Sarum Boats: February 2022

2/4/22

Video Clip of the steaming, bending and lashing process

A poorly shot video of the controlled chaos that is the boatbuilding class. I was live-streaming this to keep a recording of the process for future classes and as a preview for the class that will be doing this when they return from their long winter weekend. Between messing with my microphone cord stepping in and out of camara view, not very elegant, but a bit of a look into the rib installation process.

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.

2/26/22

February 22

2/4/22

Video Clip of the steaming, bending and lashing process