same boat.” Marcus has a time-lapse camera in his workshop to automatically record progress, and during our chat it flashed while he was leaning against a workbench. “Damn thing’s caught me slacking again,” he sighs.
Top: Marcus at work on the Plymouth Mayflower, Bottom left: Fowey River 56, sailing in the Fowey River Right: The Mayflower, finished Lower right: Fowey Troy No 53, built by Marcus in 2008
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