A boat in your future.

Picture by Valeskca SanMartin

At the beginning there was a book. "Building Skin-on-Frame Boats" by Robert Morris. Hours of reading, dreaming and scheming. Followed by a trip to the lumberyard in Montreal.

I then spent many happy hours working on my red cedar beauty. But then it went horribly wrong. Gunwale split, rib broke, the boat went crooked, discouragement and sorrow. At the end, I had a frame that looked like a kayak but the bad craftsmanship was everywhere I looked. I set the boat on the grass and try to squeeze in the frame. Catastrophe. I could not fit in the boat! Upset, I stared at the thing and took the saw to it and reduced it to kindling for a marshmallow roast.

The very next week, I made one of my biggest mistakes. I went to the store and bought two yellow plastic kayaks. Paid a fortune and we paddle the clumsy thing for a year. 12 feet and 45 pds. These things were heavy! Waking with the boat on my shoulder the 200 m to the water would leave my shoulder bruised.

Two years later, while on a business trip to Vancouver, I met Robert Morris at his Granville Island shop. We talked about my failed attempt and he showed me what was going on in the shop at the time. He offered me to take one of is boat for a paddle on the spot and I accepted. I was shocked by the experience. The old black skin boat felt like a feather in the water. It behaved like the boat I dreamt of during my first attempt at boat building. I promised myself that I would build one with Robert when finances would permit.

Some times passed. I was residing in the Middle East and money was a little better. So on my annual leave trip, my wife and I booked a class with Brewery creek boatbuilding school. Five days, two boats and my life was changed. We returned home and I emptied the living room of our villa in AbuDhabi and started my own boat shop. Within a month, I had built a boat for my son. A while later, a surfing kayak.... another Greenlander, a sailing canoe and so on.

More and more boat were taking shape in the shop and in my brain until my life was run over by the boatbuilding virus. I quit my airline pilot job to come back to Canada and the boat building is set to resume in a grand way.

It does not matter if you are rich or poor. If you live in a mansion or in a closet. There is a skin boat for you if you wish. So let me climb a big tree and shout to the top of my lungs into the autumn air.

ANYONE CAN HAVE A BOAT!