My Backyard Boatyard full of Boats.
I love boats. It's that simple. I have a special fondness for old wooden boats that have some life left in them. As you will see in the following pages, I have had more than my share of boats over the past 17 years.
When I graduated from college, I was kicking around and wanted to do something with sailing before I had to get a "real" job. One day, I saw an article about a boatyard that preferred to work on wooden boats. I called the owner up and asked for a job. Shortly thereafter, I started work as the yard "scut boy". While I only worked there for less than a year I had the opportunity to see and learn a lot about boats as well as purchase my first boat. It was a 1946/47 vintage Hampton One Design, a boat indigenous to the lower Chesapeake Bay. I cleaned it up, rigged it and spent a season sailing before I moved inland and started a real life. Over the next couple of years I stripped the fiberglass that had been laid in polyester resin, faired the hull, laid new glass in epoxy, painted with Interthane two part polyurethane paint and sailed occasionally.
Now jump forward about 7 years; I was married, had a career, house and a newborn daughter. I also had the desire to build a strip canoe. In the living room.
That didn't go too badly except when I nailed the sawhorses to the subfloor through the carpet! Then my wife was positive I'd gone over the edge! The neighbors were also convinced I wasn't wired right. And the cat liked to play in the wood shavings from when I planed the strips to fit. Needless to say my wife wasn't thrilled to find shavings all through the house.
Still I wanted to sail, and the Hampton was too much to single-hand on windy days as well as taking time to rig and launch. So I bought an old fiberglass LASER to beat about in and this is what I used to initiate my now 14-month-old daughter to sailing. (Mom sat on the beach and pretended not to be worried)
The Hampton wasn't seeing action, so I sold it the following winter and put the cash towards more tools. Several years later, I did the same with the canoe and bought a bandsaw.
In the late 90's I designed and built a house in the country and had a dedicated workshop. I acquired a STAR class hull and a Lightning over the summer of 2000, both for the astronomical sum of $100. Life intruded in the form of some family illnesses and deaths, a divorce, and a few years of single parenthood. The STAR was sold to someone else intent on restoring it and sporadic progress was made on the Lightning.
I started doing more sailing and offshore racing, remarried, and bought a 36' cruiser/racer sailboat. Eventually I even raced it single-handed to Bermuda in the Bermuda 1-2 race. Bermuda1-2.org
You can read more about this at our boat blog: DIANTHUS
In 2017 I retired and moved closer to the Chesapeake Bay. In 2018 my wife and I were unpaid crew for boats in the Oyster World Rally and we sailed from NZ to CapeTown S.A. Returning home we had a new house built in 2019/20 and I built a stand-alone workshop.
I have since resumed working on the LIghtning, fixed the deck/hull joint on a free Laser sailboat given to Carol and started building two kayaks from kits we purchased from Chesapeake Light Craft.
Starting them young! This is my daughter relaxing (as only babies can do) in her boat cradle built by Dad, of course. Hung from a high ceiling and, given a gentle push, it would swing for several minutes. Then when she was 14 months old, I strapped her into my LASER and took her out for a quick sail while MOM pretended not to worry! A few years later we were out, and she wanted to flip the boat to see what would happen! I told her the first thing that would happen is her mom wouldn't let her go sailing anymore.
PROJECTS
LASER
KAYAK (S)
WORKSHOP
