With a yo-ho-ho and some bottles of rum an eccentric adventurer has been sailing his dry land “pirate ship” for 26 years.

And he hopes all the work he has put in at the bottom of his garden in Suffield Close, Selsdon, will see his pride and joy being crowned the shed of the year.

Keith Brown started work on the project as a refuge from his wife and two daughters.

He said: “It all started off as we were going to the Carib-bean quite a lot and I was bringing back stuff and I decided to create a Caribbean getaway in the garden.

“I have a wife and two stunning daughters, but I really needed a shed to get away from them occasionally, so I built the Caribbean drinking shed.

“The whole family wanted to come up there so I built a moat and then put two cannons there [that fire blanks].”

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Since then it has become a place where Mr Brown and his friends go for pirate themed parties and he is working on having a zip wire set up to transport rum from his house to the ship.

He hopes to have this finished tomorrow in time for the filming of Channel 4’s Amazing Spaces Shed of the Year programme on Friday.

Mr Brown said: “I have seen the other sheds and they are very impressive.

“I think the competition demonstrates the British eccentricity of being able to build something that is fairly mad.

“There are a lot of impressive sheds and the competition is fairly good.”

Anyone wanting to come to his shed for parties has to wear fancy dress and in the past Mr Brown said he has had gatherings with 40 people all dressed as Captain Hook, from Peter Pan.

As well as the firing cannons there is a 1,000w sound system, disco lighting and lasers, a smoke machine, a drawbridge, mechanical parrots and two bar areas.

The contest was launched nine years ago by shed enthusiast Andrew Wilcox to celebrate the best of British sheds.

If you think you deserve to win the shed of the year title then visit readersheds.co.uk by April 7 to enter.