wooden boat
wooden boat: Boat Lovers Spend Day Building Their Own Boats
July 30, 2006 -- When you talk to boaters around here, it sounds like they've put their heart and soul into the wooden boats they've built.
Rusty Cooper devoted 100 hours to build a 16 foot boat. He used to have a plastic boat but now he says wood is the only type of boat he'll ever use.
Builders and students showed off 50 boats of delicate wooden craftmanship Saturday at the
Wooden Boat Festival. Many of the works of art were built by students from Cape Fear Community College.
Boat lovers also spent the day on the riverfront trying to build a boat from scratch. When they're finished, the ultimate test will be which team's boat can survive the water.
The festival even wants to make room for tomorrow's wooden boat lovers.
Cape Fear's boat building program is the only one of its kind on the east coast.
Report by Dan Cassuto
wooden boat: Wooden Boat Enthusiasts Race off Newport
Thursday, July 13, 2006
By Coty Dolores Miranda
The regatta, which attracted quite a crowd, was held on the club's Opening Day.
SEAL BEACH - Every yacht club has its source of pride - but for one Southern California club, it starts from the bottom up.
The 34-year-old Wooden Hull Yacht Club is home to some of the coast's finest and most recognizable sailboats.
On July 8, Wooden Hull YC's 15th annual Heritage Regatta brought handsome old and new wooden hull vessels to the waters off Newport Beach, impressing hundreds spectators on sea and land.
The First to Finish Audrey Nye Perpetual Award went to Bob Dodds and his Rhodes 40, Whisper; Thomas Cooper's Syrena took first in Class B sloops and Denton Porter's Herreshoff ketch, Patience, won the Class B ketch race.
The event also marked the Opening Day for Wooden Hull YC, formed in 1972. The club's members, with home berths from Santa Barbara to San Diego, were hosted by Balboa Yacht Club. Following the regatta, the vessels were open to public viewing.
The Wooden Hull YC Opening Day Reception and Heritage Regatta awards ceremony followed on the Balboa Yacht Club's Flag Deck.
"Our 15th annual Heritage Regatta and Opening Day Ceremonies is our favorite event and provides an opportunity to celebrate not only the heritage of our yachts, but the heritage of Newport Harbor and our shared passion for wooden hull yachts," said Wooden Hull YC Commodore Jerry Klein.
"Boats came from Marina del Rey to San Diego for the Heritage Regatta," said Staff Commodore and regatta co-chairman Alan Peterson. His own vessel - the Kettenburg K-40, Zephyrus, was delivered overnight by skipper Jack Peterson in time for the regatta. Though her home berth is Long Beach, she'd been in San Diego for the past few months participating in classic yacht regattas, said Peterson, who bought his first wooden hull boat and joined the club in 1996.
"I've always loved the heritage of classic wooden hull sailing vessels," Peterson said. "They sail differently. They feel different. There is an organic sense one experiences at the helm of a wooden hull as it sails through the water. There's something about the boats, each with many decades of experiences, memories and nostalgia attached. Wooden Hull YC is our connection for these experiences. It's where we gather as friends, share our boats and our techniques and our latest stories about what projects we have next. There are always projects on these boats - one is never finished."
It was 34 years ago that Clark Sweet and Ray Wallace first approached other wooden hull boat owners with the idea of beginning a club that would honor and promote traditional
wooden boats.
This was the decade (1970s) when fiberglass-hulled boats were making their way into Pacific Ocean racing circles, putting wooden vessels at a disadvantage. Within a short time, more than 100 wooden boat owners expressed interest and the Wooden Hull Owner's Association (WHOA) began. That same year, the WHOA's first race, from Newport to Dana Point, attracted 42 participants.
In 1991, the club voted to rename itself Wooden Hull Yacht Club.
Its membership roster reads like a who's who in Southern California wooden boats: the 70-foot gaff rigged cutter, Bloodhound, now plying the waters of Puerto Vallarta; the 1931 Fellows & Stevens 56-foot yawl Cheerio II; the 65-foot Kelpie - serving as this summer's substitute for Argus at the Newport Sea Base; the Alden 72-foot double top-masted schooner Dirigo II; and Tom Zetlmaier's Coast Rhodes 33 Lanakai, built in 1936 at South Coast Shipyard in Newport Beach.
