Glad to be sailing again, after the seemingly endless winter, most of us have now fitted out our boats and repaired the ravages of the frost. Some owners of marine ply boats have discovered ravages against which they thought the quality of the material should have been proof. In this issue we publish the first of two articles (019/02B and 020/02) about the reasons for delamination of BS.1088 plywood, and what we can do to prevent it. As more and more small boats are built of this and other relatively new materials, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between the sound and the potentially unsound, unless one is an expert and can trace the material back to the factory in which it was made.

Great are the advantages of plywood - lightness and ease of construction, with reduced building costs. Great also are the advantages possible in glass fibre, with its great strength and lasting qualities. But in buying an ordinary timber boat most of us learnt what to look for. We must learn all over again with the new materials. Glass fibre hulls are not always as well put together as they should be and the standard 1088 does not, evidently, prevent inferior marine plywood from finding its way into boatbuilders' yards. It takes time for faults of this kind to appear, as more and more boats built of them begin to show signs of age. A sailing boat has, or should have, the advantage that one does not need to be a mechanical or scientific expert: to learn how to maintain it. Its fittings should, in my opinion, be kept simple for this reason - especially in cruising boats where repairs may have to be carried out at sea under difficult conditions and with rudimentary tools. It is therefore a real disadvantage of factory-made building materials if they may let us down unexpectedly through a fault which we could not detect until too late. J. A.