Barely eight hours after Cricket and Glade’s post-Grand-Canyon-trip party in the boatshop, we piled into the 4-Runner before dawn and headed for Oregon with a trailer loaded with lumber and tools.

We stayed in a lovely period B&B in Susanville (Roseberry House–highly recommended), and continued north in the rain. Lots of rain, rainbows, and beautiful fall leaves.

And oh, how it rained. We set up shop the following evening in Shelly Pruitt’s shop in Vida, Oregon.

The McKenzie River Drift Boat, which gave rise to the Grand Canyon Dory, attributes its origins to several innovators in the McKenzie River drainage. Among them were Veltie Pruitt, who, around 1920, devised a small, lightweight variation on the existing river boats– and his friend Prince Helfrich. Together these two men pioneered many of the rivers in Oregon and Idaho. It was an incredible honor to be immersed in this heritage. Below are Jeff Helfrich, grandson of Prince, Shelly Pruitt, daughter-in-law of Veltie, and Gene Jones, president of the McKenzie River Discovery Center, which sponsored our class. They were in and out of our classroom on a daily basis.

Veltie Pruitt’s son Leroy (Roy) was a lifelong McKenzie boater and craftsman and had long dreamed of building the perfect boatshop workspace. After his death and the subsequent Holiday Farm fire, which devastated the area and much of the Pruitt estate, Shelly rebuilt, and created Roy’s dream shop, where we had the honor of teaching. Shelly is an AMAZING and wonderful hostess!

As always, we began the class with drawing up the lofting from a set of coordinates called a Table of Offsets. The class then  connected the dots and refined the lines of the boat(s) they planned to build–in this case a pair of Doryaks.

We had four recitivists from last year’s Oregon class, one from a previous WoodenBoat School class, and seven new folks. All were great workers and learners.

Here’s Chelsea grinding out scarf joints for the side panels.

From the lofting we created drawings of the ribs, transom, and bowpost, and built them right on top of the drawings. Here’s the gang finising them off and installing bulkheads.

On day three, having made all the parts, we assembled the hulls.

On goes a transom.

In the break room we had a Doryak we were selling for the widow of its previous owner. It is always incredibly helpful to have a finished example of the boat to use as a teaching aid. Tyee now lives happily with a family of boaters on the shore of the McKenzie just a few miles downstream of the boatshop.

The bottoms went on with our very eccentric system whereby we create a continuous fiberglass inner chine of fifty ounces of biaxial fiberglass with a six-ounce glass overlay. It’s bomber. It’s a tricky system, but no more difficult than a traditional wooden chine, and far stronger and easier to repair.

While the bottoms were going on we steamed the gunwales and clamped them to the newly shaped hulls.

Next we turned the boats right-side up and finished the deck framing and guttering.

Then it was time to install the decking. This is always done with the gunwales clamped tightly in place, so that the decking will hold the side panels exactly where they should be.

Once the decking was installed and the seams fiberglassed, we did the final installation of the gunwales. Toward the end of one day, once all the floor supports were installed, we rolled the boats over and applied the fiberglass bottoms–25 ounce biaxial glass with mat, overlaid with six-ounce plain glass. Once that kicked we applied the flow coat.

With the rubber outer chines glued on, hatch lids built, hinged, and latched and a gajillion other things attended to, it was time to send the boats home with their new owners to be completed. Here’s a five-foot wide Doryak going out a four-and-a-half-foot doorway.

And two very happy new boat owners in front of the rest of the class.

The prime mover getting us entangled in this amazing community is the equally amazing Roger Fletcher–a longtime ramrod in the McKenzie River Discovery Center and author of the seminal book, Drift Boats and River Dories, that is largely responsible for the current resurgence of wooden drift boats and dories. Roger and Brad have been working together since the late 1990s. Together with many helpers they created the 2001 replica of Buzz Holmstrom’s boat, Julius. On one of Roger’s visits to our class this year he gave us the partial model of of one of his first attempts to replicate Julius. It cried out for shrinedom.

Although the forecast for the two-week class was solid rain, we did get quite a few breaks before it was over.

We took the weeked between the two weeks of the class to indulge in our obsession with All Things Dory. We drove out to Pacific City to see if we could find the mythic Pacific City Dory Fleet–known for beach launching and landing their ocean dories in the Pacific surf. It was the wrong time of year to see them in action, with 15 to 20-foot offshore breakers coming into the bay. Here’s Haystack Rock, locally known as simply The Rock. There’s great fishing out there–if you can get there.

But even though it’s not boating season we hit the jackpot. It was Halloween weekend and we got to join the Trick or Treat the Dory Fleet gathering and meet some of the principals in the Dorymen’s Heritage Center. Here is Ben Vaughn explaining how the original rowing dories worked before the motor versions took over.

Ben has restored Coquille, an old two-man rowing dory. They were launched with the bow oarsman pulling hard into the breakers, while the second oarsman stood pushing and fine-tuning the angle as they hit the waves.

Nowadays they are mostly larger, more modern motor versions, with a broad flat stern for planing. But they still have that unmistakable dory prow. Here is Bob’s gorgeous dory.

Ben gave us a tour of some boats and other things the next day. Here are two of his trophies for Best in Show in the Dory Days Parade held each July. Which one do you find more impressive?

Unfortunately, although we hoped to find a bunch of disagreeable nitwits that we would not have to revisit, we had stumbled into another amazingly welcoming and wonderful group of dory geeks like ourselves that we now have to go back and play with. We’re planning to be there next July for Dory Days.

It was finally time to head home. Here’s a lovely Rock Fish in Bandon, made entirely of ocean trash.

We stopped in Coquille to pay homage to Buzz Holmstrom.

And the always amazing Bandon Beach, where Buzz Holmstrom scavenged the bent piece of fir for the bowpost of the original Julius F.

We stopped at the Metcalf Sawmill to pick up a few thousand dollars’ worth of Port Orford cedar for future boats.

And finally, after some very long days of driving, we made it home. HOME! HOOOOOME!

We spent a few days cleaning gutters, raking leaves, building a home for gas tanks and propane away from where we cast bronze (about time!) and paying our winter heating bill. Perfect timing–it snowed the next day.

It would have been nice to rest, but we had comitted to a photo shoot for Carhartt and needed to get a few things ready. So we designed a whole new boat–a McKenziac–a scaled down version of Woodie’s Last Boat. It’ll be a one-person open rowboat for modest whitewater. We’re thinking of building a fleet if they work out, for rowing classes on the San Juan. We built a strongback and banged her together. Isn’t she adorable?

Up she goes to the loft while we get a few other things ready.

Peace River got a very crooked stern in one of her rebuilds in Idaho many years ago, and we had told her owner that if he ever crashed, to crash the stern so we could straighten it. By god, he did!

Meanwhile Cricket started a lettering project on Water Bear.

Glade and I set up the steam bender and the bronze foundry, and pounded out a few sand molds to pour. With all our props ready, we went to bed knowing the next morning we had to cast bronze, steam bend gunwales on the McKenziac, hoist Peekaboo out of the loft and onto the trailer, carve an oar, work on Peace River, do name-painting on Water Bear, and pose for portraits and interviews–all before lunch. Keep your eyes peeled for Carhartt ads this fall!

At 5:30 AM the invasion began. The neighbors thought ICE had come to take us away.