Some members have hand-built their wooden-hulled vesels. Longtime member Woodson Woods, now living in Hawaii, spent six years building the 122-foot replica ship, Lynx, which now serves as the sail training vessel for the Lynx Educational Foundation. A newer Wooden Hull YC member, Thomas Kulp of Mission Viejo, also built his 24-foot Philip C. Boger-designed catboat, Jillian.
Although wooden vessels may seem to some a specter of the past, members like Peterson look to resurgence in interest for the classic beauties the vessels embody.
"I see our yacht club growing in the coming years - over the past couple years, we've reenergized our club, increased our membership and increased participation in our races," Peterson said. "We're a group of yacht owners who love wood, bronze, tools, varnish, paint and sometimes West System, and Wooden Hull YC provides our members the frequent opportunity to meet, greet and share stories."
For more information on Wooden Hull Yacht Club and its activities, visit its Web site at www.whyc.org.
Coty Dolores Miranda is a freelance maritime journalist who covers Southern California and Baja California, Mexico. She is a frequent contributor to The Log Newspaper.
wooden boat: Love of Boats Became Force To Transform Lives Adrift
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 23, 2006; Page C07
Inside a hot, cluttered warehouse on the Alexandria waterfront one morning last week, 19-year-old Josh Payne was looking for holes in a small wooden boat he had just helped build. A husky blond with a wispy beard, Payne knew carpentry; he learned from his father and an uncle while growing up in Spotsylvania. Now he knows the rudiments of boat-building, thanks to a program sponsored by the Alexandria Seaport Foundation that works to rescue youngsters caught in the malaise of the justice system by teaching them skills they desperately need.
"I learned how to be successful," said Payne, who landed in jail in the fall after deciding that selling drugs was a better way to make money than building houses.
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One of his mentors in that learning process was Paul Weeks II, a 62-year-old Arlington lawyer who was the program's managing director until his death from melanoma May 31.
Weeks, a lifelong basketball player who hit the hardwood with the same verve and focus that he brought to his law practice, was, in some ways, an unlikely participant in a program designed to rescue troubled youngsters, most of them young males.
Granted, he loved boats. He started sailing on Long Island Sound as a teenager, and he and his wife, Pam, kept a sailboat at Annapolis. He discovered the Alexandria Seaport Foundation when he wandered into its floating boathouse-office between Queen and Cameron streets looking for technical help on a wooden boat he was building in his garage.
But Weeks was no social worker, not even a criminal lawyer. Although he was a father, he was not familiar with the personal turmoil that such youngsters as Payne know too well. Educated at Princeton and George Washington universities, he was a corporate lawyer with a background in engineering. For years, his was a high-powered world of corner offices, corporate boardrooms and international travel, first with Communications Satellite Corp. and more recently with ICF Kaiser International.
Then, in 1999, Pam Weeks had hip replacement surgery, and Weeks decided to stay home for a while to help his wife and to take a break from his stressful career. He started spending more time at the foundation and became a board member.
After a few months, Executive Director Joe Youcha persuaded him to come aboard as a consultant and then as part-time managing director. Weeks kept a private law practice, with the idea that maybe he'd get back to big-time lawyering one day, but it wasn't long before part time at the foundation became full time.
"He just loved it here," Pam Weeks said as she sat in the foundation's cluttered, gently swaying second-floor office. "Going back to a regular law job just seemed less and less appealing."
Youcha, 43, a sailor and accomplished boat builder who grew up on the Hudson River north of New York City, took over the foundation in 1992, when its focus was tall sailing ships. Youcha had in mind starting a community boat-building program similar to one in Seattle called the Center for
Wooden Boats.
It was Bill Hunley, a board member and retired chief Navy architect, who suggested that youths should be the focus. The idea was to take high school dropouts in trouble with the law, help them get their General Educational Development diploma and teach them a marketable skill through building boats. The four-month course, relying primarily on volunteers, prepares them for a union job through a partnership with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.
"I needed an administrator who would focus on how to run the organization," Youcha said. "We were growing a lot, and we needed to figure out how to manage what we were doing."
