Sarum Boats: April 2016

4/23/16

April 23rd. Making good progress...

Some boats are getting skinned, some frames still being varnished today. The sea kayak has both its decks, but will now have a lot of 'detail' work to be done. The Oxford Shell is almost ready for its decks.

Loosely applied skin in the back; tightened skin in foreground.

Row of staples holding the skin on the gunwale

Foredeck wrestled into place.

...and glued and nail on.

Oxford Shell in the background.

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.