Built & Launched is a brand-new registry dedicated to preserving the boats people build and the stories behind them. Help us grow the fleet—add your home-built boat and become part of the registry from the beginning.
About
Built & Launched is a public record of boats built and rebuilt by hand: what they are, whose work they are, how that work was done, and where they float.
Thousands of boats are built every year by people who are not boatbuilders. They are built in garages and barns, on driveways and in spare bedrooms, from plans bought by post, from kits, or from an idea drawn out full size on a sheet of plywood. Most are never recorded anywhere. When the builder moves on, the story usually goes with them.
This registry exists to keep that record. Every vessel entered here receives a permanent registry number and a page of her own — her particulars, her design, her builder, her hailing port, her photographs, and the journal of her construction.
Why
Principles
One
A boat may be registered at any stage — a set of plans, a hull upside down on sawhorses, a fit-out that has taken nine years, or a vessel thirty seasons afloat. Boats under construction are not lesser entries here.
Two
Mini tugs, sailing cruisers, skiffs, runabouts, steam launches, canoes, kayaks, houseboats, workboats and one-off experiments. If a person built her, she has a place in the register.
Three
Records belong to the people who made the boats. An owner chooses what is public, how precisely her position is shown on the chart, and may keep a record entirely private while a build is under way.
Eligibility
One test, and it is a broad one: an amateur’s own hands made her what she is. Built her from nothing, finished her from a bare hull, or brought her back from a state nobody else would have taken on. Not a yard, not a production line — a person, or a family, or a couple of friends in a shed.
A production boat counts once an amateur has done the work. Six winters spent taking a factory hull back to bare glass, replacing her floors, rewiring her and rebuilding her interior is amateur boatbuilding by every measure that matters here, and the fact that somebody else moulded her in 1978 does not make it less so. Register her as a restoration, and say what you found and what you did.
A boat that came off a production line and has never been touched by an amateur is the one thing that does not belong. There are excellent registries for those, and this is not one of them.
The Workshop
Most registries only want boats that float. That is a reasonable rule and it throws away the most interesting years of every boat in it.
A build takes what it takes. Two winters, or twelve. It stops for a house move, a new job, an illness, a child, a broken promise from a supplier. It restarts. The boat sits under a tarpaulin for eighteen months and then somebody walks back into the shed. That is what building a boat actually is, and a registry that only records the end of it records the least remarkable part.
So a boat is registered the day her builder decides to register her — with a hull upside down, with frames on a strongback, or with nothing but a set of plans and an intention. She has a page, a number and a journal from that day forward. If she is never finished, the record of the attempt is still worth keeping. Somebody tried.
The Number
When a vessel is first published she is issued a registry number: BL-000001, BL-000002, BL-000417. One unbroken sequence, in the order boats entered the register.
Drafts take no number. A boat you are still writing up costs the register nothing, and you can leave her a draft for as long as you like.
There is no year in the number on purpose. A year would have to mean the year she was built, or launched, or entered — and for a registry that welcomes a boat finished in 1974 alongside one launched last week, none of those three is a safe thing to stamp on something permanent.
Privacy
A boat in a driveway is somebody's home address. The registry is built around that fact rather than apologising for it afterwards.
The finest grain the registry records is a town, harbour or marina. There is no field anywhere in the database for a street address, and there never will be. On top of that, every builder chooses one of three things for their own boat:
SHOW REGION ONLY is not a fuzzed coordinate. Her true position is never sent to the browser at any precision: what goes out is the centre of a fixed grid cell about fifty kilometres across, and every boat in that cell lands on exactly the same point. It cannot be recovered by averaging, by watching the marker over time, or by comparing two requests.
SHOW NO LOCATION means no row at all — not a marker without coordinates, not a pin at the middle of the country, not a count in a tooltip. She is fully in the register, in the fleet directory and in search, and she is on no map.
Separately: your real name, your email address and your town are yours. Vessels carry a builder's name that you choose to put there. Nothing else from your account is ever rendered on a public page.
The Record
Contact
An archive is only as good as the people who correct it. If something here is wrong — a designer misattributed, a boat entered twice, a name spelled the way nobody spells it — the registry would rather know.
Write to support@builtandlaunched.org. Corrections and additions, questions about an account, a request to close one, and anything the registry has plainly got wrong all arrive at the same address; there is no form to fill in and no reference number to quote.
“Every Boat Has a Build Story.”