Weeks was his man. For nearly six years, Weeks administered the program in every sense of the word -- accounting, fundraising, dealing with lawyers, police and probation officers, whatever was needed to keep things running as smoothly as a well-built wooden skiff.
"He was the glue here," Youcha said. "He was brilliant at being able to take what I had as a feeling, something visceral, and quantify it: 'Here's how we measure it. Here's how we come up with a conclusion.' "
"He knew so many things," said Howell Crim, who directs the apprentice program. "The scope of his knowledge ran from what size hole should I drill for this screw to how do you compensate for wobble in a satellite to how do I volunteer at the foundation."
But there was something more. The big, white-bearded guy got along well with the young men in the program; they enjoyed being around him.
"He helped out a lot of people, especially me," said Alhaji Carew, a slight 19-year-old from Sierra Leone who was a young man in trouble and without a country until Weeks helped sort through the chaos of lost immigration papers that had kept him in limbo.
"He was a real good guy," said Payne, who leaves the program in a couple of weeks to start a new job. "Just a real good guy."
wooden boat: Boat festival widens horizon in 29th yearWooden Boat Enthusiasts Race off Newport
Thursday, July 13, 2006
By Coty Dolores Miranda
SEAL BEACH - Every yacht club has its source of pride - but for one Southern California club, it starts from the bottom up.
The 34-year-old Wooden Hull Yacht Club is home to some of the coast's finest and most recognizable sailboats.
On July 8, Wooden Hull YC's 15th annual Heritage Regatta brought handsome old and new wooden hull vessels to the waters off Newport Beach, impressing hundreds spectators on sea and land.
The First to Finish Audrey Nye Perpetual Award went to Bob Dodds and his Rhodes 40, Whisper; Thomas Cooper's Syrena took first in Class B sloops and Denton Porter's Herreshoff ketch, Patience, won the Class B ketch race.
The event also marked the Opening Day for Wooden Hull YC, formed in 1972. The club's members, with home berths from Santa Barbara to San Diego, were hosted by Balboa Yacht Club. Following the regatta, the vessels were open to public viewing.
The Wooden Hull YC Opening Day Reception and Heritage Regatta awards ceremony followed on the Balboa Yacht Club's Flag Deck.
"Our 15th annual Heritage Regatta and Opening Day Ceremonies is our favorite event and provides an opportunity to celebrate not only the heritage of our yachts, but the heritage of Newport Harbor and our shared passion for wooden hull yachts," said Wooden Hull YC Commodore Jerry Klein.
"Boats came from Marina del Rey to San Diego for the Heritage Regatta," said Staff Commodore and regatta co-chairman Alan Peterson. His own vessel - the Kettenburg K-40, Zephyrus, was delivered overnight by skipper Jack Peterson in time for the regatta. Though her home berth is Long Beach, she'd been in San Diego for the past few months participating in classic yacht regattas, said Peterson, who bought his first wooden hull boat and joined the club in 1996.
"I've always loved the heritage of classic wooden hull sailing vessels," Peterson said. "They sail differently. They feel different. There is an organic sense one experiences at the helm of a wooden hull as it sails through the water. There's something about the boats, each with many decades of experiences, memories and nostalgia attached. Wooden Hull YC is our connection for these experiences. It's where we gather as friends, share our boats and our techniques and our latest stories about what projects we have next. There are always projects on these boats - one is never finished."
It was 34 years ago that Clark Sweet and Ray Wallace first approached other wooden hull boat owners with the idea of beginning a club that would honor and promote traditional
wooden boats.
This was the decade (1970s) when fiberglass-hulled boats were making their way into Pacific Ocean racing circles, putting wooden vessels at a disadvantage. Within a short time, more than 100 wooden boat owners expressed interest and the Wooden Hull Owner's Association (WHOA) began. That same year, the WHOA's first race, from Newport to Dana Point, attracted 42 participants.
In 1991, the club voted to rename itself Wooden Hull Yacht Club.
