The Proprietors

 Mike & Lisa Hooton

Mike was brought up next to Burnes Shipyard in Chichester Harbour, builders of Nicholsons, SCODs and Folkboats.  

 Mike and Lisa Hooton bought Weir Quay Boatyard in 1999. Mike had just sold his software company and started to restore a 1934 Blackwater Sloop in his shed in Norfolk. He was looking for beaching legs and noticed a small ad in the classified section of Yachting Monthly offering a Boatyard for sale.

The setting on the Tamar was so glorious and so completely unspoilt that a lifestyle change beckoned. Mike and Lisa, with their two children,Daniel and Sophie, moved from their farmhouse on the North Norfolk marshes where they had been living for more than 20 years to Weir Quay within 2 months.

Mike was brought up next to Burnes Shipyard in Chichester Harbour, builders of Nicholsons, SCODs and Folkboats, it was there he found his first boat at the age of nine - a firefly that was too big for him. WQB is uncannily similar to Burnes Shipyard and subliminally the move to here was a move to another home territory.

Mike's professional life has formerly been spent building enterprises in the public and private sectors in rural areas and these have included the arts, software, food industry and management services.

Lacking a marine trade to be useful in any other capacity, Mike has become the Yard driver of crane, tractor and hydraulic boat transporter.

It was a steep learning curve when Mike arrived at the Yard in 1999, but he has mastered every boat moving task and manoeuvre on the River and in the Yard.  It has become a matter of personal and corporate pride and distinctiveness to park boats neatly and safely when they are shored up on the Yard!

Lisa trained for 3 years and works as a teacher of the Alexander Technique.

Daniel is reserve boatman and drummer when he ís not touring the world or reading history at Bristol. Sophie wants to go surfing.

Mike is full time hands-on manager and foreman of the Yard.