Gunboats restored!! BBC Video attached

Firefly625

Firefly625

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I thought I had found an HSL in the middle of France.

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I posted these pictures on here in September 2007, but no one had any information on Gracie.
 
Firefly625 said:
MGB81 Gunboat and RAF rescue boat, both restored. Praise be to those who donated the money and did the work, great to see these wonderful boats in action!!!

....sorry, my geekie love of classic boats coming out! :rolleyes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/8505534.stm?ls


....oops, sorry, had missed the news page of mbm....

http://www.motorboatsmonthly.co.uk/news/441883/world-war-ii-motorboats-saved-for-posterity
Click to expand...

102 was East Coast based for many years & was in a few films
 
No, she was the full 71ft. My father bought her from the Navy in 1946 and had her converted to a houseboat in a shipyard in Shoreham, where that photo was taken. Maybe the angle of the photo makes her look foreshortened.

She was very nice inside, for those days, with bathroom, two separate toilets, coal fired heating, etc. The stripped out engine room was the full beam of the boat and about 20ft long with a large sliding hatch in a raised roof which we could sunbathe under.

My Dad always fancied somehow getting some engines in her and taking her to sea, but it was never to be.

We moved in in 1947, when I was 1 and sold her when I was 11. When we got our first own property in 1971, our first bed was two of the Kapok-filled wardroom bunk matresses side-by-side on the floor.

She was towed to Littlehampton in 1955 and ended her days there in about 1991, when she caught fire and burned out.

Lots of happy memories!
 
Wonderful bits of machinery. They were both moored at Bucklers Hard for a while, and you always knew when they were giving the engines a quick run-up :) Glad to see that their future has been assured - things were looking a bit dodgy for a while.

It sounds as if the asking price has dropped a bit - I seem to recall that Phil Clabburn was asking £750k just for MGB 81.

I never lived on an MTB, but I went out a couple of times in this little baby in the 1960's:

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sailorman said:
102 was East Coast based for many years & was in a few films
Click to expand...

Just to confuse things there are two 102's about!! One is the one in this film, an RAF high speed launch, the other is a Motor Torpedo Boat.

MTB 102 was active at Dunkirk and D-day. At the former, it was used as a command vessel for some time by Rear Admiral Wake-Walker and at D-day it was used to review the fleet by Churchill and Eisenhower.

I think you are referring to the MTB which was 'discovered' as an engined house boat in Brundall on the Norfolk Broads in the 70's. Returned to operation by Kelso Films and used in The Eagle Has Landed and a Dutch file Soldiers of Orange.
Operated by my Sea Scout group for many years, where aged 11, I leaned offshore navigation. Now passed into a trust for preservation.
http://www.mtb102.com/
 
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