Every summer, Paul Curran and Jill Walsh from Oak Bluffs haul their Bahamian Sloop, Mary Eleanor, onto the railway at Gannon and Benjamin in Vineyard Haven.
More than 80 people gathered at Gannon and Benjamin Marine Railway in Vineyard Haven Saturday for the launch of Nat Benjamin’s 100th design, a custom 26-foot, gaff-rigged sloop called Marta.
On the Vineyard Haven waterfront you can see, smell and hear the bustle of activity. The town's boatyards are all party to boat building and launching. Anyone who walks the shores of the town will discover a wide variety of vessels undergoing extensive work. It was a busy winter and there is evidence everywhere.
Maciel Marine, Martha's Vineyard Shipyard and Gannon and Benjamin boatyards are witness to a resurgence in interest in Island built and restored vessels.
A flock of mallards quacked outside and a small wood stove crackled from within Rick Brown’s boat workshop on Lagoon Pond in Vineyard Haven, where he was sanding an oar and preparing to replace the ribs of a 14-foot wooden wherry.
Situated on its familiar corner of the Lagoon Pond in Vineyard Haven, Maciel Marine holds a respected place in the long history of boatbuilding on the Vineyard.
The craft of building, restoring and loving wooden boats was celebrated Thursday, Nov. 10, at the Vineyard debut of the movie Wood Sails Dreams screened at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society in Vineyard Haven. The one-hour documentary is a New England coastal story and it is a Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket story.
Ted Box of Vineyard Haven hopes to launch his 70-plus-foot schooner, a scow, in June. The building of the wooden boat in full view on a vacant lot of the Boch property off Beach Road is visually arresting. The boat building project began over a year ago and is picking up pace.
A new boat-building enterprise with a strong educational component
has been launched in the concrete building at Five Corners in Vineyard
Haven.
On Tuesday, Myles Thurlow of West Tisbury was inside lofting the
first of two new 32-foot rowing boats. With volunteer labor and
contributions from the community, they'll be in the water by the
end of the summer.
Winter is the ideal season when wood shavings fly, drills and sanders sing and Vineyard boat builders assemble and repair boats.
At one of the Island’s smallest boat shops, Rick Brown of Far Cry Boats in Vineyard Haven is working on two. Space is a premium inside his 15 by 36-foot workshop with limited heat. His fragrant shop is at Maciel Marine, next door to John Thayer’s cabinet shop, and has one of the best views of Lagoon Pond. The air smells of fresh-cut oak.
