Just after his 75th birthday on October 22, 1919, Ernest Jack Muir decided to write down a "few things" that he remembered as one of Australia's best known designers, builders and ocean racing identities. He thought they might be interesting for his children and grandchildren. So Jock (his nickname from childhood) got together his scores of boat designs, logs, scrapbooks and photograph albums and started to write but, in his words: "It developed into a long job. I'd think I was going well, then I'd remember something I'd missed and pretty soon my few notes were a big mess." Encouraged by his eldest son, John and sailing friend Russell Duffield of Sydney and supported by family and friends, he decided: 'I would do the remembering and someone else could get it all together." As a traditional wooden boatbuilder at Battery Point for more than three decades from the 1930s, his recollections provide the present generation with a link to that period even further back when names such as Charlie Lucas and Percy Coverdale ruled the shipbuilding yards. His earliest memories on the waterfront include Perce Coverdale: "I used to hang around the sheds after school watching him, helped by Athol Taylor and "Chook" Newman, build several Derwent Class one-design yachts, one of which, Gnome, was built for Walter Taylor and is still sailing on the Derwent today. "Perce was undoubtedly one of the State's greatest boat builders and I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge from him. I remember an example of the craftsmanship that I learnt from him. He was talking about a small wooden lifeboat dinghy and he said...'you know mate, you could poke this out into heavy weather when even the Zealandia (a large passenger ship) wouldn't look at it'... such was the quality and soundness of wooden boats built in Tasmania."