Here are ideas for how you, at any age and in any location, can get aboard to sail, get your hands dirty maintaining, or garner skills for building before you ever think of digging into your wallet to own a boat. The best boats for a beginner, truly, are Other People’s Boats.
Our so-called “bateau” boat is not yet five minutes away from the dock before we spot our first gator. It isn’t very big–maybe four or five feet. I glimpse the crest of its head and the black, reptilian eyes glaring at me above the brown water. Then there’s the flash of a tail, and it is gone. I remember what “Mr. John” Benoit said after the fog had lifted this morning and J.B. Castagnos had launched our 20' cypress-planked bateau at Mr. John’s camp on Bayou Pidgeon.
CAPRICE and GHOST were part of the 28-boat Sound Interclub fleet built by Henry B. Nevins during the winter of 1925–26. The class raced on Long Island Sound for more than a decade before being eclipsed by the larger International One Design.
WoodenBoat contributor Bruce Halabisky and his young family have been cruising in a 34′ wooden boat for the past seven years. Most recently the family crossed the Atlantic from Maine, via the Azores, and then sailed on to Senegal.
Like many wooden boat owners, the author kept expenses down by doing as much of the restoration work as she could on her own, taking advantage of the fact that Port Townsend’s Boat Haven facility permits maintenance by owners.
Synchronicity,” muses 70-year-old Jonathan “Johnny” Waters, sharing coffee from a thermos with his 34-year-old daughter, Emilie Waters Harris. It is late summer 2022, and we’re sitting in weathered wooden lawn chairs on the wharf at Bradley & Waters Marine Railway. It has been the Waters’s wharf since 1985, and their railway. It’s the last bit of working waterfront in the village of Stony Creek, nestled in Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.