From the Dumpster to the Launching Ramp

When Polly Robinson was growing up in Cumbria, there was always a home-built boat for the family to use. Her father and grandfather were hobby boatbuilders, and she attributes her love of being on the water to them. Long before she was born, her grandfather built a pram dinghy in which her father and aunt learned to sail. It stayed in the family and, when they were old enough, Polly and her sisters learned to sail in it too. A generation later, Polly’s two children used it. Beyond sailing and rowing, Polly's grandfather also introduced her to boatbuilding. When she was 9, she helped him to build a Selway Fisher Wren, a stitch-and-glue canoe. Now, she has built another stitch-and-glue Selway Fisher design, the 7′ 6″ Redshank, a lapstrake rowboat based on a traditional English dinghy.

Photographs courtesy of Polly Robinson

Stitching the strakes together would become increasingly nerve-wracking as Polly progressed up the sides of the hull and the curve became exaggerated around the generous beam.

In 2022, Polly was working at Fyne Boat Kits in Kendal, Cumbria. During the two years she had been with the company a diminutive stem dinghy, all stitched up but not glued and far from finished, had stood in one corner of the boatbuilding shop where weeklong classes were held. When Polly came in to work one day, the boat was gone. She didn’t think much of it until a colleague told her it had been thrown out, but that he had rescued it from the dumpster. He felt sorry for it, saying it deserved better than to be simply thrown away. He thought he should ask Polly if she would be interested in finishing the boat. He knew she’d built a Kaholo paddleboard and a 9′ 6″ Grain Waterlog surfboard and had been talking about building something else.