First Post

As a kid, I'd always dreamed of building my own boat...back then, I was obsessed with birch-bark canoes (and anything having to do with American Indians). But we didn't have any birch trees where I grew up (Maryland) , so I used to carve out little "dugout" canoes from sticks...Eventually I became interested in other things, and the dream faded into the background. It revived briefly after I got out of grad school in 1996, when I came across Stelmok & Thurlow's book The Wood & Canvas Canoe.
The thing I found attractive about wood&canvas canoes is that you don't have to trek all the way up to NY or VT and slog through the woods trying to find good bark--all you need for the covering is canvas. Reading through The Wood & Canvas Canoe I quickly realized that it would be a pretty significant time commitment just to build the forms, and at the time I was already overloaded w/ a fixer-upper house and a long commute...plus I had heard from my post-doc adviser, who spent many hours as a camp counselor in his wood/canvas canoe one summer many years ago, that these canoes can have a tendency to become waterlogged. So once again I shelved the idea.
But last year I was browsing through some magazines in a cafe in DC and just happened to notice an ad touting amateur small wooden boat building, (using plywood !?), and just a few weeks before, I had gone sailing for the first time (loved it)...anyway, a switch went off in my brain, and I've been infected by the boat-building bug pretty badly ever since. My canoe had morphed into a small sailboat but otherwise I guess it's been a lifelong dream, finally being made concrete.