Sarum Boats: Oxford Shells

All four boats are decked. On two, the cockpit rim and deck wash are on, and we are beginning to prepare the mounts for the Pantidosi Row Wing.

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.

4/26/08

Oxford Shells