A TALE OF TWO LIFEBOATS
Wherever you find boats, you will find boat restoration projects. From patching up an old dinghy to rebuilding a topsail schooner, many will result in a magnificent vessel, while some will never be completed.
But how often does a boat considered fit for scrap actually end up looking good as new again? Not very often, yet in the past six years that’s just what’s happened in the Kent fishing town of Hastings… not once, but twice!
The story starts in 2012 when local antiques dealer Dee-Day White (that’s his real name – and no prizes for guessing the year of his birth) was invited to a farm a few miles from Hastings with a view to purchasing some antiques: a gun, a table… and a boat. The gun and the table were attractive, a price agreed, and Dee-Day looked around for the boat – anticipating a glass-cased model. Instead he was taken a few hundred yards to a field where lay a 35ft boat in a very sorry state. Parts were rotted, a tree grew through a hole in the hull, and it had been adopted by chickens!
No expert in boats, Dee-Day nonetheless recognised it had been a lifeboat, a fact verified by the vendor who’d bought it 20 years earlier with a view to cutting