Its membership roster reads like a who's who in Southern California wooden boats: the 70-foot gaff rigged cutter, Bloodhound, now plying the waters of Puerto Vallarta; the 1931 Fellows & Stevens 56-foot yawl Cheerio II; the 65-foot Kelpie - serving as this summer's substitute for Argus at the Newport Sea Base; the Alden 72-foot double top-masted schooner Dirigo II; and Tom Zetlmaier's Coast Rhodes 33 Lanakai, built in 1936 at South Coast Shipyard in Newport Beach.
Some members have hand-built their wooden-hulled vesels. Longtime member Woodson Woods, now living in Hawaii, spent six years building the 122-foot replica ship, Lynx, which now serves as the sail training vessel for the Lynx Educational Foundation. A newer Wooden Hull YC member, Thomas Kulp of Mission Viejo, also built his 24-foot Philip C. Boger-designed catboat, Jillian.
Although wooden vessels may seem to some a specter of the past, members like Peterson look to resurgence in interest for the classic beauties the vessels embody.
"I see our yacht club growing in the coming years - over the past couple years, we've reenergized our club, increased our membership and increased participation in our races," Peterson said. "We're a group of yacht owners who love wood, bronze, tools, varnish, paint and sometimes West System, and Wooden Hull YC provides our members the frequent opportunity to meet, greet and share stories."
For more information on Wooden Hull Yacht Club and its activities, visit its Web site at www.whyc.org.
Coty Dolores Miranda is a freelance maritime journalist who covers Southern California and Baja California, Mexico. She is a frequent contributor to The Log Newspaper.
wooden boat: Life's dream yields winning design
CHARLES WATERHOUSE
11jul06
ALLAN Witt grew up in a family obsessed with designing and building boats and has now won an Australian
Wooden Boat Festival design competition.
Mr Witt, a Hobart-based furniture designer, won the festival's Derwent skiff design competition against 17 Tasmanian, interstate and overseas designers.
He has won $1000 and will work with the selection panel to further develop the design through extending the length and load-carrying capacity to make it suitable for an adult and one passenger.
And expressions are now sought by the festival from local boat builders to build the prototype of the skiff.
The requirement is to build a single prototype for trials and to build a second skiff, demonstrating building techniques, during the festival.
The competition called for designers to submit sketches or drawings and explanatory notes for a recreational rowing boat.
The specifications called for a boat of simple timber construction with unique Tasmanian characteristics.
Several designers presented models of their proposals but Mr Witt's entry was a completed 4.7m craft.
It was built from 6mm cedar ply planks and clinker fastened with glue and copper nails.
It has a raked bow, double chine flared sections and, in the style of a piner's punt, a solid huon pine transom.
Mr Witt, who has degrees in science and theology and is completing a Masters in Business Administration, built the internal parts of the skiff -- the rigger, sliding seat and stretcher assembly -- and his father, Lou, built the hull.
The aim of the competition was to produce a design for a vessel which could be rowed on the River Derwent, which could be constructed without having to be built by a shipwright, was a pleasure to row and would introduce people to wooden boats and could be carried easily.
The design entries will be on show during the festival from February 9-12 next year.
wooden boat: Boat festival widens horizon in 29th year
DOVER TWP. EVENT BECOMES A CLASSIC
Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/7/06
BY JEAN MIKLE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
DOVER TOWNSHIP — The Wooden Boat Festival, renamed the Classic Boat Festival, is not just for wooden vessels anymore.
The annual festival, sponsored by the Toms River Seaport Society, will feature classic fiberglass boats for the first time, according to festival chairman Chet Ehrman.
The 29th annual festival will feature antique, classic and contemporary
wooden boats Saturday, and classic fiberglass boats — both sail and power — Sunday.
Judging and awards for the wooden boats will be at 3 p.m. Saturday, with people's choice and chairman's choice awards for the fiberglass vessels to be presented at 3 p.m. Sunday.
The festival also will feature local marine artists, boat rides on the Toms River, music, games and food. Many of the boats will be available for boarding by the public.
The Maritime Museum, at the corner of Water Street and Hooper Avenue, will be open both festival days. The museum is a short walk from the festival area.
The featured boat this year is the Barnegat Bay sneak box, which is celebrating its 170th anniversary. This shallow-draft, round-bottomed boat was used for duck hunting and was first built by Hazleton Scaman of West Creek in 1836, according to information distributed by the Seaport Society.
