Sarum Boats and Beyond

6/20/26

Home from Scotland and back on the water.

Not a lot of paddling since last fall. mostly training for my hike across Scotland in May. Now I've had time for some short trips close to home.

12/2/25

Back to my favorite stomping grounds. Starting off Floodwood Road and doing a loop around the ponds. Also two nights out. Great weather. Water was very low.

9/25/25

New Territory

Three days paddling and two nights out. Beautiful weather. From Low's Lower Dam, down Bog River, past the floating bog and Low's Upper Dam to Low's Lake. Found a campsite and used the second day to explore further down the lake.

8/24/25

Closer to Home

On August 22nd, I decided to explore a spot a bit closer to home - the Bantam River and Bantam Lake, part of the White Memorial Conservation Center, in Litchfield, CT.

Lots of birds, Canada geese and turtles, loons and a Great Blue Heron. A couple of boys contemplating a jump into the river from a low bridge span.

8/7/25

Summer Jaunts

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.