Good News! For those of you that, like me, were so sad to see WoodenBoat School close for the 2020 season, I’m delighted to announce we are on track for a full season in 2021. With the good news of Covid vaccines coming online in the next few months, there’s a great chance we can return to “normal.”

WoodenBoat School, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is an amazing facility on the coast of Maine offering one and two week courses in virtually everything you can think of pertaining to wooden boats. It’s a stunning campus on the shore of Eggemoggin Reach–a branch of Penobscot Bay. When you’re not in class you have the opportunity to frolic in their fleet of vintage classic wooden boats.

I will be teaching “Building the McKenzie River Dory,” July 18-24. The class is filling fast so odds are we will be building two boats that week. The lucky winners of the lottery will each get to take one home for the cost of materials. A bargain.

We start with a Table of Offsets–a set or perhaps not entirely accurate numbers that describe the shape of the boat. We loft the boat from those numbers, that is, we draw it full scale, correcting any inaccuracies as we go. We then build the boat from those lines.

We build semi-traditionally, plywood-on-frame, but use the free-form method–that is to say, we skip the strongback phase of building and assemble the boat in open space from the parts we have made. During the course of the week we’ll cover most every technique you’ll need to build a similar boat of your own.

By the final morning we should be doing the finishing touches on the boats and launching them.

Here is Jonathan in a McKenzie he won in one of our classes. Go Jonathan!

Class size is limited, so call WoodenBoat School soon if you’d like to join us. (207) 359-4651. Or if the class is full or you have other interests, peruse their selection of other courses. You can’t go wrong at this place.