Light rain falls from the London sky, tinkling onto the corrugated fiberglass roof above like mini chocolate chips. Sam Skinner sits on a stool beside the vintage Dawes bike propped up in his stand. Wheels and frames, parts and tools hang around the ceiling of this tiny canal boat, surrounding his head like birds after a cartoon character gets a good knock to the head. And this suits Skinner, a good-natured bike mechanic living and working full-time on his three-boat flotilla called Floating Bike Repairs.
Since he’s floating, Skinner changes location every couple weeks around the canal system in the U.K. On sunnier days, he sets up his workstand out on the deck or on the boardwalk beside his moored boats. Many of his customers stumble upon him while he is working, by happenstance. The rest of them simply ask—his regulars know to send him a text, give him a call, or check his Instagram for his most recent location.
Skinner is a maestro of a mechanic, charming the grittiest hubs back to functioning, and restoring the most battered old bikes back to their former beauty. On more than one clear day, he has spotted a bike marooned at the bottom of the canal and fished it out with the boathook. He cleans off the grime and salvages what he can from these wreckages—even if it’s just the handlebar—bringing it back to life. As he tends to each bike, he seems to sense their adventurous soul, coaxing it out of them as he gently polishes the frame.
For Skinner, bikes have always been about beauty and wonder. He fell in love with them as a young boy, riding through the enchanted forest of his backyard, full of trails and tunnels and magic.
As an adult, he found work with the magical machines in bike shops in London and Valencia. While working in Spain, Skinner found himself drawn to the superyachts in the marina in the similar way he felt pulled towards beautiful antique bikes. “The builders of these boats have really got the lines down—where they sit in the water, the way the water’s breaking over the bow,” he says, as sleek as the sweeping curves of a Peugeot step-through.
It’s the well-loved look that charmed Skinner, though, who found himself equally impressed by cheaper boats with old, worn sails and masts with stories to tell, like the tarnished head badge of a bike just begging to be polished.
Remi Bumstead
He spent six years sailing as a crew member on vacation flotillas and superyachts and kept a folding bike stowed away onboard for his days off, but his ride plans were often canceled by a spontaneous owner scheduling a last-minute cruise. “I just got sick of missing bikes,” Skinner says, after a while.
So four years ago, he opened his own bike shop on his own boat. Today, he’s docked outside the Princess of Wales Pub, where he’s been for the past few weeks. Beneath the rain-freckled fiberglass roof, he gingerly scrubs at the Dawes’s dingy crankset with a frayed toothbrush.
Captain of his own destiny and cruise director for a party of one, Skinner spends his days bobbing and tinkering, restoring beauty one bike at a time on the River Lea.
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