Barry Jenkins

I have never, ever bought a steel shell in. I built everyone myself. I would never have bought someone else's shell, so that's a load of.....?×##×:*s! Again!!! I am sick and tired of reading crap about me, stating things i have never done!

That's what people do and they invariably make an inferior product, which is damned annoying to see your design corrupted. But saying that i can remember one winter day and I had just finished Art & Design College and I saw a lot of people standing on the canal bridge, so I knew a boat was coming, and I could see it in the distance and I recognise my lines on the bows and it went into the lock and the lady came near to operate the lock and I shouted down to her, "Is that a Lincoln Tug?" And she said, "No, it's a copy of a Barry Jenkins boat." And I told her i was Barry Jenkins and she told her husband and he came to talk to me and he told me that he had the copy made in Liverpool. And i was very impressed with the workmanship and I told him they had built a very good boat. Which they had. But I recognised my bow lines from a long distance. When you spend the amount of hours i did to create them, it's easy to recognize your work. It's not so bad when you see a copy that has been well made. When I first saw it i thought it was one of my boats, because they did a very good job.

Thankyou for replying to my very long message. It's nice to get feedback. I apreciate it. Thankyou very much. I will always answer all forms of feedback be they bad or good. So far I have spent over 2 years designing my new boat and I probaly have another year's work on it to finish it. This will be the first boat design I have done where i didn't have to meet a deadline. So it will be finished when I am happy with it. I think it will be the last boat i design. There is an old addage in Boatbuilding: "Draw long, build fast." I can't tell you anything about it because other Boatbuilders copy my designs. They will find it very hard to copy this design.

