Over the Thanksgiving holiday, our ground crew James and I were able to visit a family friend of his over in St. Michaels MD who is putting together a wooden boat. This isn't just your typical canoe, its a 44' long "Bugeye". While I couldn't tell you what the heck its supposed to look like when its finished (other than its got some kind of pilothouse on it), its a BIG BOAT. Most of the lumber that is being used on it was cut from right on the Eastern Shore of MD. The mast timber was taken from just south of Cambridge. He said that him and his building partner are single-handedly keeping West System in business. He cannot trailer the boat out, instead, he's going to have to use a house moving service to move it through town to the Maritime Museum's skipjack launch and put it in there.

At any rate, I figured with all the talk about all these hi-tech building methods, some of you might appreciate some of the lower-tech stuff and the craftmanship required to make it all work.

Pics are here if you care at all.

If you all want more of this stuff follow the link below to a 70' wooden schooner. A few winters ago I decided I needed to get out of the house so I started to work in the Burhnam boat yard in Essex, MA. His family came to the New World 11 generations ago and have been building boats ever since. After the boat was finihsed I crewed on it until I moved to MD. Most of the tools and methods haven't changed in the last hundred years. Check out the constuction pics on the website.
Schooner Fame

What do you mean he can't trailer the boat out? My old Volvo wagon towed some pretty big boats in its day.

It's amazing how many people do these type of projects in their garages. The only problem is most of them are never finished.

I remember a guy once who was building a helicopter in his basement. He miscalculated and couldn't get the fuselage out through the door.

nothing low tech about wood...
After all it is natural carbon fibre..

This wasnt a garage.

it was definitely a boat shed/yard.

In fact, two years ago the original shed collapsed ontop of the frame of the boat. So the shed built around it is younger than the 4-year old boat it encloses.

I remember a guy built one of the early automobiles in his basement (they called them "horseless carriages" then) and was dismayed to find it too wide to negotiate the doors. If Henry Ford hadn't taken a sledghammer to that doorframe, someone else might eventually have adapted mass production for cars.

A translated Dutch Poem by a well known female childrens book writer. Her work was translated into several languages.

Please bear with me for the translation.

Romanticism

Everytime I encounter the word romanticism
I think of my father
Who was building an aeroplane of concrete on his attic.
He told everybody that it really could fly
if it hadn't been too big to fit through the windowpane.

A.M.G Schmidt

http://www.annie-mg.com/huiskamer/about_annie/introduction.html

That's great Wouter!
When I was a boy growing up on Cape Cod there was a man and his son who were building a concrete boat in their backyard. It must have weighed .... I can't even guess. 35 -45 foot long. Like maybe a 15-20 foot beam. We always stopped in to see the progress (not much) whenever we were in that part of town (always people standing around watching) but the part that fascinated me was that he had NO HOPE of ever getting it out of his backyard without removing either his house or one of his neighbors. Didn't seem to phase him though. I can remember him saying it didn't interfere with the boat-building experience. I went off to college and I've never heard whether the boat reached the sea or not. I'd love to know.

Greg
Nick, I saved the website for the schooner out of Essex MA. My partner lives in Beverly MA so I think I will work with them next year on either a birthday party or a company outing. Looks fantastic. Thanks!

I know of a couple that was building a yacht out of concrete during the 80's as well. I was a teenager back then as well. Fascinating stuff; a boat out of concrete, but now I understand that it really can float and sail !

Wouter

Tad, Looks really cool to me! I hope you can post pics as she progresses. Sorry I missed the PM.

Nick, I saw that beauty a couple of times when she was being built. What a great experience it must've been to have been a part of the construction and crew!

Thanks guys. The Fame is a great boat. I had many surreal weekends where I would be blasting around Salem Sound on my TheMightyHobie18 on Saturday, then sailing the schooner on Sunday. It was like going through a 150 year sailing time warp. I'm hoping to be able to get enough time off work this summer to spend a week up there crewing again.