Alf Smythers

Combining three of my favorite things; wood, sailing and seafood, the Alf Smythers is a brilliant machine. Boat building and furniture making are not similar, the rules and aesthetics that apply to one are alien to the other. In boats for example, the good, hard, expensive wood is used for the frame and the planking is of lesser quality, where as you (very nearly) always use show off the better quality timber in furniture. In traditional cabinet making you may allow for expansion and contraction due to atmospheric conditions by the use of a sliding dovetail for example. But with boats, the entire construction has to be able to move and twist in heavy seas, its has to have a certain flexibility and the amount of fine work to allow for this is astonishing (these boats can take years to build). Furniture is obviously static, and whilst boats could be used to just sit on and bob around, the addition of sail and rope turns them into something very different. The Falmouth working boats are now mainly used in a recreational way, but Ranger dredges for oysters on the Alf Smythers in the traditional, two hundred year old way, on three tons of wood with some cloth and rope. And yes, the oysters are amazing.