Sarum Boats and Beyond: More Milestones

4/12/12

More Milestones

Just a couple weeks into the spring trimester, and things are looking good. By the end of the week, most of the thwarts should be in the skin-on-frame canoes. The stand-up paddle board is getting its last coats of epoxy before final sanding and varnishing.

Inwales in place, prepping to attach the thwarts.

Skegs for stand-up paddle board placed and glued.

Reinforced with fibreglass cloth, two layers

With a coat of epoxy

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.