I spent 7 years once building Lowly Worm, a 31-foot Essex Smack, and more recently a year building Lowly Worm III, a 19-foot Ness Yawl. The quotation below sums up the experience better than anything else I know. Other builders in the DCA may appreciate it:

"Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition....... The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting place... When it comes, the desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins with a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky, so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom."

— From 'Racundra's First Cruise'

Shortly after the original inquiry (concerning speed boats on Windermere), about 70 years ago, Arthur Ransome explained in a newspaper column why speed boats should never have been allowed on the lake in the first place. It seems appropriate at this time to add it to In Our Wake:

"The question of whether there is any pleasure in moving at frantic speed through beautiful scenery (foolishly raised at the inquiry) is altogether irrelevant. The question that ought to have been considered, but apparently was not, is how far any man is justified in spoiling the pleasure of great numbers of other people for the sake of his own. In fact, if he measures up his own pleasure against that of the many others involuntarily concerned he will, if a person of normal kindliness and decent instincts, save his petrol and other people's happiness by being content with a speed low enough to be silent and to let him enjoy those qualities of Windermere which are not dependent on trying with a tremendous accompaniment of noise and thrum to run away from his conscience."

ARTHUR RANSOME, publisher, newspaperman, yachtsman, dinghy sailor, close observer of the Russian Revolution as war correspondent for the Daily News, (which led to his marrying Trotsky's secretary!), lover of the English Lakes, and writer of "children's books". As A.N. WILSON once said, "The wonder is that Ransome ever got down to writing Swallows and Amazons at all!"