From dream to reality,
Our own Lake

Bridlington model boat society was founded in August 1979, the only place nearby that we could sail was the passenger carrying motor boat pool for holidaymakers on the seafront. This was only available in the winter so we had to travel out to sail during the summer. Obviously our own pool (lake) sited locally and available all year round was the ideal, as we had no funds we began by contacting the local council to see if we could persuade them of the need for such a facility. It soon became obvious that whilst they would like to help, the funds for such a scheme were never going to be available. After a couple of years of fruitless searching for an existing stretch of water that we could rent, we realised the only way we would ever have our own pool was to fund and build it ourselves.

To raise funds we decided to hold an engineering exhibition in our local ballroom, the Spa Royal Hall, one of the biggest venues of this type on the east coast. In September 1981 we held our first show, it was hard work for the few club members we had at the time, but a reasonable profit was made so we vowed to continue until we had enough funds to build our own pool. The "engineering" exhibition gradually transformed into a Hobbies Models and Craft Festival and we have run it every year since.

After our 1985 show we decided it was time to start looking into the possibility of aquiring some land and costing out what size of pool we would be able to afford. It would take me forever to itemise all the time spent on searching and negotiating for somewhere we could build a pool, but there were many blind alleys and a lot of frustration involved. To cut a long story short our local council were very helpful, and agreed to rent us an area of land on a long lease, upon which we could build our own pool. From here on we obtained several estimates for the construction of a pool, these estimates varied wildly, the dearest being three times more expensive than the cheapest. We were very fortunate in that a Mr Gordon Fox of FOX PLANT(Owmby) LTD, Owmby by Spital, Lincoln was sympathetic to our efforts to help ourselves, and quoted us a very modest estimate. We calculated that after our 1987 show we would be just able to afford it, so we arranged a start date for late 1987.

The method of pool construction is shown below, basically our test bores on the land showed an underlying clay base, the idea was to create vertical walls to link in with this underlying base to form a rectangular pool approximately 70 by 90 yards in size and 4 feet deep. It would have been nice to have gone a bit bigger for the multiracers in the club, but that would have meant waiting to do another one or two years of fundraising and we did not want to hang on any longer.

On Monday January 11th 1988 Fox plant arrived with three bulldozers and an excavator. Over the next few days it was amazing to see the pool taking shape. I went out from work every dinnertime to confer with the foreman about any problems they were having, for instance he would ask, are you sure this large sewage pipe is disused, I had to look confident and say yes it's been checked out, and pray we didn't get covered in a shower of xxxx when they dug it up. After only ten working days their work was done, we had a big hole ready to be filled with water.

Robert Daniel