'It just seems to be something inside you. Like music or art. It has nothing to do with where you went to school, it is a gift. "Percy Coverdale, Athol Taylor, Charlie Lucas - they all had that natural aptitude. And others building at about the same time as I started were Max Creese (and his son Peter), Jack Behrens, who was based at Prince Of Wales Bay with his father, George, and George Lovell, Norm Taylor of Battery Point and the Wilson brothers, Alan, Keith and Noel, who specialised in fishing vessels at their yard, Port Cygnet." Ray Kemp, who is still building at Woodbridge and built Tasmania's sail training ship, Lady Nelson, was a shipwright at Muir's boatyard before he started out on his own. "I really feel a boat designer is an artist. By his creative ability he achieves a blend between accepted theory and the practical test of wind and wave. Around Hobart in the fifties, there was only a handful of people capable of achieving these goals. "About a hundred yards down the road from our yard was old Percy Coverdale's yard where I gained my first interest in the art. He was a lean, wiry man forever clenching a pipe between his teeth but he was a master craftsman. He built the 52-foot yacht Winston Churchill with Max Muir, who served his time with him, and skippered her to second over the line in the 1949 Sydney-Hobart race when he was 69 years-old." To underline his point on boatbuilders, Jock quotes from a book on famous American yacht designers : "It's a lonely sort of profession. It is an intangible thing, nothing to do with education, background or station in life. " (Published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, USA in 1974, entitled "The Great American Yacht Designers." Author Bill Robinson). He echoes the book's statement that yacht designing was originally very definitely a form of sculpture done in solids, not on paper and "it took an 'eye' and a feel that could not be defined." Jock adds: "One of the most important individual aspects is to have an eye for lines. You know instantly whether the line is right or wrong and whether the sheer is right. There is nothing worse than a bump or a hollow in the sheer." Boatbuilding, like designing, is, in Jock's words "an art all on its own." "A good boatbuilder has to be both fast and neat. A lot are one thing or the other but you have to be both. It is a very labour-intensive industry and everything has to be spot-on but done quickly as well. And you have to know, like the designer, when the line is right."