The crew was composed of eight students from the Fosen Folkhøgskole (folk school) in Rissa, which offers yearlong courses in the traditional folk arts including boatbuilding, sailing, farming, self-sufficiency, and crafts. The sailing students sail throughout the winter in a fleet of Fosen-built Åfjørd’s boats including four-oared færings and larger fembørings.
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.
More than 500 boats were displayed on land and in the water at the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in February. The biannual event covers the sprawling waterfront of Hobart, in the island state of Tasmania.
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.
Among the dramatic changes during the MAYFLOWER II reconstruction has been the complete replacement of her rigging, reducing weight aloft by about one-third. The standing rigging is of Mystic Three Strand, made by New England Rope.
Some years ago, I watched a traditional Norwegian faering take shape in an adjacent classroom. Driven half-mad by the beauty of those singular lines, I thought, “Aha! Next year’s stitch-and-glue class!”