A natural comeback
Photo / Billy Black
Atlantide, a historically significant 122-foot commuter yacht built in the 1920s, undergoing an extensive refit at Front Street Shipyard.
Wooden boat-building in Maine has earned a small but robust niche in a field today dominated by fiberglass and composites.
Brooklin might be the epicenter of the trade, as home to WoodenBoat magazine, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and its boat-building school, as well as a number of boat-building shops.
Wooden boat templates, tossed aside in the 1950s and ‘60s, when fiberglass revolutionized boat-building, have been brought back and the age-old skill reborn.
Boat builders and customers talk about the natural “feel” and comfortable ride, the work of art created individually, the heritage of skills and traditions. Every boat is different, “tweaked” a little here and there, subject to the builder’s eye for improvement. It’s a passion, an art, a heritage.
Shops and boat builders like Bunker & Ellis in Southwest Harbor, Harvey Gamage in South Bristol and Ralph Stanley in Southwest Harbor kept the tradition alive.
Back in the 1950s, a Massachusetts yard had a contract to build a replica workboat from the Pilgrim days. The yard sent for Maine boat builders, because they were the only ones who knew how to do the job authentically. The authentic wooden boat builder remains alive and well in Maine today.
The 1970s, with “back to the land” on the minds of young rebels, saw something of a renaissance in the field, soon to be documented and driven by WoodenBoat, whose founder, Jon Wilson, famously lived in a cabin and had his telephone “nailed to a tree — half a mile down the road,” as the company history tells us.
But the field has changed. Just 20 years ago, there seemed to be small-boat businesses around every turn of a tree stump. Suddenly, sheds and barns along the coast were now workshops turning out wooden kayaks and Cotuit skiffs, river bateaux and prams, lobster boats and launches, dories and dinghies. Often, traditional building methods were combined with “cold molding,” a process that uses wood veneers held together by epoxy glue.
Repair and restoration, along with routine storage and maintenance, is a strong component for businesses such as Bass Harbor Boat, where Robert “Chummy” Rich inherited the mantle from his father and grandfather, and is today passing it to his own protégé, Rich Helmke.
Other builders include Steve White, son of Brooklin Boatyard founder Joel White; and Taylor Allen, who first began building boats as a teenager at Rockport Marine, the yard founded by his father, Luke Allen. Both yards remain premier designers and builders of wooden boats, employing both traditional plank-on frame construction and modern wood-epoxy composite construction. Now White, Allen and others have leveraged their expertise to found the Front Street Shipyard, the large-boat construction and service facility in Belfast.
Small-craft builders continue to keep their hand in the game, from the strip-planked Pulsifer Hampton made by Brunswick-based Dick Pulsifer, to the cold-molded Pisces 21 turned out by Jean Beaulieu and his crew in Bernard, to the traditional small craft of Brooklin-based Eric Dow. Island Falls Canoe in Atkinson specializes in the 19th century designs of E.M. White of Old Town, while Shaw & Tenney in Orono continues to serve up traditional oars, paddles and spars.
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