I love the journey of building a boat from ‘tree to sea’. I love the skeletal, sculptural forms of the boats and how people respond to them almost as living, breathing creatures. I specialise in building replica boats, or as I prefer to call them, ‘daughter boats’, and it gives me the feeling of breathing life into a new generation of traditional boats.

My most recent project was called The Story Boat. I upturned a retired fishing boat of 1923 and transformed her into a miniature maritime museum. It was built in collaboration with wheelwrights to create a mobile structure and allow me to travel to schools and deliver educational workshops inside The Story Boat.

Not as yet. I have tutored at the Boat Building Academy in traditional boatbuilding techniques and I have delivered masterclasses in traditional clinker construction to trainees from National Historic Ships Training schemes.

In clinker construction the planks of the hull overlap and most people assume the overlapping planks are glued together. However, there is no glue used in the overlap of the planks. The watertight fit relies on the planning of a rolling bevel along the length of the plank, which is then fastened with copper rivets.