A SAILING enthusiast who worked all his life in the yachting industry has drawn on his experience to compile a record of East Anglian boatyards.

Mike Davies, from Wivenhoe, who has sold yachts since the Sixties, has noticed a gradual decline in the number of boat building businesses on the creeks and estuaries of the east coast.

With the number of companies making traditional wooden craft having dropped sharply, he decided to use his old files to create a memoir of the yards he had called on over the years.

The book, Essex and Suffolk Boatyards and Boat Builders, covers local rivers and waterways and contains hundreds of photographs of yards, past and present, and the yachts they made.

It is a record rather than a historical narrative, but does delve back as far as the year 885, when the shipyards of Harwich Harbour got their first printed mention, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

Mr Davies, 68, said: “I have yacht brochures and records going back to the Fifties and Sixties, and I decided it would be a good idea to do a book because nobody had the huge library I’ve got.

“I have 60 volumes of the Lloyds Yacht Register, which was the definitive listing of yachts, and went out of production in 1980 because it cost too much to print.

“There are boats mentioned in there that were built in the 1700s.”

Mr Davies grew up in East Mersea, where his parents moved when he was five.

His physicist father, Dr Norman Davies, was a keen sailor and wrote a respected book on how he converted an old whaling vessel into a small cruising yacht.

Norman and his wife Mary had five boys, all of whom were out on the water from a young age and were later involved in the yacht trade during their working lives.

Mr Davies was born in 1941, in an era when Thames barges were still trading, and witnessed at first-hand the revolution caused in the industry by the introduction of fibreglass in the Fifties and Sixties.

He started building small fibreglass sailing dinghies in 1968, and exhibited them at national boat shows. As fibreglass boats could be mass-produced using a mould, they were cheaper to buy and made yachting more accessible.

But they also spelt trouble for wooden boats, which are individually crafted.

“The wooden boatbuilding era has been declining for 20 or 30 years, and is now only retained by specialist companies,” Mr Davies said.

“The mass market is glass fibre and that’s where it will stay.”

Having started a boat hire company in 1965, Mr Davies founded his yacht brokerage, Marine Traders, in 1973, and continued in business until 2000, selling everything from small day boats to yachts of 70ft.

As well as the dwindling number of boatyards, he witnessed advances in the interior fittings of yachts and their navigational instruments.

He said: “All the modern electronics are without doubt very useful, but I can’t help thinking that years ago it all seemed far simpler, except, of course, when in the middle of a thick fog or making a landfall after a night at sea.”

* Essex and Suffolk Boatyards and Boat Builders is available for £24.99, plus £5 postage and packing, from Mike Davies, 3 Parkwood Way, Wivenhoe, Essex, CO7 9AN.