WoodenBoat School Maine

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Photo by: Christa Buckingham

On Tuesday, which was luckily the last cold, damp day of our week, we sanded the frames and began wiring the hulls together, installed the breast hooks and then glued the plank seams. By the end of the day, we had each created something that looked roughly like a boat, and it was pretty thrilling.

Wednesday brought warm sunshine and the barn doors were wide open as we clipped and pulled the wires, sanded the interior and began filleting — applying smooth stripes of epoxy mixed with wood cellulose to lend a little structural stiffening and round out the interior corners. This was probably the most challenging part of the build for many of us — oh, OK, for me. Harris’ dory on sawhorses mocked me with its perfectly smooth and glossy fillets — ours at first had a grittier texture, pockets of drag that reflected a hesitant application. Frustrated, I probably spent twice as long on this part as I should have, but our fillets looked respectable in the end. We moved on, applying interior fiberglass to the 9 mm okoume bottom and up the first few side panels.

Classes ran each day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or a little later, if we were in the middle of something. Room and board at the school is $450 per week, and three excellent meals are served each day. As we learned, choosing this option leaves you with more time to explore the school’s waterfront — a flotilla of boats is available for the students’ use, and a sunset sail up Eggemoggin Reach is a hell of a way to end the day. We had chosen to rent a little cottage on the water, and we left class each day, filthy and exhausted but awfully happy, went home to our porch to watch others sailing in the sunset, and then had an early dinner and slept like the dead each night.



By Thursday, students who were laboring through the Fundamentals of Boatbuilding or working on a 5 x 10 skiff in Stitch and Glue Construction were wandering in to gaze wistfully, and a little bit lustfully too, at our boats taking shape. We trimmed the interior fiberglass, sanded the hulls, shaped the bows and then applied the exterior fiberglass to the bottom and lower side panels and installed the skegs. Only one student was building his dory with the optional sail rig, so we all watched as Harris assembled a mast step and installed a daggerboard trunk.

On our last full day, Friday, we had really picked up momentum. The days seemed to be flying by, and the progress was starting to make me giddy. I was ready to chuck it all for a career as a boatbuilder — leave it to me to find the only career on the planet that’s possibly less lucrative than boating journalism! But what did I care? I was working with my hands and beauty was emerging. I was made dizzy by the seductive scent of cypress and buoyed up by the thought of the school’s traditional Friday night lobster bake. I was ready to move to Maine and make a go of this whole wooden boat thing.|



But Saturday morning hit me like a bucket of cold water. Most of the classes end on Friday, so it was sad to come to the quiet, empty barn, as a cold, damp mist moved back in, and remove the clamps that had secured the rails to the boat. Yes, the boat. There was no doubt about it now: We had built a strong, elegant 17½-foot wooden dory in 5½ days. Harris gathered us around to walk us through the roughly 40 hours of finishing we still had ahead of us at home (more epoxy, lots of sanding, varnishing and painting) but still, I knew it was over. My week as a boatbuilder had come to an end. As we loaded the dories aboard each other’s roof racks, exchanged e-mail addresses with our classmates and promised photos of our finished craft, Karyn and I vowed: We are coming back next year to build another boat. We are going to give in and be just like those crazy people who go to Disneyland, year after year.

WoodenBoat School, 207-359-4651; www.thewoodenboatschool.com