Welcome to Classic Wooden Boat

This website is dedicated to classic wooden power boats and classic wooden yachts in Australia. Whilst there are many Wooden Boat websites, representing clubs, associations and industry, our intention is to create a central information repository that welcomes contributions on all aspects of significant Wooden Boats, wooden boatbuilders and wooden boat building in Australia.

Our primary objective is to ensure that historical classical wooden boat data and wooden boat information is not lost to future generations of 'Australian Wooden Boat Lovers'.

The author Gary Plumley has had a long association with classic wooden boats, beginning in the 1960's fishing for bream and luderick in the lower reaches of the Snowy River at Marlo in his familiy wooden Pompei clinker putt putt boat and other timber estuary boats. His involvement with wooden boats and wooden yachts has carried on for more than forty years.

Gary rowed wooden surf lifesaving boats for Point Leo SLSC and Point Lonsdale SLSC for 15 years, from 1970. These sleek yet sturdy wooden boats were built by legendary boatbuilders Boyd Humphries from Swansea NSW and Bill Clymer and Roger Ninham from Sydney.

More recently Gary has owned and competed successfully in Ian Farrier designed cruising and racing trimarans, Soling Olympic class keelboats and Ocean racing keelboats.

Classic Wooden Boat project boats.

Returning full circle to his love of Wooden Boats, his first design and rebuilding project in Classic wooden cruising powerboats Argyll, built in 1945 by C.C.Neill of Paynesville, on the Gippsland Lakes, Victoria and rebirthed by Frecheville Heaney Boatbuilders Paynesville in 2004, is one of the featured boats on this website.

His latest project is Amazing Grace a classic, ketch rigged motorsailer yacht, built in 1978. She was purposely designed and built of Huon Pine by boat builders Pompei Brothers in design collaboration with Lacco Brothers, as a bulletproof, comfortable, seaworthy vessel for extended cruising and racing. Amazing Grace is a long term restoration project, that has only just begun.