Marine engineers make boat out of skip

After plugging drainage holes and bolting on a 5hp, two-stroke motor, two marine engineers made a vessel out of a skip.

“We couldn’t believe how well it worked,” Jake Harris told The Sun, after lowering the 125kg 12ft skip by crane into the River Medway, Kent.

According to the paper, ‘the cutting edge craft chugged along like a normal boat’.

“When I saw the video I was amazed and thought it was a stroke of genius,” says Ky Campion, at East Kent Recycling, from whom the skip was hired.

“Skip boat worked well,” says Harris via facebook. “Need to make a bracket to hold the outboard better. Will add the pub umbrella for the next trip out.”

The duo is planning on using their new vessel to cross from England to France.

“It took about five minutes for us to do,” Harris told The Mirror. “As long as it took to drink a can of cider. When we got out there it felt great. We just couldn’t stop laughing.

“I’d got the skip changed that morning and me and Sam [Newstead] decided to have a couple of ciders after we finished work and he stood in it. We could have swum back to shore if we had to though.

“We were going to take my little dinghy out and we couldn’t be bothered in the end so thought about strapping the outboard on this skip instead.

“They have drain holes in them as well so we had to cover them with sticks and rags with a hammer. We were confident it’d work.

“We get up to stuff like this all the time. It’s what we do for fun. We weren’t nervous about it. It was just great fun.

“We had a bit of string tied to it at first to make sure it didn’t go too far and sink but when we got about 20 yards from the wall we thought ‘sod it’ and untied the string and just went for it.

“It’s certainly cheaper than buying a boat. It was only £216 with the VAT. We took a risk but it worked out well.”