How It Works

Putting a boat in the register

It takes about ten minutes to create a record and one field to start: her name. Everything after that is optional, can be left half-finished, and can be come back to on a winter evening three years from now.

This page is the whole thing laid out in advance — the quick start and every section of her record, in order, with a boat filled in — so that you can see what is being asked before you sign in and decide whether it is worth your evening. Nothing here is a preview you have to pay for or an account you have to make first.

First

Four things worth knowing first

She does not have to be finished: A boat can be entered the day the plans arrive. Planning, under construction, launched, laid up, being restored — every one of those is a status the register keeps, and a hull three winters into a build is exactly the record this site exists for. There is no waiting until she is good enough.
Nothing is published until you say so: The moment you give her a name she becomes a draft in your boatyard, with no registry number, until you press Publish Vessel. You can leave her a draft indefinitely, and nobody is waiting on you. While she is planned or under construction she is listed as a build in progress; turn Show Build Progress off in her Privacy section to keep her out of sight entirely.
You can stop at any point: Her record is split into sections, and each has its own Save. Saving never publishes anything, so closing the laptop mid-sentence loses only the section you had not saved. Coming back opens her record on the first section that still needs something, and a What's left? button on every one of her screens lists what is still to add and where it is.
A blank field is better than a guess: Almost nothing is required. If you do not know her displacement, or the day the build started, or the sail area, leave it empty. An archive of confident guesses is worth less than an archive with gaps in it, and the register would rather have the gaps.

Which are you?

If she is launched and sailing, her record will feel like a form you already know the answers to: name, design, dimensions, the day she went in, where she lives now. Set aside fifteen minutes and you will finish it.

If she is a stack of plywood and an intention, most of it does not apply yet, and that is not a problem to be solved. Fill in the name, the type, the design and the status, write a line about why you are building her, and publish. The record grows as she does — every measurement, photograph and journal entry can be added later, a section at a time.

The Example

Marigold, who does not exist

Every answer shown on the rest of this page belongs to an invented boat. Marigold is not in the register and never will be; neither is her builder, her design or her designer. She was made up for this page so that the walkthrough could show real, specific, unglamorous answers without borrowing a member's boat to advertise with.

She is deliberately an ordinary one. Fourteen feet of glued lapstrake plywood, built slowly in a single-car garage by somebody who had not built a boat before, with a winter lost to a house move in the middle of it. Most of the register looks more like her than like a varnished cutter.

Her: Marigold — a 14-foot skiff, glued lapstrake plywood, built from plans.
Her design: Wexford 14, drawn by Tobias Rennick. Invented, like the rest of her.
Her builder: Nell Harkaway, who works in a garage in Ely and had never built anything larger than a bookcase.
Where she is: Launched in April after four years, and rowed on the Great Ouse most weekends.

Section By Section

What each section asks

The first section is a quick-start screen on its own: give her a name, press Create Private Record, and she is saved as a draft. You then land in her record, where the other seven sections sit on one page in the order a builder thinks about a boat. Open any of them, in any order; Save keeps you on that section, and Save & Next moves you on to the next. Only the first section has anything you must fill in.

1 · Meet the Boat

Her name, what kind of boat she is, and whose design she is. The name is the only answer the register insists on here, and a working name is fine — you can change it for as long as she is a draft, and her address on the site moves with it.

The design question has three answers: a design already in the catalogue, a custom one-off, or a design that is not listed. Choose the third and type the name, and the register checks the catalogue for near matches before adding anything new — so that a Wexford 14 and a “Wexford 14” do not become two designs with one boat each.

Vessel name: Marigold — required
Boat type: Skiff — the nearest thing on the list; she need not fit it exactly
Design: A design that is not listed → Wexford 14, Tobias Rennick
Builder name: Nell Harkaway

Press continue and she exists — privately, in your boatyard, and nowhere else.

2 · The Build

What kind of project she is — a new build or an old boat being brought back — and then how she was put together and from what. Answering “restoration” changes the questions on this screen rather than adding a tick box: it asks what condition you found her in, how much of the original boat remains, and the year she was first built, because those are the facts a restoration record turns on.

Project kind: New build
Build started: March 2021
Construction method: Glued lapstrake plywood
Primary material: Marine plywood and epoxy
Plans, kit or custom: Built from plans
Where she was built: A single-car garage in Ely, Cambridgeshire

3 · Her Dimensions

Length, beam, draft and the rest, in feet and inches or in metres — whichever you measured in. The register stores what you entered and converts for the reader, so nobody has to do arithmetic to file a boat.

Every field on this screen may be left blank, and several of them usually are. Nell knows the plan dimensions and has never weighed the boat, so she fills in three lines and leaves the displacement empty.

Length overall: 13 ft 11 in
Beam: 4 ft 6 in
Draft: 7 in
Displacement: Left blank — never weighed her

4 · How She Moves

Sail, oar, outboard, inboard, steam, electric — or nothing at all yet, which is the default and a perfectly good answer for a boat that is still a hull. A rowing boat answers this screen in about four seconds.

Power: Oar
Notes: A pair of 8-foot spoons, second-hand and re-leathered

5 · Launch and Home Waters

Where she is in her life — that is her status, and publication does want one — and then where she hails from. This screen also decides what the fleet map shows, and it is the only screen with a real decision on it rather than a fact.

You never enter coordinates. Type the town and the register looks up the position when you save. If you would rather it did not, the third option withholds her location entirely and takes her off the map — see the next section, because that is the one choice on this screen that interacts with publishing.

Status: Launched / active
Launch date: 12 April 2025
Hailing port: Ely, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
Home waters: The Great Ouse
Fleet map: Town and county — the coordinates fill themselves in

6 · The Story

One line for her card, and then as much room as you want for the rest. The one line is the single piece of writing publication asks for, and it is the piece that does the most work: it is what appears beside her everywhere she is listed.

