My friends Rob and Jane Hylton run sailing boat and canoe hire on some of my favourite sailing waters – the lower Murray Lakes – just an hour south of Adelaide.

The boat hire is quite cheap but linked with you overnight staying in the small town of Clayton Bay – on the edge of the Murray River. There are a number of different options. My favourite is a tent or an on site caravan on the river’s edge camping area. But there are classier (?) options as well.

Low season is quite cheap and the days down there can be very beautiful in winter with a good weather report. They also offer sailing lessons which can include a picnic and/or a tour of the fascinating Murray wetlands.

Slideshow and pictures resources to show some of the methods for building the Eureka Stitch and Glue Plywood Canoe.

Howdy, Lot of background stuff happening over the last few weeks. Duckflat has been developing up a precut kit for the Goat Island Skiff and the Eureka Canoe. Gosh it has been a steep learning curve. Have been back and forth with the cutting people to get things to work correctly. Computer cutters (the machines) [...]

While in Port Vincent for the Wooden Boat Festival (great little show!!!) someone pulled out this 505 class dinghy. It is in REALLY bad condition – but the exciting thing is that it has all the original gear and fittings. So it is a time capsule from around 1959. “State of the Art” down to [...]

Unless you come to the Port Vincent and Stansbury Boat Festival. I’ll have a couple of PDRacers there. Unless the weather looks really bad. We expect it clear tomorrow – so will be at the festival from around 11. Best wishes Michael Michael Storer Wooden Boat Plans and Adventures in Boat Design, Restoration and Building.

Now we haven’t had a huge amount of luck with our PDRacer days in South Australia. While I did make a new PDRacer speed record, the conditions were mostly too strong at the Goolwa wooden boat show. However there are a couple of opportunities to see (and possibly sail) an OZ PDR if you are [...]

This clip demonstrates the lovely manners of the boat, (to replace our aging “doing donuts” movie). Note that Michael does a gybe or two while standing, this is as much a reflection of the stability of the boat as it is of his cat-like agility! If ever there were any doubt about the ability of [...]

During the recent Duck Flat Spring School (I was one of the instructors) a GIS was built by Paul and Chris – who are a pair of old school chums who have a long term plan of building something bigger to share the use of. During the class they built the hull, glued up the [...]

Dakota built one of my OZ PD Racers with some help from her dad LarryIt took her three lots of school holidays – about 8 weeks – fitting the work between all the other things an 11 year old has to do. The middle two weeks holiday it was tooooo cold to do much boatbuilding [...]

The Spring School is underway. About 15 people, around 10 projects. A couple of days ago it was just a big empty space. Now there are boats sprouting everywhere. Storer boats, Oughtred boats, Redmond boats, Bear Mountain boats You can see my pics on Flickr – about 600 of a whole bunch of different details [...]

Storerboatplans and Duck Flat Wooden Boats will be sharing a stand at the Adelaide Timber and Working with Wood Show. 27-29 July from 10am to 5pm at Wayville showgrounds. We have a 16′ Goat Island Skiff, two 8′ puddle ducks (PDRacers) , a 31′ Bolger Tennessee Riverboat (it’s is being refurbished after 12 years of [...]

The picture right shows the view from our stand as the first of the crowd just arrives after the doors open. Storerboatplans and Duck Flat Wooden Boats are sharing a stand at the Adelaide Timber and Working with Wood Show. 27-29 July from 10am to 5pm at Wayville showgrounds. We have a 16′ Goat Island [...]

Duckflat have started work on Kirribilli for a consortium of owners. Keel is off – boat is upside down – hull is half stripped and half splined – starboard side. I’m assisting with the technical side. If the end result is as nice as the work Duck Flat and I did on our last keelboat [...]

Rob Badenoch Launched his OZ PDR “BLU” (PDR #124) for the first time last weekend. This is pretty exciting news as Rob was not only one of the volunteers that helped build the three boats at Duck Flat but is a very good sailor. He started sailing in his teens with his brother in Rainbow [...]

The world speed record for PDRacers is currently 6.5mph. During the recent South Australian Wooden Boat Festival (pic of three of our five PDRS on the beach right) there was so much wind that many events were cancelled, but Michael Storer had a crack at the speed record for PDRacers. Actually we briefly thought he [...]

Chris came to Duck Flat Wooden Boats with plans to fix up an old riverboat hull he had bought. Duck Flat contacted me for some help I helped go over the boat and work out how much it had deteriorated. Basically everything above decks was in poor condition but the inside of the hull looked [...]

I will be on the stand with the Duck Flat Wooden Boats Staff at the SA Wooden Boat Show over three days 10/11/12 March at Goolwa on the Murray River. It is a great boat show and you can find the details from the article immediately below. I will also be attempting to win the [...]

Seeing that I am getting the two boats ready for the festival season here is some info about the two major ones. The Australian Wooden Boat Festival – Hobart, TasmaniaThe Tasmanian Wooden Boat show is definitely bigger but the Goolwa Wooden Boat Festival is much more hands on – as the grassy bit the festival [...]