Friends of Boat School launch endeavor to preserve program

EASTPORT – Money or no money from the State House, Friends of the Boat School earlier this week launched a plan that would preserve and protect a program that has sent its graduates out of Eastport and into marine technology careers since 1979.

The Friends organization, a nonprofit development corporation, formed last summer when its parent Washington County Community College announced it was moving the boatbuilding program onto the school’s Calais campus as a money-saving step.

As of Wednesday night, when the 122nd Legislature closed its session, just $25,000 had been allotted to support the Boat School – tabbed for a study, due in February 2007, that would focus on the program’s future, either in Eastport or Calais.

Twelve hours later, Gov. John Baldacci stepped up the funding to the $210,000 level that he had privately promised the Friends group only days earlier.

Thursday morning’s announcement of nearly 10 times the money was welcomed by the Friends.

Washington County legislators who sponsored a “Boat School bill” had originally asked for $433,000, or, the amount estimated to keep the boat school going in Eastport.

The Friends look at the $210,000 kindly.

“Together we can build on this school’s heritage to create the strongest school of boatbuilding and related marine technology in the world,” Thomas MacNaughton, the group’s president, related in an e-mail to supporters of the Boat School after hearing of the money adjustment.

As the fall semester’s numbers round into view, 18 students have committed to the school so far. Aggressive recruiting and promotion of the school could bring in as many as 32 students for the fall, MacNaughton noted on Thursday afternoon.

The boat school’s facilities have carried on Eastport waterfront’s shipbuilding heritage. The program will continue to shape the waterfront’s future.

A 90-foot schooner, the Halie & Matthew, was built at the Boat School over the last two years, complete with 10 staterooms and a galley. The Sylvina W. Beale, an 80-foot schooner from 1911 that has provided whale watching and sunset cruises out of Eastport’s harbor since 2002, was rebuilt at the Boat School over the winter.

The Friends devised a four-point plan on Tuesday – when state funding was at stake – that already is under way. It is moving ahead in ways that are designed to shape the Boat School program into a model of public-private enterprise.

First, after Baldacci promised $200,000 for the project on Monday, ensuring the school would stay in Eastport. MacNaughton sent out a thank-you letter.

Next, the Friends have scheduled June 12 for a business strategy workshop that stresses collaboration among the Friends, private industry, the community college and a number of other university and college options that have shown interest in resurrecting and supporting the program.

Third, Butch Harris – owner of the two schooners – will announce a date in June when the boats will be launched and relaunched from the Eastport waterfront. The ventures represent local growth in both small business and tourism, two areas of concern for eastern Washington County.

Fourth, July 3 is the date that the Friends will announce the John Pike Grady Endowment Fund – named in honor of the popular Eastport veteran and dedicated to both leadership and faculty for the Boat School in Eastport.

WCCC President Bill Cassidy cautioned Thursday that one of his concerns about keeping the program in Eastport was its perceived “distance” from the Calais campus.

Nonsense, said Karen Munday, a former Boat School student who continues to live and work in Eastport. She said she found the Eastport locale perfect, having arrived in 2000 from Vancouver, British Columbia.

“I started researching where I could go learn the craft,” she said. “Eastport really drew me in by the quality of classes, the facility and really, the people and the town. I made my choice based on that.”

Now armed with an associate degree in boatbuilding technology, she has contracted since graduating to work on boat projects in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Louisiana.

“I kept coming back to Eastport,” she said. “I fell in love with it and relocated here. Having such a facility exclusive to the students, and all of us sharing the same obsession with boats, was a great situation.

“Eastport is a remarkable little place, a little mecca of culture.”