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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Since our last post, summer has faded into fall, and frantic pace of the ADVENTURESS project has finally slowed down. The work list, seemingly endless and overflowing on yellow legal pads, has been whittled down to a few items. The boat has traveled to the Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors Show, the Newport International Boat Show, and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta and thousands of people have taken off their shoes, walked over the decks, poked through the drawers and cupboards, and run their hands over the raised panel interior.
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Over the course of the year, I give a lot of tours to school classes. Although the teachers sometimes balk as their charges frolic through the heavy machinery and scaffolding, kids generally love the boatyard. For some kids, it is even a real "a-ha" moment--that they might be able to make a living making something beautiful with their hands.


Over the past three years, I have shown hundreds of school kids the ADVENTURESS restoration. Kids and adults alike find it overwhelming, 83 feet of classic yacht loveliness crammed into one of our work bays. On the floor, the boat towers over us, and when you walk on deck, you must duck to avoid hitting your head on the ceiling. My favorite question to ask them is, "How the heck do you think we're going to get this big boat out of here?"


The question really stumps them. I've heard children postulate that we could remove the roof and crane it out, flood the shop and float it out, or even drag it out with ropes. To complicate matters, our boat hoist can't lift a boat like ADVENTURESS, she is just too heavy. So now really--how are we going to do it?

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Last week my comrade in arms for all things blog posted a great piece about the biennial Classic Yacht Symposium held at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island.

In it she touched on the level of thought and care that goes into the restorations of historically significant classic yachts and of how this yard has developed a restoration philosophy that leaves room for the owner’s tastes and preferences.

Ours is probably not the true purist’s preferred approach. It would not surprise me if curators of master works rendered in other media took umbrage to this methodology. I find that where you happen to find yourself standing in the debate about the importance of originality is far less important than creating an atmosphere where the debate actually occurs.
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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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Ideally, custom boats are built to perfectly express and mold to the character of the person using them. In the case of GYRE, a restoration we began in the fall, we faced a different challenge: shaping an existing boat to meet a client’s needs. Our client bought a used, wooden cruising boat and asked us to transform her into a comfortable daysailer. To this end, the cabin house was cut back by a few feet. 

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This must be a stressful time for marketing professionals. It seems I keep reading about the demise of traditional avenues for advertising. From what I’m told, ever evolving “Social Media” seems to be the panacea , but it would appear that the constant shape-shifting makes it pretty hard to get a firm grip on that too. Likely the feeling of uncertainty about where this is all headed is the first indication that I am no longer an especially youthful member of the labor force. I remember watching how my parents’ awkward, stumbling, negotiations with various forms of “new technology” resulted in what I interpreted to be reluctance followed by resignation of their growing technological obsolescence (for carbon dating purposes those technologies included ATM machines and cordless phones) . It is no comfort to me that, at age 34, I may be approaching the same obsolescence, but I tell myself that this apparent inability to keep current has more to do with the amount of time spent cooking and cleaning up after kids than ossification of cerebral tissue. For the record, prior to my Father’s aforementioned resignation I had the opportunity to learn my first engineering axiom: violence and portable electronics do not mix.

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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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Image courtesy of Andrew Williams

If you have been following these blogs or checking in on our website or Facebook posts you’ve noticed that these last few years have been filled with a lot of restoration here at Rockport Marine. It occurred to me that there’s a part of that restoration process that is almost completely hidden from view.

Photo by Billy Black

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The 1936 L.F. Herreshoff ketch BOUNTY came to us on a truck from California in late November. Since being here she's come apart fast. Our initial work will include most of the backbone. BOUNTY had lost much of her shape, partly due to a line of scarf and butts in her plank keel and deadwood just aft of the ballast. 

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