Boat-building

Published Articles Featuring My Boatbuilding Projects

After building a small jonboat with my Dad as a youth, I was hooked on the idea that you could build something unique and tailored to the exact way you wanted to use a boat, instead of limiting yourself to the increasingly narrow generic variety of “store-bought” boats. In times past, local boatbuilders in small boatbuilding shops constructed craft designed and evolved to meet their own myriad of local needs and water bodies. This vast diversity of local knowledge and boat types has all-but disappeared in the shift to mass-producing only a few types of boats in large factories. I have a life-long interest in building, using and sometimes designing specialized vessels for unique purposes, as well as restoring and maintaining a few larger vessels from earlier eras when boat types were much more diverse. I’ve been especially interested in passing on these ideas, teaching to schools and youth groups in various places I have lived. Below is a smattering of news articles and even a film I have collected about my endeavours:

• Bolger Sneakeasy: Brice Prairie native returns from Alaska with unusual home-built watercraft, La Crosse Tribune, 2003.
• Klondike Replica: In 2002, a Canadian film company contacted me to build a replica of the 25’ boats used in the 1898 Klondike gold rush for an upcoming film. In 30 days! I reached out to our small group of Juneau boatbuilding friends and we built the boat in short order, which that summer made it 700 miles down the Yukon River, appearing in the film Klondike: The Quest for Gold! More details on my boat page.
• Family and Youth Boatbuilding with my “Wacky Lassie” double paddle canoe design:
  • Canoe Nation, NRTA spring 2005, about building boats with 6-7-8th graders at Floyd Dryden Middle School, Juneau, Alaska.
  • Building Canoes and Self Esteem, Juneau Empire, June 21, 2001. 4-5-6th graders and Juneau Community Charter School, Juneau, Alaska
  • Wooden Boats a Kid Can Build, Onalaska Community Life, August 12, 1999, a community boatbuilding project building 3 double-paddle canoes.
• Rescue Vessel: Guardians of Pool 7, Big River Magazine, Jan-Feb 2021. Didn’t do the welding on this one but worked with Kann Manufacturing of Guttenberg IA to design this unique rescue vessel for our local Brice Prairie EMS & Rescue group, adapted to the backwaters of the upper Mississippi River.
• LOTS more boatbuilding and boat projects on my “Backwater Boats” webpage - Klondike Gold Rush replica boat details, more Phil Bolger boats, larger boat restorations, and cartop Dory, duck skiff and rowing shells I designed and built and much more.