Sarum Boats

12/7/09

We are now one week into the winter trimester. Things have started to settle down and I feel a little less scattered. The skins boats have their gunwales and breast-hooks together, and we are milling the stringers. The shops band-saw ‘went south’ just when we need it, but when the new one is up and running, we will cut out the knees and stems and rip the cedar rib stock.

A finished Chester Yawl

On the kit side, we are gluing the scarfs for the panels/strakes of the boats and the shears and rubs so we have all our full-length pieces before we start stitching things together. These photos are from the Chesapeake Light Craft website. (I assume they won't mind me using them, as I'm giving them free advertising).

This is the Chester Yawl being stitched together.

Sassafras pair

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.