Another mystery boat (well, part of...)

This nice rudder turned up recently, having been dumped in a skip somewhere in Argyll. It ended up at the Moleigh for recycling and such is my reputation for the progue it ended up at my door. Sadly the fine rowing skiff to which it seems to have belonged hasn't turned up yet.

It's about 22 inches from top to bottom and looks pretty old, made from two pieces of mahogany glued together and fitted with a pair of hand forged iron pintles. These are not in-line, suggesting an interesting clinker (lapstrake) transom construction in the original boat. The steering yoke looks as if it's been added more recently, cut from a piece of the same material - either part of the original rudder or form another component. I feel that it belonged originally to a fine rowing skiff.

So, what is it? What happened to its mother skiff? Does anyone want it back?

Now we are three!

This blog has just passed its third anniversary and I thought I'd have a look at the statistics to see where we're now at.

As it says on the cover my idea was to cover everything about boats, more or less in Scotland and it's interesting that there's been a lot of interest from outside our little, perhaps soon to be free, country. In this context it's fascinating to note that there has been an avalanche of hits from Poland on the post I wrote about Don Roberto, which I guess is due to the current interest in Scottish independence. Recently there has been an increase in hits from Spain, I suspect for the same reason.

This being post number 156 means that I've managed an average of one per week throughout. Pageviews are nudging 150,000 to date, about 1,000 per week. Not bad for a non-monetary blog that will not carry commercial advertising.

Recently I've been heavily involved in skiffing and so had less time for research, so there haven't been so many historical posts as earlier. If you're new here please have a look at some of the earlier posts, such as the very first one The Scottie which are I hope still worth reading. One of my favourites is about St Abbs, the little port that had a huge impact on the young me.

Apart from needing to feed a writing habit the main reward from this blog has been the feedback via comments and private emails, resulting in a lot of data being preserved. So, if you have anything to do with boats that you want to share, please let me know.

The image at the top is from a new series of works by Paul Kennedy, prints of which will be available soon.