WoodenBoat School Maine

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Photo by: Christa Buckingham

There’s a place I go, in my mind’s eye, when the day has been filled with a lot of those little frustrations that vex the spirit: It’s an old farmstead on the coast of Maine, with a green lawn that slopes gently to the sea, barns that hum with the quiet, contented energy of people doing something they love, and a scenic waterfront where one lovely wooden boat after another awaits your command ... This is WoodenBoat School. And it’s a little piece of heaven for anyone who loves the water and traditional boats.

The scenery of Blue Hill peninsula is your first indication that you’re headed somewhere magical. It’s beautiful, of course — it is Maine, after all. But as you drive east on Route 175, along Blue Hill Bay, you get farther and farther away from big-box stores, traffic, modern stuff. There is nothing but beautiful blue-black water to one side, peppered with lobster boats and lined by rocks, evergreens and old houses with attached barns.

Brooklin, Maine, which is home to WBS, is a small town with a general store, a library and a year-round population of about 700 people. But WoodenBoat’s presence has an enormous impact on the area, bringing 700 to 800 students to the town each year for the approximately 100 courses it offers, which range from sailing to marine electrics, scrimshaw to figurehead carving, wooden boat surveying to blacksmithing.

Jon Wilson founded WoodenBoat magazine in 1974 and has been phenomenally successful, growing his readership from 9,000 subscribers after his first year in print to 100,000 readers within 10 years, adding two new titles (Professional Boatbuilder and Small Boats magazines) and starting the WoodenBoat School in 1981. What you feel when you’re at WBS is that a place that’s as wonderful, as communal and as dedicated to something as supposedly impractical, beautiful and arcane as wooden boats has got to be the result of real vision. It doesn’t just happen. Though Wilson is less involved in the school and magazines than he used to be, he has tapped into a deep vein of passion for wooden boats that is self-perpetuating, if not self-sustaining (as the hard-working staff surely knows). What Wilson has created at WoodenBoat School, with the help of Rich Hilsinger, who runs it with gusto and grace, is like a wooden boat Disneyland, minus the plastic perfection and the cartoon characters come to life ... Here, adulation is reserved for any handmade craft of gorgeous lines that’s been built with enough love and care to last a lifetime. It’s like Brigadoon with brightwork! Maybe that’s why 60 percent of the student body each week is alumni.

Early this summer, I made my second trip to the WoodenBoat campus, but my first as a bona fide student. My partner, Karyn, made the trip with me: We were going to build a Northeaster Dory! John C. Harris, the owner of Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC), would be teaching our class, and we’d be constructing this 17½-foot beauty in 5½ days (read more about the boat here and see the complete photo gallery). Looking at Harris’ finished dory on sawhorses outside the barn, and knowing my general skill level, that seemed highly unlikely. I had imagined myself capable of creating a shorter, squatter, uglier boat, maybe something with a flat bottom, but not this long, lean, elegant lapstrake craft ... How the hell was I going to build this?

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The design is Harris’ own and is constructed with CLC’s patented LapStitch process and a pre-cut kit. On Monday, after a Sunday evening welcome and introduction, we got to work: We sanded the hull panels, made of 6 mm okoume, and assembled the frames, the thwarts, the rails and the transom. Harris introduced us to MAS odorless epoxy, which would become our best friend in the days ahead as we mixed cup after cup of the stuff, sometimes with additives, to various consistencies for multiple purposes.