Rockport Marine does some wonderful work, but the best part of the yard is the people. Wooden boatbuilding, especially, seems to draw in people that are interested in craft and doing things right, and  have good characters.

A few years ago, we started a tradition to celebrate an long-time employee at our Christmas party each year. In December, we honored Eric Sewell, who has been building boats at Rockport Marine for thirty years. He is a man of exceptional talent and great personal integrity.
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It’s been a while since I posted about the goings on in the design office here a Rockport. If you’ve been keeping tabs on us in other ways—Facebook, newsletters, or out on the water—you already know it has been a busy summer here at Rockport Marine and I hope you’ll forgive us for the radio silence from the design office. Every project is an all hands on deck effort as completion dates approach, and ADVENTURESS has proved no exception. We had a spectacular turnout at the launch, engine trials and sailing trials went smoothly, and we got to show her off at the Fife Symposium in Castine alongside a few of her cousins. Perhaps most memorably we had a fantastic few days of casual racing in the Castine Classic Yacht Race, the Camden Classic Feeder Race, and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta. In fact, if there was a downside to that whole week it was that from the foredeck I never got to see how good she looked going about her business. It would be fair to say she was well received. In fact I think ADVENTURESS is the first of our projects to draw enough traffic to the website to crash the server. She did it twice.
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“A friend and, in a technical sense, an employee, but more truly as a partner.” That’s how Olin Stephens described his relationship with Aage Nielsen. As to their working relationship during Nielsen’s tenure as head of the Sparkman & Stephens Boston office, he had this to say: “Theoretically I was the chief designer, but I was well aware that Aage’s knowledge and experience were far greater than my own.”

As far as endorsements from your boss, on a scale of one to ringing, that one knocks the bell right off the top. And this is from a man who has himself been described as the most successful and influential yacht designer of the last century. Mr. Stephens wrote these words for all posterity in the forward to Maynard Bray and Tom Jackson’s book Worthy Of The Sea. The book is a fine effort filled with biographies of Nielsen and his boats and is an excellent introduction to his life and work.
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Westward

This past weekend I attended the Classic Yacht Symposium at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island. Held every other year, the symposium is a sort of academic conference for classic boat enthusiasts of all stripes: owners or aspiring owners of classic yachts, as well as builders, riggers, sailmakers and sailors. 

About two hundred people assembled for a full day of papers in the Hall of Boats, the main display room of the museum. Although it was a particularly raw spring day and the hall never quite warmed up, there was something powerful about sitting amongst examples of some of N.G. Herreshoff’s finest designs.
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When I was first getting into wooden boats, I rented a room from Alec Brainerd, the owner of Artisan Boatworks. At that time he was just getting his boatbuilding business up and running. That summer, not only was he my landlord, but we also worked together on the schooner Appledore. He taught me to drive a big schooner, and would also chide me about my unwashed dishes.

Living and working with Alec was my first introduction to the world of yachts, and one name that was often on the tip of Alec’s tongue was “Fife.” For Alec, and many, many others, the boats designed by William Fife III are…special somehow. I came to understand that perfectly rational people who loved boats (okay, maybe that’s a contradiction) would lose their heads over a transom that tapered down to almost nothing, or an interior so well-proportioned that to alter one detail was a call to arms for a certain kind of boat nut. And as I began to look at the designs and understand them, I started to appreciate why grown people’s eyes would grow moist of a Fife yacht under sail in the summer time.
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Rockport Marine sits at the mouth of Rockport Harbor, on the west side of Penobscot Bay in Maine.  It is hemmed in by a river on one side and a creek on the other, which both fill to bursting in the spring run-off.  During that time of year, fishermen string large cone-shaped nets across these outlets to catch elvers, small eels that run up to spawn.  The eels are thin and clear, and considered a delicacy in Japan, where they are shipped to and sold.

Before the boatyard was a boatyard it was a sail loft, a roller rink and a lobster processing plant, at different times.  The Allen family bought the large, barn-red buildings and docks in the 1960s.  On the ground floor, Luke Allen began repairing and storing wooden boats.  His wife, Norma, started a restaurant on the second floor, serving solid New England fare: clam chowder, haddock with a cream and crab sauce, prime rib and meatloaf.  The couple lived on the third floor with their four children, and could look out on the dooryard of the shop, the docks and moorings, and to the lighthouse on Indian Island at the mouth of the harbor. It is a deep harbor, with good holding ground, but exposed to the south, and can churn up like a washing machine in a southerly blow. In the summer, then, as now, it was packed with yachts and lobster boats.

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