Sally gets used to admiring glances

SALLY O’Keeffe has grown accustomed to being eyed up several times a week. In fact, she has been attracting dozens of visitors to her home in Querrin, which is just west of Kilkee.
However, Sally isn’t saying much about all of this recent attention. That would be tricky given that she is an almost complete, traditional wooden boat, built under the stewardship of boat builder, Steve Morris, who is part of the Seol Sionna boat-building group.
“The boat is named after a local woman in Querrin, who used to sail turf boats up to Limerick. Comfortably you’d take eight adults for a sail,” Steve explained.
While the boat is called after a woman who sailed the estuary generations ago, the design is not a copy of an old boat.
“It’s a new design. We’re not copying anything that we found parked up in the mud. There would have been a lot of consultation between the architect, Myles Stapleton, who’s a Dublin guy.
“He’s a man with vast experience of traditional boats and worked in the Malahide boatyard in Dublin as an in-house architect,” Steve told The Clare Champion.
“Myles has a big interest in traditional working boats from Brittany, the south coast of Ireland and England. So he had a big input into the design of the boat,” he noted.
Steve, originally from New Zealand, has been acquainted with the Querrin area since 1986.
Another man who has contributed hugely to the project is Críostóir Mac Cárthaigh, an archivist-collector at the UCD Delargy Centre for Irish Folklore and Linguistics.
His mother is from Tullaher and he is the editor of the boating book, Traditional Boats of Ireland.
“He did a lot of research and found a lot of etchings, sketches and oil paintings of boats on the Shannon Estuary from the 1800s onwards,” Steve noted.
Sally O’Keeffe is almost sea worthy and is due to hit the water in April.
“At the moment we’re fitting floor boards and putting the last few coats of paint on her. The plan is that she’ll go into the water in April. Seol Sionna are planning a big launch party, somewhere around the middle of May.
“It’s a very traditional boat and you’d find its like anywhere on the west coast of Europe; Brittany, England, Scotland or Ireland. She’d be very typical of a northern European work boat from the 1800s,” Steve pointed out.
Deciding what type of boat to build took some time for Seol Sionna to finalise.
“In the initial discussions we were asking ‘what exactly do we want to build?’ The fact that we couldn’t find anything to copy, I thought, gave us great scope because what the group decided it wanted to do was bring back a bit of interest in the water and seafaring.
“We want to hark back to the traditional fishing, turf carrying and cargo carrying on the Shannon. The big interest is to try and get people looking back at the water and get them sailing.
“One of the most exciting things that has been happening with the whole project is that the local schools have been visiting,” Steve added, having received visits to the workshop from Querrin, Carrigaholt, Kilbaha and Cross national schools.
While Steve directed operations, the boat-building project wasn’t a sole effort.
“We interviewed about 40 people. We chose 12 and split them into two groups of six. We had six on the Monday and six on the Wednesday and we also opened up the workshop on Saturdays for people to drop in and have a look at what we’re doing.
“We’re down to Mondays and Saturdays now and a core group of about nine volunteers that are building the boat with me,” Steve concluded.