There were some puzzled faces on Vire Island in Totnes as Nigel Irens tested his latest design, powering gently up and down the River Dart.
“What colour is that boat?” said one. “Is it red or is it black? It keeps changing colour!”
And indeed the 26ft (8m) launch made a striking sight, with its plumb stem, beamy transom and topsides that looked decidedly red on the way upriver and pitch black on the way back down. Was it magic? Or a trick of the eye? Or was Totnes’s status as ‘twined with Narnia’ finally coming true?
In fact, it was a piece of theatre, courtesy of the boat’s owner, that master of performance Richard Stilgoe (responsible among other things for the lyrics of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera). The boat was indeed red on one side (port of course) and black on the other, like a harlequin or an isolated danger mark – or, perhaps, like the positive and negative wires on a plug.
, as the boat is called, is remarkable in other ways too. As she slid past the moorings and looped around the 200-year-old Totnes bridge, there was something noticeably absent: noise. With her 6kw motor, this latest design by Nigel – the first of the type
