I started the New Year off with two wonderful 3-day weekends building a SOF Greenland-style boat at Mystic Seaport in CT. Having never built anything and having no woodworking experience, I was grateful to discover their workshop. We spent 10hours/day in their historic boat-building shop creating our individual boats. The class size was four students with three instructors, two being present all the time. They have been running the course for a few years and have built over 60 boats.

While they have a standard design with pre-shaped forms for bending the ribs (frames), they were very happy to work with me to create a boat based on my size and desire for a low-volume, relatively narrow boat. The instructors cut and constructed some of the parts (the apummaqs, masik, and coaming) and we cut and mortised and bent and lashed and sewed it all together. We completed the boats ready to be shrunk and urethaned at home.

All-in-all this was a terrific experience. The instructors, Mark Starr, Wade Smith, and Sarah Blachly were excellent. Patient, knowledgeable, and fun to work with. It was such a treat to be able to just "build a boat" without the distractions of daily home life. The long days went by quickly and I felt like I was on a meditative retreat. Because of the time constraints, we had to surrender some desires for perfection, but the instructors made sure that what we did do was accurate and that we would be happy with the results.

I highly recommend their workshops. Most of the people who have built boats there have not been serious kayakers, and they would love to work with and create more performance-type boats. Check them out!

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