There is a bit more going on along the north side of Lowestoft's Lake Lothing these days. Walk down Harbour Road or, better still, stroll the waterside footpath east from Carlton Swing Bridge and before long you will come across a small shipyard with two slipways and a third under construction.

The latter - a slip under construction - is significant, for shipbuilding is not the most buoyant sector. Indeed, until last year, this half hectare block of land, formerly the George Prior Engineering yard, had been on the market for some time. Its business, largely the maintenance and repair of fishing boats, had faded with the contraction of fishing, particularly the decommissioning of fishing boats which has hit small to medium shipyards around the country.

The occasional fishing boat may yet reappear on those slipways - Lowestoft remains synonymous with fishing whatever the current state of the industry - but there are likely to be a few more exotic craft visiting from now on, for the yard has been bought by the Excelsior Trust.

Now that in itself might raise a few eyebrows. The Excelsior Trust was founded in 1982 to preserve the eponymous, 23m Lowestoft sailing smack and while a trust with an old boat might be expected to have occasional use for its own yard and slipway, Excelsior, in deference to the old adage ' Men and ships rot in port', spends all the time she can at sea, working as a sail trainer. So, expensive real estate and equipment which might see a month or two of work annually on her maintenance seems a touch extravagant.

There is, it is true, now a further substantial element in the Trust's equation in the form of the City of Edinboro', an 1884 Hull trawler which spent most of her working life off Iceland and the Faeroes and fished right up until 1980. Brought back to the UK, she was re-rigged before cruising western Europe and the eastern Med for much of the '80s and early '90s, only to find that cruising was more wearing than fishing. When one too many groundings finally lifted the cost of repair above her value, she was donated to Trust and towed to Lowestoft, where she awaits that repair. The third slip under construction is for that purpose.

Yet, even with two boats to maintain, the Trust buying and maintaining its own yard might still seem to be stretching things a little. But there is some lateral thinking going on here.

One problem for all owners of traditional boats now is the gradual loss of the old skills. Much though old-style boats - the sail traders, sail fishers and sail trainers - stir emotions, they aren't being built much these days which in turn means that there are few trainee shipsmiths, riggers and block and spar makers to carry those skills forward through the 21st century. The more august and intact members of the fleet like Excelsior might be in the hands of trusts formed for their survival but others languish in neglect or dereliction for want of funding and a viable end use. Thus the fading of the skills which made and sustained them only compounds the problems for those who would rescue a shattered hull and the history it stands for.

But then who would pay? Who would foot the bill for the training and retention of craftsmen when the demand for their skills is at best unpredictable and at worst always likely to be exceeded suddenly by supply?

But that is where the lateral thinking begins, for the work on City of Edinboro' will be long and expensive. She is no lightweight to be craned out onto some quay where volunteers can work away as time and inclination allow. She is 25.6m by 7m, a leviathan of her kind with massive sub-waterline capacity which will be fundamentally rearranged for her new sail-training role. The prospect of doing that work on someone else's slipway with the meter ticking from the outset - even assuming that the necessary skills would remain on tap for the duration - was never a starter.

It was the availability of the George Prior yard which suggested the way forward because another factor then came into the reckoning. The knock-ons from decommissioning in Lowestoft, as elsewhere, have added to an unemployment level already above the national average. And that unemployment qualified the town for national and European funding of work-creating projects - capital items as well as employment generators. Here then was the chance both to create jobs and to establish a training and working facility for those threatened skills which, in the Trust's case, already had work lined up in the form of the restoration of City of Edinboro'.

The yard was bought with money from a number of sources, including grant-making trusts and private contributors, but the larger part of it came from the East of England Development Agency and from the PESCA European Regional Development Fund for employment schemes targeting areas suffering through the contraction of fishing. Neither the Development Agency nor PESCA has much to do with old ships but they have everything to do with keeping people working or putting them back to work and the potential loss of local slipways and associated work opportunity is precisely the sort of thing that both seek to combat. The first New Deal trainees, classed as Premises Maintenance Workers, started at the yard in June 2000 and helped to get it up and running.

By then, the Trust was scrounging anything from teapots to portacabins and it still does because already, Excelsior and City of Edinboro' are merely two of the growing number of boats which have been or will be worked on. For the final part of the overall strategy is to run the yard as a general repair facility in order to have a self-funding base for the Trust's boats when they need it.

The yard's acquisition means the Trust now has the security of a permanent shore base for its operations' says yard project manager and one of the Trust's founders, John Wylson. 'At the same time the facility has been saved for other port users. Eventually our offices will be based here. Since starting at the yard we have been able to give many New Deal trainees valuable industrial work experience in a town where such experiences are few and far between. The aim is to keep alive the skills needed to maintain traditional ships from 15m to 37m length. Ultimately we hope our facility will be able to save a succession of historic vessels.'

The yard already has a clutch of tradesmen and trainees working on boats and a number of vessels - historic, traditional and commercial - have used the slipways.

And there is a further aspect to the operation which stems from the boat sizes to which the yard is geared.

'In the size range we can take, there are many different forms of construction' says John. 'There can be hulls of steel, concrete, aluminium, fibre glass or clinker or carvel built timber. We do not expect to provide all the necessary skills, but specialist local firms are able to make use of our spare capacity and that has brought valuable work into the area.'

Thus while the Trust cannot afford to keep all the skills on tap, it makes the slipways and ancillary facilities available on a rental basis to other firms and vessel owners who then bring in their own skilled labour to do the necessary work. And because the yard is now one of the few places where traditional skills can be practised on this scale, the demand is there. Local firms recently brought in a diving support vessel and a large aluminium motor yacht. One more traditional visitor, the Brixham sail trawler, Kenya Jacaranda, now owned by the Mayflower Sail Training Society on the Thames, was worked on by nine shipwrights brought up from the west country. The Trust thus receives income from its facility without having to retain all necessary skills on the payroll and that income helps cover basic yard costs while its own craftsmen are funded from the trainees and remain available.

The Trust can then concentrate on its own boats and the requirements for their survival. The maintenance skills needed for large carvel-built hulls aren't taught much in boat building schools these days and neither are shipsmiths in great supply - the Trust's volunteer recently hung up his hammer for the last time - and yet fabricated metalwork is unacceptable in genuine restoration on traditional wooden craft; it all has to be forged.

It is still early days but things look promising. Activity is building up, mostly by word of mouth, and the order book is filling. There are usually four or five tradesmen working on the yard - contractors attached to visiting vessels as well as Trust employees and volunteers - and working alongside them are a gradually increasing number of New Deal trainees, some of whom may take to the industry and become the means for keeping historic vessels alive into the future.

So the Excelsior Trust, having seen an opening, has slipped into it and while its motives might not be entirely altruistic - the future security of its own boats has been the prime mover - the traditional sailing sector overall, not to mention Lowestoft itself, seem likely to benefit.

Visit the Excelsior Trust website.

Reproduced by kind permission of John Worrall © 2002