The Class Project Must Float

By Peter Stoler

A school in Maine teaches the craft of wooden-boat building

There is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.

The Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Unless, of course, it is messing about with boats. Grahame's Water Rat got as much pleasure out of fussing around with his boat as he did from actually rowing it. So do Lloyd and Pat Kennedy. That is why the retired Air Force colonel and his wife have driven from their home in Harrison, Ark., to the tiny (pop. 550) coastal community of Brooklin, Me. And that is why a sunny summer morning finds them bent together over a building frame, beveling the planks on what will, in another day or two, be an 8-ft.-long dinghy, capable of carrying them for a sail on the waters of nearby Eggemoggin Reach or, later, the lake near their Ozarks home. "I've spent a good part of my life going to school and taking courses," says Kennedy. "But I've never been to a school like this."

Neither have the Kennedys' "classmates," all of whom are students at an unusual institution called, appropriately, the WoodenBoat School. Fascinated by boats in general and by wooden ones in particular, most have been avid readers of a bimonthly called WoodenBoat, and most have dreamed of acquiring the skills necessary to build their own craft. But few have had the time or the freedom to apprentice themselves to the small number of American boatbuilders who work in wood. "I'd like nothing better than to take a year off and learn the trade," says Alan ("Dusty") Rhoades, a Navy lieutenant commander attached to Atlantic Fleet headquarters in Norfolk, Va. "But I've got a family to support, kids to put through college. I needed an alternative."

Responding to readers like Rhoades, WoodenBoat magazine, now a decade old, decided to provide such an alternative. Four years ago, it acquired an old estate on 65 acres overlooking the Atlantic, converted a brick-and-stone barn into a boatshop and sail loft and launched the WoodenBoat School. In its maiden year, the school offered only a few basic courses, attracting some 60 students. This year the curriculum has expanded to 18 courses and enrollment is expected to exceed 80 students before the school closes its doors at the end of this week. For tuition of around $300 a week, which includes housing and home-cooked meals at the rambling frame house that serves as the school's dormitory, students can spend from one to three weeks studying such subjects as oar-and paddlemaking, boat repair or canoe building. Says School Head Peter Anderheggen, 50, a former English professor at Norwalk (Conn.) Community College: "We're not going to turn an eager amateur into a master boatbuilder in three weeks. But I think we'll enable most of our graduates to build and repair their own boats."

Most of the courses are designed to do just that. Arno Day, a fourth-generation Maine boatbuilder who runs the school's three-week class on the theory and practice of boatbuilding, divides his eight students into two teams of four each, then puts them right to work building a pair of 11-ft. boats. Designed by Day as a cross between a traditional down-East dory and a flat-bottomed skiff, the boats are teaching tools. They feature three types of planking and require students to go through almost all the procedures involved in the craft of building a boat. "Boatbuilding is nothing if not practical," says Day. "You do things because they work."

Day's students build their boats from scratch. Students in a separate one-week class build theirs from kits. For their $300 in tuition plus the price of the kit, they work under the guidance of another Maine boatbuilder, Eric Dow, constructing small, square-bowed dinghies known as Nutshell prams. Those who sign for the one-week course in able-seamanship spend their days aboard the schooner Vernon Langille, a 38-ft. replica of a traditional Tancook Island sailing boat, plying the waters off Maine's rocky coast.

The school's students are as varied as its courses. Among them: a Roman Catholic priest from New Jersey, a psychologist from Texas and a high school instructor of auto mechanics from Hawaii. Judy Cullen, an animated grandmother and preschool teacher from Lopez Island, Wash., signed up for Day's course because she wants to help her husband build a 36-ft. sloop. Brockett Muir, who recently graduated from the University of Virginia, came to the school because he hopes to spend the next few years building boats professionally.

The atmosphere at the WoodenBoat School is relaxed. Students spend their after-class hours playing softball and drinking enough beer to float a schooner. But before that, they put in solid workdays in a shop redolent with the smell of fresh-cut cedar. Students pick up their tools by 8 each morning and, except for an hour-long lunch break, do not put them away until after 4 each afternoon. No one complains about the hours. "I love it; it gives me such a sense of satisfaction," says Cullen. "When I fitted my first plank, I felt like singing the Marseillaise."

Cullen's fellow students share her enthusiasm; many look forward not only to using their newly learned skills but also to coming back to the school for more advanced courses. For all of them, the stay in Brooklin is a valuable learning experience. For some, like Chris Everett, 16, a Danville, Vt., high school student who came to the school to build a Nutshell pram, it is something more. "When I finish high school, I'll go home with a diploma," says she. "When I finish up here, I'll go home with a boat." --By Peter Stoler