Sarum Boats and Beyond: First Spring Paddle

3/21/12

First Spring Paddle

I started this outing, in my skin-on-frame canoe, from the Hotchkiss Road access to Thousand Acre Swamp, in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. Picked off a geocache at the suspension bridge seen here, then portaged to Mill Pond, where I put back in to paddle across to the final short portage to East Indies Pond.

Outlet of East Indies Pond

Mill Pond, in the19th century, powered a sawmill

Path of the paddle

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.