Henry Frederick Swan
Launch Day – April 19th 2019
Royal Diadem II
Relaunch: July 2010
Foy Boat: Joan
Below is a picture the Foy Boat ‘Bonney Tyne’ and she is in the Discovery Museum. To get some idea of how to finish the Foy Boat ‘Joan’, the people at the Museum kindly allowed us to take measurements and pictures of their boat.
Joan on a visit to the Ouseburn in 2018, June 18th.
New Build: Cygnet
Cygnet – Henry Frederick Swan’s Tender
The lifeboat was nearing the completion of its restoration, so the optimists believed, and thoughts turned to what should happen to her after she left the NEMT slipway/workshop and some seemed to think that she might end up on on moorings on the Tyne that were served from the quay where the workshop opens onto and for that a dinghy would be needed to ferry the crew across and the plans for what was to become the Cygnet were acquired.
It took another two and a half years before the Henry Frederick Swan was launched and she immediately became NEMT’s show-piece and during that couple of years, it appears that those in charge of making sure that she was seaworthy and safe etc. had decided that the moorings just upstream of the Marine School Centre in South Shields were not secure enough and as NEMT had access to NE1 Marina just below the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle she spends much of her time there.
The Favourite, Rachel Douglas and the Sovereign had been using the facilities offered by NEI Marina for a good number of years but outside of special events the people who ran the ‘marina’ would only allow NEMT to moor one of their fleet against the pontoon for more than a few days and here is one of the Sovereign in 2015 and the Rachel Douglas 2017. Since 2020 it appears that the Henry Frederick Swan now has a permanent birth in the NE1 Marina and one might wonder how the Cygnet is faring.
Nearly all the small boats used to ferry crews back and forth to those sort of mooring in front of the workshop are sufficiently light enough to be handled by one person and very easily by two people and I suspect that Cygnet is not one of those boats. I may be wrong but it makes her redundant on two counts 1) her weight and 2) the HFS would be moored to pontoons or wharfs and never on moorings on the Tyne.
She was however a marvellous project for the more experienced boatbuilders to pass on the basic skills required for building and repairing traditional fishing vessels to those wishing to learn and some idea of how this was done is covered in 11 posts from 2016 – 2019.
- Getting the design right before starting a new boat build.
- “Cygnet” the trust’s very first build, takes shape. Not strictly true, Salma’s Dream had been made for the Customs House Project, some years earlier.*
- Getting the transom fitted into Cygnet.
- Not only is the “Cygnet” a new build, it is our very first build. Again, strictly not true.
- Not the real thing but an exact scale model of our new build “Cygnet”,
- So this is what Cygnet will look like!
- Phil looking on with pride as the boat building crew fit the last starboard plank on the “Cygnet”.
- Rib-tickling fun. Fitting ribs in is more complicated than these guys make it look.
- Ribs finished on the Cygnet!
- Nearly the full night-shift in tonight working on the Cygnet,
- Not be long now, engine box and thwarts nearly done.
The were no more posts for Cygnet in the Face Book stream and but there were posts made in 2020 onwards, in a new stream were she can be seen in the background, and looks to be completed and on a trailer. Access to this site has recently been restricted for some reason and it looks like she is now in storage.