Sarum Boats: August 2010

8/31/10

Parker River, Newburyport, MA

While visiting family in Gloucester last week, I got out on the Parker River. This winds through a salt water marsh, as far as the ocean, though I didn't get that far.

8/22/10

Whale Watch

Not strictly boat-building, but very cool! These are from Maia's photos of the cruise.

The boat sailed out of Gloucester, MA, but these shots were taken within sight of Provincetown, over the Stellwagen Bank.

8/6/10

Todays trip

7 or 8 miles on the Housatonic, starting (and finishing) at the Falls Village power dam. Saw one Heron, and a bunch of day-trippers from Clarke Outdoors.

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.