For a visiting sailor, Maine is fantastic. The natural scenery is beautiful, the summer weather is temperate, the towns are charming, and it’s easy to escape the towns for secluded anchorages when the charm becomes too much.
While all of those things make it a great cruising ground, Maine also offers world-class boat viewing. There’s a marine heritage that extends back as long as people have lived on this coast, and it seems that everyone in coastal Maine has a boat. During a typical day on the water, one will see a flotilla of boats ranging from small rowboats and sailing dinghies to giant superyachts (both motor and sail), and everything in between.
But Maine is perhaps best known for its traditional wooden boats, and it’s the epicenter of wooden boat building in North America (although the folks in Port Townsend, WA, may disagree…).
Nothing shows this more than The WoodenBoat School, located on the eastern shore of the famous (to sailors, anyway) Eggemoggin Reach in Penobscot Bay near Brooklin, Maine. Offering classes in wooden boat design, construction, and refurbishment, students travel long and far for the opportunity to learn from the local craftsmen. The school offers lodging in an old farmhouse on camping, or students can camp on the grounds.
The campus is spectacular, with a beautiful boathouse overlooking a serene bay filled with, of course, small wooden sailboats. The smell of sawdust fills the air as students and faculty bend over wood planes, chisels, and sand paper.
For anyone who appreciates wood boats, the pilgrimage to WoodenBoat School is definitely worth it.
