Maine Boatbuilders Show

Yesterday I wandered around the Maine Boatbuilders Show.  If you haven't been, and you're in or close to New England and like boats, it's probably worth a visit someday.  There's another Boat Show going on this weekend, a bunch of fiberglass powerboats crammed into the Civic Center, which is strewn with nautical flags.  I think that's what a bunch of boat shows are like -- a convention of boat dealers or manufacturers reps, and their shiny plastic boats and glossy brochures.  The Maine Boatbuilders Show is a different kind of thing.

It's held in this ramshackle complex of ancient brick buildings, drafty and rickety.  If you look too closely at the walls or the ceiling you become convinced that the place could collapse at any minute.  As you walk around the buildings it is likely that you'll get dripped on from some kind of leak somewhere.  Although they clean out the place as well as they can, it's a little bit grimy.  Each year less so, though, and this year it was pretty respectable.  Section by section, they're gentrifying the place, but structurally it looks like an impossible task. 

The buildings are filled with exhibitors, as at any show.  And there are some gleaming, shiny boats for sure.  But there are also half-done boats, on their trailers, unvarnished and partially painted.   The men standing beside them or sitting in them are the boatbuilders themselves, who have barns or small shops in Maine coastal towns north and east of here.  They're wearing Carharts and have a pencil in their pocket and will talk excitedly with you about the shearlines or the motor or the particular kind of wood they used for the frames. 

Besides the boatbuilders, there are people in the marine industry -- sailmakers, varnish manufacturers, people selling electronic navigational equipment or heating systems or bronze fittings.  There are guys who build docks and piers, there are nautical historians selling books they've written, there are magazines catering to this niche market -- boatbuilders or wooden boat nuts or people who love to know about boatyards and their projects.  I talked to a timber merchant -- did you even know there was such a thing?  He finds exotic or specialty wood for builders who are looking for extra long or extra wide planks, or who need a whole bunch of mahogany from the same tree so they can match the pattern of grain on a finish.  I talked to a couple of guys who make epoxy, and they explained to me in great detail how they eliminated the soapy "blush" on the finish by changing the ingredients of the hardener from something hydrogen-based, akin to the resin in a pine tree that becomes amber, to something carbon-based, which doesn't pull moisture from the air around it.  "This guy over here figured it out," the epoxy guy said, pointing his thumb at a small lively guy in a chamois shirt. "Degree in biochemistry; he was building boats for no money after he graduated, and his parents were thinking, 'why did we send you to college?' but that was what he wanted to do, so we started fiddling around with the epoxy to see if we could make it a little better, and that's how we started the company."  The biochemist-boatbuilder came over and we got to talking about a kind of boat called a proa, which sounds like a crazy and dangerous thing.

The crowd of browsers includes all kinds of people.  I saw a bunch of sailors I know from the area.  A friend of mine just bought one of these motorboats, and was chumming around with the boatyard owner.  Another friend of mine has three or four old racing one-designs that he likes to chop up and rebuild; he was daydreaming and looking for ideas and was eager to talk shop with professional boat builders.  Another pair of friends were shopping -- "we'll either get a big 40 foot cruising sailboat or a little runabout and an Etchells."  My companions were a guy who is looking for a place to finish building his first wooden boat, and a fellow who has five wooden boats, in various stages of restoration, and is looking to get rid of one or more.  We rambled around the show companionably, being pulled into conversations or drawn to particular boats or booths, taking our shoes off and climbing up the staging ladders onto a boat, where we'd walk around in our socks and point out features to one another. 

In a back corner of the boat show was a crumbling schooner hull.  It was Tar Baby, a 1929 Alden.  You can see pictures of the boat on this website, but those pictures show a snappy looking, well-maintained boat.  I wonder when they were taken.  Certainly not in the last 10 years, possibly 20.  As she lies now, the yacht, although lovely, is rotting in places, and is badly in need of care.  She's being restored at the boatyard where the show is, and we could climb aboard and look around.  There's something fascinating about being on board something elegant and disheveled.  You can see the grace of the design and the tastefullness of the interior, the attention to every detail, once upon a time.  That makes the obvious disregard for the boat in recent times seem tragic.  You wonder how she came to be in such disrepair, how she fell on such hard times.  Although I don't tend to go in for it too much, I can understand the romance of these beautiful classic yachts, these wooden boats that require constant attention and maintenance and care. 

Comments

[pjm]

I don't know if they were there when you were, but if you noticed an extraordinarily cute pair of little girls running around with their grandparents in tow, they might have been my nieces.

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