THE RETURN OF THE WESTERN SKIFF

After 20 years of being denied plans for this 14ft dinghy, the Western Skiff is back. Plans are free and a kit costs less than £1,000

- NIC COMPTON

It was a cold winter’s morning when Alec Jordan delivered the Western Skiff kit to Jeremy Butler’s house overlooking the River Dart in January 2018. It was, in its way, an historic moment, for this was the first Western Skiff to be built from a kit for 20 years. For two decades, the boat had been unavailable in any form – apart from a few bootleg copies scaled up from a paper model from the 1990s – and repeated requests for “drawings, plans, anything!” were to no avail. Now, not only is the boat available in kit form, but building plans are available to download free of charge for the more intrepid builder. It’s been a long time coming, but the Western Skiff is back.

When Nigel Irens designed the 14ft (4.3m) dinghy 22 years ago, boatbuilding as a hobby was enjoying a modest but significant revival in the UK. Not content with just creating a dinghy for amateur boatbuilders, however, the designer of record-breaking multihulls such as B&Q, ENZA and Cable & Wireless decided that kit boats would be the logical next step forward:

“There’s more than a whiff in the air that kit building is in for a revival,” he wrote in the May 1997 issue of Classic Boat (CB107). “Partly because, as in the post-war years, people are again looking for a way to get afloat without mortgaging their soul, and partly because there’s some new technology about that makes the whole idea more accessible to those who cannot claim to be master builders.”