The 62nd annual Boothbay Harbor Windjammer Days will take place on Sunday, June 23 through Saturday, June 29. This year we will celebrate our local boatbuilders and shipwrights. Please visit boothbayharborwindjammerdays.org for the full schedule of events.

I suspect that my love of boats comes from my mother who had a sailboat which our family used on Long Island Sound for a few years when I was very young. Then in1972 my father, my older brother, and I built a 20-foot fiberglass Luger Power Boat Kit in our garage on Long Island, New York. My brother still owns this boat over 50 years later!

I really took to sailing as well as power boating. In 1980 I attended a wooden boatbuilding apprenticeship program called the Phoenix Boatshop Cooperative on Cape Cod taught by Loring Wordel. I learned a lot and built a couple of really nice small boats.

My interest in boats moved to design and I attended the Webb Institute of Naval Architecture, graduating in 1985. A truly life changing school and a great engineering education. Here’s where things get interesting: In 1985 I purchased a tired old (1898) catboat. Over the next five years I completely rebuilt it, from the keel up, and then successfully sailed it over the summer of 1990 from the South Shore of Long Island to Nantucket and back! These days you will still see me sailing this little old boat in Boothbay Harbor, and of course as the oldest boat in the harbor, we usually lead the Antique Boat parade.

The reason I’m appearing in this column in the Register is that in 2000 I purchased David Nutt’s Boatyard on Southport. Renamed Southport Island Marine, we continued building the great Southport 30 lobster boat yacht. Nine were built on my watch. Also, over the 21 years that I owned the yard we introduced our Handy Billy 21/Southport 21 as a new model of our new build offerings. Design work on all of these boats was my responsibility. I was also pleased to help design and build six 30-foot sailboats for the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School (for whom I’d worked for eight years). The last Southport 30 that we delivered was an outboard motor powered version, and at that time (2016) we were possibly the first Downeast boatbuilder to actually deliver a lobster boat powered in this way. (Now everyone is doing it!)

My inclusion in this newspaper series as a boatbuilder is mostly on the strength of my 20+ years owning and operating Southport Island Marine. And while I was hands-on in the construction as much as possible, supervision and business management consumed most of my time. I’m also proud of the way we developed our boatbuilding offerings to appeal to the evolving market and to keep up with available technology. We created some beautiful boats that continue to hold their value and beautify harbors throughout New England! I am very proud of all the relationships and friendships I was able to form during this time: Great hard working and talented employees who made our boatbuilding success possible, colleagues in the marine business who were always willing and collaborative, and meeting and befriending many great people as clients!

At this time, I’m retired and out of the boatbuilding game, just taking care of my own boats and running my charter business out of Boothbay Harbor.