GROWN GRAB RAILS

In the second of our ‘lockdown projects’ series, we make good use of a wooden windfall

- ROBIN GATES

1.Grown grab rail made from hedgerow hawthorn

Restrictions on movement during the Covid-19 pandemic need be no barrier to maintaining the basic hand skills of boatbuilding, so long as we keep things at a modest scale. If you’re a latter-day Henry Adams, master shipwright at Bucklers Hard during the 18th century, with mature forest on the doorstep, you may find the makings of an HMS Agamemnon within the scope of your daily exercise walk. But the rest of us can look to the windfall branch wood of hedgerow and copse to make parts for the boat every bit as authentic as the grown floors, frames and futtocks of England’s wooden walls – grown grab rails and handles.

Standard grab rails are machine-made fittings, invariably teak, and samey as coat hangers. For use on deck, I’d stick with this familiar pattern, but down below there’s good reason to turn to nature for the individual handmade items that make a boat a home. The single loop grab rail is an ideal starting point, since branches grow abundantly with the gently parabolic form required, needing only basic hand tools to liberate the boat fitting from within. And better still, the rail cut from the branch will have continuous end-to-end grain and little of the short grain that’s unavoidable in its commercial counterpart cut from straight and four-square material.