Chris Jakeman: B Marshall Marine

It’s been an interesting shift for Chris Jakeman: from working as a engineer with a specialism in mechatronics to boatbuilding. Especially as he wasn’t, in the beginning, even particularly interested in boats.

“It was first and foremost Barry Marshall’s idea,” he admitted: the pair had begun their professional association in the context of Mr Marshall’s engineering works, but when Mr Marshall needed a hand with his boatbuild projects, Mr Jakeman started helping out from 6.00am before getting to his day job at 9.30. It seems Mr Jakeman was rapidly hooked, especially since there was room for creative ideas about how to get things done.

The pair, both being engineering veterans rather than boatbuilders, set out from first principles with Barry taking the lead as he’d already built one boat, St George, himself.

“Everything, absolutely everything was decided from scratch” said Mr Jakeman. This includes quite a novel way of initiating construction: starting off upside down. “If you look at a boat, it’s much easier to make it from a flat deck upward, into the arc of the hull rather than laying down a keel and then supporting everything from that,” he pointed out. Then once the basic shape is formed, it’s pulled outside on three (Marshall-built) skates and turned over by crane before kitting out and finishing.

This particular stage of the process, Mr Jakeman admitted, is a fairly tense affair despite all the calculations “as it can mean having a hundred tonnes in the air”, but from the first this upside-down build has been a success, “so much so that once we’d done the first boat this way we have kept doing it”.

However, he added that other processes have had to develop. So, while the construction of the Marshall Art, a semi-displacement 73ft vessel from a Bruce Roberts Waverunner design, was pretty much decided as the pair went along the next build – the real start of B Marshall Marine as a separate business - was a very tailored dive support boat with a number of pretty novel but exacting specifications from Sub Aqua Diving Services. Therefore the Curtis Marshall DSV “had so much inside the hull we had to have everything pinned down before we started”.

Boatbuilding has obviously become a satisfying business for Mr Jakeman, and it’s even brought a great deal of his previous experience into play – including that mechatronics interest “which is actually the basis for marine vessel control systems”, he explained.

But his proudest moment has been getting the vessels into the water. With characteristic independence, the pair didn’t hire in equipment, but even made the launching skids. “It is actually very big thing to launch a vessel of over 200 tonnes that way,” he said, but it’s in keeping with the whole ethos: “We’ve always done everything ourselves.”