Caraboat

The Caraboat was built in the early 1970s by Caraboat Ltd of Sutton-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, a business linked to the local firms T & R Carr & Son and Ashfield Auto Ltd and run by managing director Tom H. Carr. It combined a boat hull with a built-in trailer chassis, so the craft could be towed on the road and floated off at the water.

Construction

The hull was designed by John Askham, a former naval architect, and moulded in glass-fibre by Bourne Plastics in Nottinghamshire. The internal trailer was made by Bramber Engineering Ltd.

Mk I and Mk II

An owner of an early boat found that the Mk I has buoyancy tanks in the stern, filled with water through two holes below the waterline once afloat. They hold roughly 200 to 300 litres, which adds that much weight at the rear when the boat is pulled up a slipway, and he suspected this may explain a crack near one corner of the wheel housing. His view was that the original hull sat too high in the water: early boats were corrected with the ballast tanks, and the later Mk II was given a completely different stern shape.

The folder includes pictures from a period brochure and a 1973 "big boat" model.