Peter stands behinds JIM, it's sails newly raised and sitting on the trailer he built. Above him is the sign on his shop that reads: "Optimists only beyond this point."Sibley family

Peter stands behinds JIM, its sails newly raised and sitting on the trailer he built. Above him is the sign on his shop that reads: "Optimists only beyond this point."

Peter Sibley and his wife Carole live in Murwllumbah, New South Wales, a dozen miles from Australia’s east coast, 19 miles if you go by boat down the Tweed River. Peter had set out to build a French pilot cutter that he had redesigned with the help of the late yacht designer Ed Burnett of Devon, England.Wanting to do as much of the work as possible in his own shop, he started with logs, and that required some special equipment. He had once run a sawmill business, and for transporting logs, he had designed a gantry crane that he mounted on a flatbed truck; once he had the logs at his shop, he slabbed them with a horizontal bandsaw mill that he’d built, complete with hydraulic controls. To make his own bronze hardware for the cutter, he set up a separate foundry with a large furnace and made his own wooden patterns.

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