Wooden Boat Building

Mears Boat Builders are happy to take commissions for building new wooden boats. Our history pages show some large vessels built in the past; but we tend to sway towards 25 feet and smaller nowadays – although we go where the work takes us. Current boats we have been commissioned to build are a 25' mahogany clinker weekender and a 16' Beer Lugger launch. The current Beer Lugger fleet consists of thirteen boats of which seven have been built or heavily modified by us. The local fishing ports still boast many Mears clinker and carvel fishing boats still plying their trade everyday. We are definitely not born again boatbuilders, poets or dreamers, we have been in this industry a long time and love every second of the hard, satisfying work.

The attraction of the Mears wooden boat is in their strength and longevity. We build boats with a ‘tuck’ rather than a ‘deep keel’. This makes them very strong and allows them to be beach launched day after day, year after year. We always use grown English oak knees, quarter knees, breasthooks and drop thwarts rather than laminating. We know these techniques work because the boats, be they fishing boats, sailing boats or dinghies, are still going decades later.