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 The boat is called the Sunbeam, which was the name of a local boat, sailed and fished by generations of my wifes' family. The name of the boat passed on to a newer vessel four times, the helm passed to a younger man many more.
The large block is Dunhouse Blue sandstone, from the North of England. It weighs about one and three quarter tonnes. The boat is carved from Black Pasture, a hard Scottish sandstone. The mast and rig are stainless steel. The mast is three times longer than you can see and pins the boat to the block.
 The boat is set to point 15 degrees West of true North. 15 degrees is the same as one / twentyfourth of a circle, the amount the planet turns round in an hour.
If the boat was pointing due North, the sundial would be set to Greenwich Mean Time. It would also be one hour out during the summer, and it sits nicely in the green where it is.
The angle between the rig and the boat is 21 degrees, so the dial is set up on the deck the same as for a flat sundial to be used in the tropics. Hong Kong and Mecca are both at 21 degrees latitude. The boat sits at an angle on the wave of 35 degrees from horizontal, so altogether the rig sits at 56 degrees. The 56 degree line of latitude runs through Edinburgh and is not far out in the Firth of Forth. This means the rig of the boat, the gnomon of the sundial, is parallel with the pole of the planet, and would be pointing up at the pole star if the boat was set to North.
 The planet we live on tilts as it turns on its pole, or axis, like a ball on the spin with a wobble. Or the mast of a boat cutting waves. The regular dip toward the sun and swing away from it drives the rhythm of the seasons and slowly turns long, light summer nights into winters’ dark afternoons. Up in the Orkney Isles where the boat heads, in the midsummer months, even in the middle of the night you can see that it doesn’t get dark at all. They would need an even steeper angle on a sundial up there.
 Oatridge Sundial
This sundial design of mine was commissioned by the staff as a gift for the retiring principal of Oatridge Agricultural College. It is fashioned from a block of Binnie Crag sandstone. This is the stone that was used to build the Scott monument on Edinburghs' Princes Street. The quarry, on the college land, was reopened to supply stone for its restoration. There were a couple of blocks left over, and so we used one of them for this.
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