The Wooden Boat Shop - Tim Phillips is Australia’s most successful wooden boat builder. His Wooden Boat Shop at Sorrento, employs 27 tradesmen and apprentices and each year turns out a steady stream of beautiful Couta Boats and traditional launches. Bruce Stannard reports from Port Phillip Bay. (Photo) The Nepean Launch is a traditionaly built 30ft carvel launch.

It was raining, cold and miserable as I crossed The Rip, but as soon as the Queenscliffe ferry slowed on her approach to Sorrento the sun came out and I went to the weather deck to take stock of the enormous changes that have washed over the bayside village since I last came here 30-odd years ago.
All the pretty little weatherboard fishermen’s cottages that once adorned the hillsides have long since gone. In their place stand the summer homes of Victoria’s megarich. Gleaming white helicopters are now stationed where humble fishing boats were once drawn up on the narrow sandy beach and in the summer months there are probably more Porsches, Mercedes and BMWs here than in any other part of the country.
But it was not the trappings of extraordinary wealth that caught my eye so much as the array of gleaming white flagpoles seen in front of virtually every house. Neatly manicured lawns were spiked with magnificent traditional poles, all shipshape and Bristol fashion, with their yards neatly squared and their gaffs set at precisely the right angle to carry the national flag.
Right along the shore, Couta Boats with their arching jib-booms and handsome Cheviot Launches were bobbing cheek by jowl at their moorings: so many in fact that I lost count before the ferry docked. The boats, like the flagpoles, have one thing in common.
They’re all products of the Wooden Boat Shop, the result of the creative genius, the energy, the initiative and the passion of one remarkable man. His name is Tim Phillips.
All those who know and love Australia’s traditional wooden boats will be well aware that Tim is the bloke who not only saved Victoria’s lovely Couta Boats from oblivion, but also nurtured their revival and eventual re-emergence as one of our most popular traditional wooden boats in Australian waters.
The Tim Phillips story is one we should all know and not least because it demonstrates what can be achieved when a person with talent, drive and passion sets his sights on an ambitious goal and refuses to compromise in its pursuit. Along the way he’s helped to create a seachange in attitudes ashore as well as afloat.
Wooden Boat ShopIn affluent Portsea and Sorrento I was struck by the sensitive use of weathered timbers and galvanised iron, materials that echo the early vernacular architecture of the Bellerine Peninsula. Like the boats in the bay, many of the houses have a charming, timeless quality that reminded me of that other wooden boat mecca, the Atlantic coast of Maine.
Despite all his success, Tim Phillips remains true to himself. He does not belong to the hi-tech world of the 21st century, nor even to the 20th century if it comes to that. He is instead a genuine throwback to the latter half of the 19th century, a time when deepwater windships reigned supreme on the oceans of the world and sail was still the only motive power among the myriad small boats that fished and traded around the Australian coast.
Barefoot in salt-stained shorts and a bulky old roll-neck sweater, a black woollen beanie is clamped down tight his whiskered head and gives his deeply-lined, weather-beaten face the authentic, unvarnished look of a lobsterman.
It’s as if he’s stepped straight out of the faded sepia-toned photographs of the fishermen that adorn the walls of the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum.
wooden boatTim is that rarity in Australia these days, a specialist wooden boat builder who is as passionate as he is knowledgeable about the traditions and the practice of fishing under sail in the treacherous waters of Bass Strait. The fact that he is also a multi-millionaire is neither here nor there. His real wealth lies not in the bank, but in his profound understanding of and unwavering commitment to the maritime heritage that once shaped the lives of the fisher folk of Port Phillip Bay.
At a time when every other wooden boat builder in Australia seems barely able to keep his head above water, the Wooden Boat Shop in Sorrento is thriving. I found 50 boats standing around the yard in various stages of repair, but almost double that number are due to come in over the next few months for their annual haircut and shave, ready for a spring re-launch and the up-coming summer of sailing and fishing. Three new boats are under construction in his three big sheds.
Cheviot 32.Tim employs 25 men including six specialist wooden boatbuilder and four apprentices as well as diesel fitters, painters and engineers, all of which makes him Australia’s biggest wooden boat builder.
Not bad for a bloke who started out 35 years ago with little more than a dream. That was a time when his friend, the America’s Cup crewman, Will Baillieu, gave him a book entitled: Do Your Own Brain Surgery. It was one of those you-can-do-it self-help tomes that dwelt on a single seminal theme: Don’t wait for your ship to come in, swim out to it.
Tim Phillips did just that. He fell hopelessly in love with the lines of the lovely Couta Boats, the big, beamy, open centreboard sloops that were once at the centre of Victoria’s fishing industry. He found a derelict 26-footer in a tidal creek, restored her and went in search of others.
The Couta Boat fleet, which had numbered several hundred at the turn of the 20th century, had long since been broken up or dispersed as they were overtaken by bigger, faster, more efficient motorised boats. Many of the old boats with their dipping lugsails and gaff-rigged gear were taken down to South Australia where for a few more years they fished the waters of Spencers Gulf.
Efficient 44.Tim ferreted them out of muddy backwaters and farmers’ fields where their upturned hulls were often used as dog kennels and chicken coops. He and his mates bought them for next to nothing and trucked them back to Sorrento where he restored and sold them.
In those days he’d put in a full day’s work in his own yard, then come home for a quick bite to eat and go straight out to a carport where he often worked until close to midnight.
Without knowing it, he was starting a movement that was to grow and grow into something approaching a Couta Boat cult. The wealthier citizens of Melbourne, whose opulent summer homes had long since replaced the humble fishermen’s cottages around the outer edges of Port Phillip Bay, lined up to commission new boats.
Eighty six have so far been launched. So great is the enthusiasm for the Couta Boats that Tim and his clients formed a club at Sorrento where they now race throughout the year.
From the observation deck of their splendid new clubhouse, Tim has the satisfaction of being able to look out over the broad arc of the bay and see over a hundred boats that he has either built or restored.
Tim Phillips recently completed what is undoubtedly his most ambitious project so far, the restoration of his own boat, the magnificent 54ft topsail cutter Storm Bay.That’s a record of achievement that may well be unequalled in Australia.
But it’s not like Tim Phillips to rest on his laurels. Far from it. Although he recently completed what is undoubtedly his most ambitious project so far, the restoration of his own boat, the magnificent 54ft topsail cutter Storm Bay, he is now embarked on yet another, the resurrection of the lovely 50ft Huon Pine ketch Jane Kerr, a crayboat that had long lain neglected down the Victorian coast at Portland.
She was on the point of being sold to a fellow who planned to seal the holes in her wet-well and turn her into a fancy cruising boat. It was a prospect that Tim found utterly abhorrent. In a fit of indignation he stumped up the money to buy her. When he’s completed her refit he hopes she will continue in the life she was designed for, as a working crayboat, fishing the waters of Bass Strait.