Sarum Boats: June 2024

6/17/24

Further From Home

An overnight trip up and back on the Oswegatchie River in upstate New York (I mean really upstate, not the Catskills). Camped at Buck Brook lean-to and paddled to High Falls and back to the car the next day.

Some rocks and small riffles, lots of beaver dams, big and small.

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.

6/17/24

Further From Home

6/7/24

Summertime, downtime. Messing about on the Housatonic.