I am Barry Jenkins the Boatbuilder. I've seen the photo of the Traditional Narrowboat and i can recognize all my boats, and I didn't build that boat, i can tell by the shape of the bows. It is definitely not one I built. I keep reading articles written about me that are totally wrong and I would just like to put the record straight on a few things. The owner of Tam Lin who owns a Lincoln Tug, states that i designed it with the help of a customer. I can assure you that I never allowed anyone to dictate to me how to design a boat. A new boat design was always 'My Baby', it was always my creation, not anyone else's. I can remember designing the prototype and I can remember what my design criteria was. Like all the other Boatbuilders i was building Traditional Narrowboats all the time. And I had an idea to create a new boat that was more ergonomic and accommodating for people. I studied all the old boat designs and realized that we were all building boats with unnecessary high hulls, which made it very difficult for females especially to have to climb over to get on board. And I had seen the poor females sat in the front of the boats while the husband steered it from the back. And it wasn't a very nice place to sit really, because of the high hulls, the female's view was obstructed by the high bulkhead in the well deck and the area was very small, so it wasn't exactly a very nice place for the female to have to sit in all day, because she was cramped up and the high bows and bulkhead obscured her view as she sat there and the canal scenery is beautiful and her view was blocked. I kept researching the old boats and I realized that the only reason they had high hulls was because when they were loaded with cargo, they sank deeper into the water leaving them with 10 inch of Freeboard. So high hulls were virtually redundant because they are not used for carrying cargo. So I knew I could drop the hull height and it would still be safe in the water. I eventually found photos of an old Tug Style and that had low Freeboard (The height of the hull above the waterline) it was about 10 inches, because the Tug Boat didn't carry any cargo, so it didn't need a high hull. So this how the design of the Lincoln Tug evolved. I knew it was safe and tried and tested to have a hull height with only 10 inch Freeboard, so that was a critical factor in the design. I designed the boat around that factor. My aim was to create a new boat design that was more ergonomic and user friendly than the Traditional high hull Narrowboats. The main focal point of the boat design was the bows. It had 12 foot long curves, as against 6-8 foot curves on the Traditional boats. This boat was designed with the female of the species in mind. I saw from the photographs of the old Tug Boats that they had sunken paneling along the cabin sides and I could understand why? It's because of the high height of the cabin. It looked slab sided without sunken paneling, and that's why I incorporated the sunken paneling into the design. I was the first Boatbuilder to use sunken paneling on boats. It was while I was designing my new Tug style boat that a man called Derek came to see me and he showed me photographs of the type of boat he wanted and it was the same photographs that I had taken my inspiration from and I showed him my design on the Drawing Board and it was exactly what he wanted. So he ordered one which was very good because now i had someone who was going to finance the prototype which is a good thing. We did discuss the design, but i can assure you that nobody influences my boat designs. I can remember that we did have a discussion on the height of the front hatch lid. Because the hull height was low, i had to increase the height of the hatch lid to fit a gas bottle inside i did listen to Derek's opinion on that because it was very unusual to have such a high height on the hatch lid. But Derek approved of it, so it stayed in the design. When it came to building it, the 12 foot long bows were very, very hard because they they were low hull height and we had to pull them around to give the double curvature. And the 12 foot long curves had to be spot on because any slight error would stand out a mile. We created a jig for the curved paneling on the back. This was a very labour intensive boat to build and it was far more technically difficult than the standard Trad. I had created a monster for my own back. It was very difficult to build. There was a lot more work involved in building the Lincoln Tug than any other boat I had built. Derek lived locally, so he would come and watch us build his boat every day. And I used to be reassured knowing that he was happy with what we were building, because there was no other boat like it and i didn't know if people would like it or not, so Derek's positive opinions were very important to me. When we finished it, Derek fitted it out in my Boatyard and new customers would come to order a Traditional Narrowboat and they would see the Tug Boat in my Boatyard and they would want the same boat. Everyone who saw it wanted one and it got to a point where I was getting fed up building the same boat and it was very difficult to build. My biggest fear when designing a new boat is that people would laugh at it. That never happened thank goodness. People who saw it loved it and wanted one. Over the years i developed and improved the design and then customers told me they had seen other Boatbuilders having my Tug Boats pulled out of the water and measured up and patterns taken off them, so I redesigned and redesigned increasing the lengths of the curves even more to make it harder for other Boatbuilders to copy, I had made it much harder for myself to build too. A customer arrived one day and told me that his wife told him that my boats had lovely female curves on them. I told him she was spot on because I studied famous ancient Greek sculptures of nude females and I knew that the artist had created the curved lines on the female to the best he could do, so I would copy those lines and incorporate them into the design of the boat. People told me that it was a compliment to have other Boatbuilders copying my boat designs, but I didn't like it because I would spend thousands of hours creating the design. I was a workaholic and often worked into the early hours of the mornings designing my boats and people only see the finished lines of the boat, they don't see all the lines that had been altered and altered again and again and erased over and over until the design was right. There are thousands of lines that go into creating a new boat design and most of them are not seen because they have been erased. People must assume that every line comes out right all the time, it doesn't, it evolves with constant alterations until it can't be altered anymore. You're talking thousands of hours work to design a boat and it is very, very lonely because you cannot concentrate on a design when someone is talking to you. You've got to be totally alone to achieve the concentration necessary to create something new and beautiful and better. People don't realise exactly what goes into designing a new boat. Standing alone at a Drawing Board for thousands of hours. Nobody sees that and they don't see all the calculations that go into the design. Every single line has to be calculated very carefully. I used to work to eight decimal places in my mathematics. And to hear of other Boatbuilders pulling my boats out of the water so they could measure them up did make me annoyed. I read an article about a boat with a 3 foot swim that I had built and it looked very rough under the water line. I have never, ever built a boat with a 3 foot swim and I know that I never produced a rough looking boat because I always inspected every boat all the way through the building and the finish. My boats all had 2 foot swims on them. It gets me angry when I am accused of bad workmanship, because I prided myself on the best craftsmanship possible. This is why my boats were always late and the customers used to moan about the boat being late, but I put craftsmanship before profit. They didn't seem to realise that me paying my men to work on boats for very long hours was costing me a fortune, but I used to tell the customers that the boat comes first before them. I had a few customers come back to shake my hand because they had found out that I had built them a very good, strong boat. One man told me that he was with another Narrowboat on a tidal section of a river behind a Coaster which was travelling in front of them and the the Coaster turned 90 degrees to them and both of the boats ploughed into the side of the Coaster and the other boat that was with him immediately sank. The impact also moved his galley 6 foot forward. I didn't fit it out so I am not responsible for the galley moving 6 foot, because it gives you an idea of the impact force. Another man came to thank me because I had built him an ocean going steel yacht and on his maiden voyage he decided to sail to Amsterdam and half way over, in the middle of the North Sea he was in a Force 9 gale and this was the first time his boat had been to sea, so it was untested and he was alone sat inside his yacht with the hatches battened down listening to the waves crashing down onto his yacht and one gallon of water weighs 10lb so those massive waves must have weighed a few tons. He also had a collision at sea and I told him that was why his boat was late because I have always been conscious about safety for the customers using the boat. There's been more rubbish written about the time i was in a business partnership, sometimes partnerships don't work out because some people become greedy and steal vast sums of money from the business. It took me 2 years to get out of a partnership because I had so many orders that I knew if I left, my partner would steal the deposits. I had to slowly whittle the orders down. But at no time did i ever build a bad boat. The boats always had priority over profit. Sometimes I would lose money on building a boat, but that didn't matter because I didn't set up in the Boatbuilding business to make vast amounts of money, i set up to produce the best craftsmanship I could. I would have built the boats for free if I could have, but I had to charge money for them. I was a Boatbuilder first and a business man second. So all these write ups on me are totally wrong. I just had to get my side over. As to what I am doing now, i am 65 years old and live in a Care Centre where I am looked after very well and I am designing a new boat on my computer using AutoCad in 3D which is fantastic. I always used to design my boats in my head first and always in 3D but I had to draw them in 2D on the Drawing Board. Using the computer and being able to design my new boat in 3D is unbelievable. The boat design is totally new, there is nothing like it. She's beautiful and i hope to have her finished in another years time. I have two Boatbuilding factories waiting for the design to be finished. So I am still building boats, but I am building on computer and when you design a new boat, you do have to actually build it as you're designing it. I hope people will perhaps stop writing totally wrong things about me and I hope what I have written gives a clearer view on Barry Jenkins Boatbuilder.