Sarum Boats and Beyond

6/7/25

Don't buy any canoe you need help to carry.

Paddle your canoe at least once a month

every month of the year.

Canoeist's Little Book of Wisdom,

Cliff Jacobson

5/24/25

Graduation Day

In more ways than one, the year is over. I will be retiring at the end of the term, and it is unclear if this blog will continue, though I may transtition into recording my own adventures on the water and in the boat-shop. This will be 196 boats of various types, but mostly skin-on-frame canoes. I may have one or two left in me, but mostly I hope to get out on the water and enjoy it while I am still able.

Three of the eight boats completed this year.

A few words of instruction,exhortation and encouragement.

Into the water to get to know their canoes.

Boat Building at Salisbury School

This is a record of boat building at Salisbury School, a boys' prep school in northwest Connecticut. In 2002, Eliot Hovey finished his Annapolis Wherry, from a Chesapeake Light Craft, stitch-and-glue kit. He rowed it to a very respectable fourth-place finish in the Blackburn Challenge.

Since then, students /faculty have built sea kayaks; lake kayaks; a couple of prams; Oxford rowing shells; one canoe; a Chester Yawl, a skiff and two surfboards from kits.

Along the way, I learned how to build low-seat, skin-on-frame, solo canoes, which have become our most popular project. After a few of those, I built a ‘recovery’ kayak and a plywood coracle. As of summer of ’14 we were up to seventy-five boats (I’m not counting the surfboards as boats). My lifetime total is well over a hundred boats.

I've also built three West-Greenland style kayaks and four coracles; for the blog of the latter, go to Steel Coracle.

8/7/25

Summer Jaunts

6/9/25

6/7/25

5/24/25

Graduation Day