Fishing takes patience but the boat took five years

There’s no substitute for passion and perseverance and a Taupō man has taken that to the next level, painstakingly creating a 4m clinker boat over the last five years.
Mark Dumble launched his pride and passion – the Daphne G – at Two Mile Bay in Lake Taupō on October 5, with all the fanfare and fuss that his supporters could muster.
It marked the end of a five-year journey, or about the equivalent of two and a half years of fulltime work, Dumble estimates.
His interest in boats goes back to the 1960s when he used to “kick around” in his uncle’s boat building workshop in Dunedin.
The idea behind the Daphne G stemmed from a trip to the United Kingdom in 2014, and a visit to the Southampton Boat Show, where there was an exhibit from a school called The Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis.
One thing led to another and Dumble signed up for a one-year boat building course the following year.
“It became clear that it was the only course available at that time – anywhere in the world – where you learnt to build a boat from scratch.”
The students made four boats that year – all different styles.
“We built a clinker, but it was a rowing boat, sort of a Nordic thing, for a guy with one arm – a row boat for a man with one arm! He would invite you to go rowing and he would sit in the back with the tiller on his good arm and the rest of you had to bloody row.”
After he finished the course, Dumble decided to set himself a challenge and settled on a Henry Jones Skiff designed by Paul Gartside and constructed using a lapstrake or clinker method, that uses overlapping boards.
“In times of yore, boat building apprentices would have to construct a clinker dinghy before they could qualify and their final result highlighted their skill level, as they are more difficult to construct and get the plank lines looking right than other construction methods.”
“Construction started in earnest just as Covid hit … and has taken me far too long, but other sailing and travel adventures interrupted progress from time to time.”
The boat will be used for harling and jigging for trout on Lake Taupō and fly fishing at Lake Otamangahau behind Tūrangi.
And it won’t be the last boat building project for Dumble. The next boat will be a small sail and rowboat that his grand daughter Chloe Dumble 9, can use to learn to sail and she will help build.
And there’s more boats to come; “but hopefully a little quicker than number one″.
The reason it has taken so long is because every board is a different shape and must be calculated using a set of numbers called The Table of Offsets. This provides the dimensions of a vessel from three dimensions: side-on, from the front and a bird’s-eye view.
He made other modifications to the boat, from the original design, including gluing the planks instead of using copper nails.
“I’ve used marine ply for planks and glued them using epoxy resin. It was designed as a copper-nailed boat but the problem is that any fresh water that got into the ply from nail holes could cause rot – hence taking the glued route.”
The other advantage of glue is that it makes it very strong.
Other changes include the centre console, which is used to to counter the weight of a larger 25hp motor and to give him something to lean against when casting a fly and he has added three watertight lockers to aid buoyancy.
It also has a seat in the bow for a fishing passenger to use when he’s trolling.
The stem, backbone and transom are made from sapele mahogany.
He said he was not too worried about taking it out on the water, after having spent so much time on it.
“You are only a coat of paint away from fixing it.”
He said he has been offered “real work” as a boat builder, but turned it down.
“I don’t want to go back on the clock, I’m retired, I just want to build for the fun of it and it is, it’s good fun.”
His father was a builder and he has built houses before too, which he said was quicker than the boat.
“Oh, hell yeah, much quicker.”