GLEANER
in Germany that needed rescuing. Gleaner was in a sorry
state: part-planked and undecked and – worse still –
moles had dug holes under the props that were holding
her up, sending her shooting onto her side and cracking
several planks. But, as the pictures of the boat came
through, pixel by pixel, Davies was immediately hooked.
He drove to Germany the following week and, within
minutes of seeing the boat, he had shaken hands with
the local council and agreed to buy her for a “symbolic
sum” of €2,000.
It was not as rash a decision as might at first seem.
“About 60 per cent of the boat was there: the hard
60 per cent,” says Davies. “Nearly all the framing
was there, and most of the planking. And 95 per cent
of what was there was new. It was a chance to jump
ahead of where we were; it was too good an opportunity
to pass up.”
He then had the problem of how to get the delicate
60ft (18.3m) structure back to Cornwall before the site
bulldozers arrived. The original plan was to patch up the
hull, fit a temporary engine, chuck her back into the Elbe
and motor her home, but it soon became apparent there
was too much boat missing to do this. He couldn’t afford
a low-loader, but his friend James pointed out that a
container was usually the cheapest way to transport stuff.
The idea was initially dismissed as ludicrous, but as all
the other options fell by the wayside, they began seriously
considering the possibility of doing just that.
“When we looked at how she was put together and
what was broken, we realised we were going to have
to take her apart anyway,” says Davies. “The longest run
of beam shelf was only 22ft [6.7m], and there was a row
of planks which would have to come off anyway to
stagger the joints properly. Taking her apart would be a
good opportunity to see how she was put together and
sort out some of the problems.”RESCUE MISSION
And so, in April 2013, Spike and a team of friends set
off to Germany to turn the former North Sea drifter into
a flat-pack kit boat. To remove the 2,500 fastenings,
Davies devised a system whereby a short length of
studding was welded to the nail head, a slide hammer
screwed to the studding, and the nail knocked out. Once
the nails were removed, they were knocked off and the
studding was reused. It took six of them a week to take
out all the fastenings – a surprisingly fast turnaround
given the scale of the project. By the time the boat was
dismantled there were about 500 pieces of wood, which
it took Davies’ mum Helen three days to number with a
paint pen.
Two months later, the container arrived at Freeman’s
Wharf in Penryn, and Davies organised the first of many
work parties to help ease the project on its way. Some
22 people turned up to welcome Gleaner back to
Cornwall – probably her first visit to the land of her
birth since she was sold to Norway 120 years earlier.
Buoyed up by how quickly they had taken the boat
apart, Davies set off full of optimism, imagining she
would come together almost as quickly. He was to be
proven sorely wrong. It would take him weeks just to
reorganise all the parts, and more than a year to
reassembled them and fill all the gaps in the planking.Opposite,
clockwise from
top left: Gleaner
before
dismantling, April
2013; About
2,500 fastenings
had to be
removed to take
her apart; All
parts numbered
before
disassembly;
Sails were pieced
together in a
field nearby;
Girlfriend Elle
prepares a brew;
Smaller spars
made from
donated masts;
Friends gather to
sort through the
pile on arrival in
Penryn; Around
500 timber parts
were carefully
stowed in a
container before
being shipped to
EnglandIn the end, he used nearly all the parts brought over from
Germany, apart from a couple of dodgy frames, as well
as getting through four big larch trees and most of an
oak tree, which he milled himself with a mobile sawmill.
In September 2014, Gleaner was back in the water for
the first time in more than 35 years, but she still didn’t
have a deck or any accommodation. Davies had run out
of money, and had to take time off from the project to
get the funds to carry on with the next stage. And so it
continued, with periods of work on Gleaner interrupted
by periods working to raise money. There were many
donations to the project too, including 10 tonnes of lead
for the ballast, which Davies loaded into the bilge in
March 2016, along with an ancient Lister JPM engine he
had bought off an old fishing boat in Hayle for £1,200.
Finally, in the summer of 2017, he started making the
masts: first the enormous fore mast, 60ft (18.3m) long,
18in (46cm) in diameter and weighing about one and
a half tonnes, and then the mizzen mast, 12in (30cm)
in diameter and three-quarters of a tonne. All the other
spars were gifted by the local wooden boat community:
the Falmouth-based charter boat Eda Frandsen donated
her old mast, as did the gaff yawl Voluta, the Falmouth
working boat Victory, and the Isle of Man nobby
Gladys. In each case, after being whittled down to size,
the donors’ main masts became yards and spars on
Gleaner, which gives you idea of the scale of her rig.GENEROUS GIFTS
The sails were all donated too, including the old mainsail
from the Bristol Channel pilot cutter Mascotte, which
became Gleaner’s mizzen. The 1,500sq ft (140m^2 ) fore
lug was a “collage” of six sails, including a ripped genoa
someone found in a bin, which Davies and his girlfriend
Elle (herself a former tailor, with experience of pattern
cutting) stitched together in a field at a friend’s café.
Somewhere along the way, Davies realised his crew
would need somewhere to sleep if they were going to
sail the boat across the Channel to France, and he, Elle
and new crew member Amber threw together a set of
rustic bunks – made from offcuts of wood – placed
forward of the workshop.
Finally, on 11 July 2018, Gleaner sailed under full
rig for the first time in more than 100 years, and the
following day headed west for the Sea, Salts and Sail
festival in Mousehole. The bowsprit was whittled on the
way over and fitted halfway through the second race.
Soon after, Davies and friends headed across the Channel
to Brittany for the biennial wooden boat jamboree at
Douarnenez. And so an idyllic summer back on the
water continued, including surviving a half-gale on the
way back to the UK.
By the time I joined Gleaner in September, Davies was
in tune with his boat and completely unfazed by taking
her out with a small scratch crew: just four of us (and me
too busy taking photos to be really useful) to sail a boat
that would traditionally have been handled by 10 men.
But he has wisely taken advantage of some intermediate
technology to make sure Gleaner can be sailed short-
handed: a huge antique, hydraulic capstan on the
foredeck not only operates the anchor chain but can
be used to hoist the fore lug, while a smaller capstan
on the aft deck makes light work of raising the mizzen.GLEANER
LOA
65ft (19.8m)BEAM
16ft (4.9m)DRAUGHT
8ft (2.4m)DISP
50 tonnes
SAIL AREA
3,000 sqft
(279m^2 )