The long story is optional and has seven prompts sitting beside it for anyone staring at an empty box — why did you build this boat, what was the hardest part, what would you do differently. They are prompts, not fields. Answer none of them and write one long paragraph about a cold October instead, if that is the truer account.

Short description: “A 14-foot lapstrake skiff, four years and one house move in the making.” — required to publish
Full story: Nell answers three of the seven prompts and leaves the others. About four hundred words, written over two evenings.

7 · Pass On What You Learned

Seven optional prompts aimed squarely at the next person to buy the same plans: the most useful tool, the biggest unexpected expense, the most difficult part, what you would do differently, whether you would build the design again. Unanswered prompts do not appear on her page at all, so answering two of seven leaves no gaps behind.

This is the screen most worth coming back to after a season of using the boat. Very little of it can be answered honestly on the day you launch.

Most useful tool: “A cheap random-orbit sander and forty discs. Not the block plane I bought for the job.”
Biggest unexpected expense: “Epoxy. I budgeted for the plywood and forgot that the glue costs more than the wood.”
Would I build her again?: “Yes, and faster — the four years were mine, not hers.”

8 · What the Registry May Show

Your choices, made explicitly rather than guessed at on your behalf: how much of her location is shown, whether an unfinished build appears in the workshop listings, whether readers may comment, and how you hear about it if they do. Nothing in this section is decided for you by a default that quietly assumes you want the maximum.

What her page says about her hours and stages is chosen on her Hours & Progress screen, beside the hours and stages themselves, and this section links there. They are asked about separately, because they are separate disclosures: some builders are glad to say how far along a boat is and would rather not publish the number of hours it took, and some are the other way about. Nell shows both. Either half can be kept private, nothing is deleted by the choice, and she goes on recording both whichever she picks.

Fleet map: Town and county, from section 5
Build progress in the workshop: Shown — she was listed as a build in progress from the evening she was entered
Her hours and progress on her page: Shown — set on Hours & Progress
Comments: Open, with an email when somebody writes

Then · Preview and Publish

The Preview tab shows her record rendered by the same code that draws a public vessel page — not a summary of what you typed but the page itself, as the registry will show it. If anything required is still missing, her record lists it beside the Publish Vessel button, with a link straight to the section that asks for it.

Until you press Publish Vessel she is not published and holds no registry number, however much of her record you save. Publishing issues her permanent registry number and lists her at whatever status you set — under construction included. You can withdraw her later; she keeps the number either way.

The Short List

Publication asks for five things

Out of every field in those sections, this is the whole of what the register will not publish a boat without. It is printed here rather than discovered at the Publish button, because finding out at the end that something was missing from the beginning is the most annoying thing a form can do to a person.

1 · Her name: Section 1. A working name counts.
2 · Her type: Section 1. The nearest thing on the list.
3 · Her status: Section 5. Where she is in her life. Planning and under construction are both publishable answers.
4 · A map position: Section 5. You do not enter it — the register finds it from the town you typed, and if it does not know the town it uses her state or province, then her country. So all it really needs is her country. Or choose the third map option, Show no location at all, which keeps her off the map entirely and asks for nothing.
5 · One line about her: Section 6. The short description that appears on her card wherever she is listed.

That is the list. No photograph is required, no dimensions, no launch date, no story, no build log. A boat can be published with five answers and grow for the next twenty years.

Worth The Ten Minutes

Photographs are not required. Add some anyway.

They are the one optional thing on this page worth arguing for. A record with three photographs is the one another builder reads to the end; a record with none is a row in a table. It does not take a good camera or good light — a phone shot of the hull upside down on trestles under a strip light is exactly the picture somebody building the same boat wants to see, and the polished launch-day photograph is usually the least useful one in the set.

Photographs are added on their own screen — the Photographs tab on her record — so they never block a registration, and What's left? reminds you while she has none. Three or four is plenty to start: the hull, the inside, one detail you are pleased with.

If she is still being built

Photograph her now anyway, at whatever stage she is at. The frames-and-stringers photographs are the ones you cannot take later, and they are the ones the next builder needs most. Nobody has ever regretted having too many pictures of a hull that is now planked over.

Afterwards

What happens once she is in

She gets a number, permanently: Issued at the moment you publish and never reissued, even if you later withdraw her. Drafts do not take one, which is why an abandoned draft costs the register nothing.
The same screen, from then on: She is edited exactly where she was entered — her record, with the same sections and the same tabs for photographs, the build log, hours and progress, previous names and ownership history. Nothing moves when she is published.
She finds her sister ships: If anyone else has registered the same design, her page and theirs link to each other automatically. This is the part that surprises people: a design with one boat in the register in January can have four by June.
The build log opens: Dated entries with their own photographs, written whenever you feel like it. A boat under construction is the best possible use of it, and entries can be back-dated to the winter they actually happened in. A day already written up somewhere else — a blog post, a forum thread, a video — can be brought in with Import Existing Page and edited before it is posted.
Her hours and her stages: The two questions a boatbuilder is asked more than any other get a screen of their own. An afternoon at the boat is logged in a line; a stage is ticked on the entry that describes it, and her page then says how far along she is and how long it has taken. Both are optional, both can be recorded and kept private, and hours worked before you joined go in as one honest estimate rather than four years of Saturdays.
And if she is left half-finished: A draft nobody can see is the one thing the register will mention unprompted — a band at the top of the page, and at most three letters, ever, about any one boat. One button publishes her; another silences the subject for good.

Thank you for considering it. The register exists because homebuilt boats are documented by nobody else — no authority keeps them, and the usual record of a four-year build is a forum thread on a site that closes in a decade. A boat entered here is a boat the next person building the same design can still find.