Rock-a-bye baby
I first saw a cradle boat at a woodenboat show years ago, and thought to myself: “When I have kids, I’ll build one of these”. Fast forward a decade, and the news that we were expecting a baby told me that now was the time to build one of these beautiful objects – and to learn a bit about traditional boatbuilding at the same time. And like all the best projects, a solid and immovable deadline in the form of my daughter’s arrival was a good incentive to get on with the job!
The Baby Tender is a design by American designer Warren Jordan and, to quote, ‘an adaptation of the classic yacht tender carried aboard many of the finest yachts during the time when wooden boatbuilding was truly an art.’
A clinker dinghy in miniature, measuring 45in (115cm) in length, it sits suspended from its own davits. It’s all there – hardwood keel and stem, clinker planking, copper rivets and steamed hardwood frames, gunwales and inwales – but at a fraction of the normal size. A shaped mattress turns it into a crib, which, hopefully, should gently rock the baby to sleep in style.
Having admired the examples to
