The Apprentice Who Stuttered by John Newbury.
Category: Biographies & Memoirs
Paperback: 132 pages
Language: English
ISBN: 1906459045

"When I was about eleven, Dad bought me a boat, well it was really for the family but the girls weren’t very interested and I guess I monopolised it. It was a fourteen-foot salmon punt with a flat bottom that made it virtually uncapsizeable. Of course it was heavy and never intended to be fast, but it was safe and gave me thousands of hours of fun. Each autumn, Dad and I would row it up the harbour to the slipway just down the road from our house and it would be kept in our back garden. I would rub it down and give it a new coat of paint, an one year, under Dad’s guidance, I built a little foredeck and a locker in the stern. Dad showed me how to calk the seams and then we coated the bottom with pitch. That boat taught me a lot about craft. One day Dad took me to one of the local boatyards where he purchased a new piece of rope for a painter. the owner of the yard spliced an eye in the rope for us. When we got home I unpicked the splice to see how it had been done. when he saw the splice in pieces Dad was rather displeased but after I had reassured him and had remade the splice he bought me a book on knots and splices that I still use today.

The boat was everything to me, from pirate ship to the Golden Hind sailing around the world."