Built in the USA
By: Steffan Meyric-Hughes (Classic Boat Magazine)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Built in the USA
A recent tour of boatbuilding on America's East Coast was an eye-opener
Being back in America was like a dream. The nation, her people and culture set the global tone for the entire 20th century. (Political content deleted) Once past the homeland security grilling at the airport, where fools ask questions wise men can't answer ("What are you writing about boats for?" Yes, really…), it was time to hit the open road to visit boatbuilders in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
America is a country to see by car. Interstate 95 was our companion for the week
America did not disappoint. Roads wound through hills and past villages, in the climate (this was in June) of a perfect English summer. Just uttering the magical word 'interstate' recalled the adventure of nearly every film ever to come out of Hollywood. Boatbuilders received us with open arms, and sometimes at short notice, despite it being about the worst time of the year to visit, getting boats ready for Independence Day. Tea was brewed, jokes were cracked. Did someone tell you that "Yanks" don't get jokes? They never told Woody Allen, Larry David, Seinfeld or the creators of The Simpsons, South Park or Sex and the City. They never told these guys either.
Alongside the impressive restorations, stunning lakes (they call them ponds), white-painted clapboard mansions (American mansions seem to be based on the English garden shed, and are far more elegant than that sounds), clam chowder, massive V8 pick-ups and baseball caps, were a load of laughs. CB ad exec Hugo Segrave and I were made to feel very welcome and frequently very well entertained. At one point, I even made an American woman swoon just by speaking. "I don't care what you're saying," she sighed. "Just keep talking." Luckily for matrimonial longevity, she was about 70, working the cash till in an out-of-town dime store.
Arey’s Pond, Mass. The small lake that is home to the boatyard of the same name is an idyllic spot. With more than 50 catboats afloat, the lake acts as a living museum to the boats that the yard has built, rebuilt, or looks after, over the years.
For me, it was the return to a wonderland. In 1994, I spent a summer in Maine as an 18-year-old summer camp teacher at a remote lodge called Flying Moose, near Bangor. We drank lakewater unfiltered, the same water we swam in, day and night. We felled trees to build traditional canoes and a house. For a callow teenager leaving an urbane existence, it was fascinating and wonderful to spend the day shingling a roof; to handle a chainsaw; to drive a minibus full of kids to a remote spot with a trailer full of canoes, then spend four days in charge of a wilderness canoeing/camping trip down a river like the Allagash or Penobscot. Or to hike 100 miles of the most hilly section of the Appalachian Way and to see, night after night, stars, and distant, silent lightning in the night sky.
Birchbark canoe on Maine’s Allagash river. Photo by Michael Melford, National Georgraphic
Since then, America - more specifically her eastern seaboard, has always been a place of magic to me. Our recent tour of boatyards, detailed in the September issue of Classic Boat, did not quite reach the giddy heights of that summer in Maine, but something of the feeling remained: glorious space, levelheaded American practicality, unassuming good sense, free refills, nearly free petrol, snappy phrases and easy complicity.
Detail from East Passage Boatwrights on Rhode Island, where owner Carter Richardson showed us around
The huge number of lakes and tress in this part of the world means that even normal, middle-class Americans can afford a holiday lake house, and many do. And it seems that in every other backyard, there is a boat in build. American boatbuilding is a grassroots affair, very authentic, as it is in many parts of Scandinavia, with second or third generation amateur and professional builders sourcing timber from their own land or perhaps a neighbour's, to build (typically) dayboats and dinghies for holidays on the lake. It was clear that wooden boatbuilding in America is on a monumental scale that is hard to quantify. After our week stateside, Hugo and I felt as though we had done a fair bit of running around - but barely scratched the surface.
.A trip highlight was catching up with old friend Chris Museler and family aboard his schooner and temporary home. Chris showed us inside the hallowed portals of the New York Yacht Club’s amazing Rhode Island summerhouse, from where this photo was taken.
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By pure chance, we happed upon Halsey Herreshoff, the nicest man you could ever hope to meet. More on him in November Classic Boat
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A great story told by a Brit about his tour of part of the north-east USA, seeking American wooden boatbuilding.
I wouldn't even try to remember the many times I've travelled the I-95.
I'd avoid the NC section of I-95. From the Virginia state line to the SC state line it's an unimaginable mess.
It's been many decades since I was in that area, and as the raven spoke, "nevermore".
That's about how long they've been "working" on it.
I guess in order to get more than one person to read this article I should have contravened my own Red Box Rules and not deleted the political comment about Trump in it.