A new website today from our own Master Shipwright Tim Goldsack and his own barge, SB Decima. It’s on http://sailingbargecharterdecima.com/index.html and I have created a link to it from our useful links tab. It’s a nice clear, fresh website, well laid out and easy to use. It advertises that you can charter Decima for family group bookings, day trips, “Art Trips” where you can spend “the day with local artist Mike Lang who will either show you the basics or offer help to improve your skills”. There are also Bird-watching trips – “come for the day and enjoy a unique opportunity to get up close to the wonderful wetland birds of the River Blackwater” as well as “Evening trips with local musicians offering traditional sea-shanties or whatever takes your fancy whilst sailing down the Blackwater”. You can also compete in the annual Barge Match races or go on “Afternoon cream tea cruises”.

SB Decima website screen grab

SB Decima website screen grab. Image ‘borrowed’ by Matt Care

I was also interested to read the bit about Tim himself, much of which I did not know. “Tim Goldsack”, says the site “always knew he had to own a sailing barge one day!  He has been sailing ever since he was a young boy, since the nineteen-sixties when he lived with his family on S.B. Ernest Piper on the River Medway.
His family then moved to the depths of Cornwall, where, throughout the nineteen-seventies, Tim sailed various dinghies and yachts with his father, and then on his own.
Moving back to Kent in the early eighties Tim was re-acquainted with the sailing barges of the East coast. A family friend, Owen Emerson, took him under his wing, and taught him how to sail and repair Thames Sailing Barges.
Tim has since become a Master Shipwright and worked on many of the remaining fleet of barges, and other traditional sailing craft. He and his team of shipwrights have recently carried out the complete restorations and rebuilds of the Sailing Barges ‘Dawn’ and ‘Cambria’. These are the largest traditional wooden vessel restorations in Great Britain at the current time.
Tim gained his Barge-Master’s License in 1989, and has since that time skippered various barges, as well as buying Decima in 2003 and restoring her to sail.
Tim continues to restore and repair traditional vessels, whilst skippering Decima during the sailing seasons”.

Nice one Tim. Good Sailing