Sarum Boats: Wrap-up

5/28/09

Wrap-up

The tally for this year is four skin-on-frame canoes, one Oxford shell and two Grain surfboards. The surfboards were a new addition to our repertoire, and were challenging, as described in the previous season's posts. The canoes were a bit different this year, making use of an 'acid dye' and 2-part polyurethane from the Skin Boat School in Anacortes, WA. The consensus is that we like the new look, and I'm sure the skin will be more durable than our previous water-based coating.

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.