Other boat builders in the area began designing their own versions of the sneak box. In the last half of the 19th century, Samuel Perrine and, later, his son, J. Howard of Barnegat, began building "improved" sneak box models which established the boat's reputation as a stable craft that glided easily over the shallow surface of the bay.
Originally, the sneak box boats were 12 feet long and 4 feet wide. They were shaped like the bowl of a spoon on the bottom and were able to glide easily through the water, allowing hunters to literally sneak up on flocks of resting geese or ducks.
Water fowl was a major staple in the diet of the bay people, and the sneak box boat was light and could be easily hauled by a solitary hunter.
Modern sneak box boats, which still are sailed on the Barnegat Bay, are 16 feet long and 5 feet wide. Some are now made of fiberglass instead of the native cedar wood used by 19th-century boat builders to construct the craft.
About 30 restored sneak box boats race each August at Mantoloking Yacht Club in the "Duckboat World Championships." Many sneak box boats will be on display at the boat festival.
wooden boat: Wooden-boat fans share passion with landlubbers
By Karen Gaudette
Adrian Ahlstrom built his first wooden boat in about 15 minutes — masts, sails and all.
His mom, Delmar, wasn't sure it would be seaworthy. She turned it over in her hand to reveal a little secret: a hole where the hand drill had gone a bit too far.
"I think it's gonna sink," she confided with a grin as her 2 ½-year-old clambered onto a giant propeller on the grass nearby.
But no matter. Wooden boats have a long tradition of coming back from the deep, of being rebuilt, repainted, renewed.
Just ask fans at the 30th annual Lake Union Wooden Boat Festival, many of whom described owning such a vessel as embarking upon a passionate relationship, one complete with sleepless nights, thousands of dollars spent and a love that requires constant attention.
"It's a love affair, really. You're never done," said Craig Kinnaman, an engineer aboard the Sand Man, a 96-year-old tugboat from Olympia that he helped restore after a failed bilge pump sent it foundering up to its smokestack at the city's Swantown Marina.
The festival runs through Tuesday at the Center for Wooden Boats along the south end of Lake Union. It features tours of historic vessels and speedboats, jaunts around the lake in rowboats, boat-building demonstrations, displays of nautical art and equipment and a model-boat pond.
History floats
Like floating museums,
wooden boats reveal their histories everywhere: in the smoky walls of galleys, in the pitted, aging decks where lumbermen stomped around in cleated boots, in the worn spots of captain's wheels where weathered hands once grasped.
"If God had wanted us to have fiberglass boats, He would have made fiberglass trees," said a placard on one boat.
Handmade canoes agleam with varnish sat in the sun, ready to be caressed and ogled. Richard Cleveland of Klamath Falls, Ore., crafts and restores wooden canoes. Nothing glides along the water as quietly, he said. He remembered once he and his wife, Lorena, surprised an otter that glanced up and suddenly realized it had company only an arm's length away.
Walt Plimpton, a festival volunteer and wooden-boat aficionado, likes to admire the design of many boats docked near the center. You can judge a boat's quality by its proportions, Plimpton said, by its blend of form and function. He stops to admire the smooth lines and colors of a fishing boat, the Molle B.
"It's a work boat, but it has wonderful aesthetics," he said.
Landlubber questions
A stroll around the festival grounds offers a tour of some of the more interesting detritus of seafaring: Piles of rusty chains, a propeller the size of a child's sandbox, random anchors strewn about with bits of rotting rope.
Exhibitors at the festival cheerfully explain mysteries to landlubbers. For instance, how do pots and pans cling to stovetops when the boat's afloat? Answer: Usually, they're penned in by little guardrails. One booth offers free temporary pirate tattoos. All the Jolly Roger pirate flags were gone by lunchtime.
Back at the boat-building tent, Ethan Merchant, 10, of Spokane, put the finishing touches on his creation. After cruising Lake Union earlier in the day, he says he wants a houseboat and a sailboat.
What would he name that sailboat?
"Maybe the Waverider," Ethan said.
Karen Gaudette: 206-515-5618 or kgaudette@seattletimes.com
or call 206-382-2628 for more information.
Copyright © 2006 The Seattle Times Company
