WELCOME ISLESFORD BOATWORKS

While a fine old boat school at Eastport struggles under inadequate funding, low enrollment and a threat to move it to Calais, a new boat school on Islesford, in the Cranberry Isles, is about to start operating. It has 23 prospective students already signed up.

The Islesford Boatworks plans to open July 5, with two sections, a younger one with students 8 to 11 years old, and an older group 12 and over. The plan is for them to build a 12 1/2-foot sailing dinghy, which is to be completed by Labor Day and auctioned to help provide funds

for next year.

Brendan Ravenhill got the idea for an Islesford boat school while teaching boat building at a school in the Bronx. He found that work satisfying except that most folks there regarded a boat as a foreign object. Youngsters in coastal Maine, on the other hand, live with boating from infancy. The Cranberry Isles have several active boatyards, and Islesford was home for a famous boat builder, Arthur Spurling, who produced 50 or so skiffs in the past century in his attic workshop.

The new boat school will be a family operation, based in a massive barn built a few years ago by Brendan, his brother Geoffrey, their sister Amanda and a score of visiting friends. The Ravenhills will comprise the faculty, along with local volunteers.

The first boat will be a lug-rigged sailboat, with lap-strake cedar planking on oak frames. While the boat is in progress, students will spend part of their time practicing carpentry by building smaller projects, including bat houses – an environmental measure to increase the island’s bat population and combat its serious mosquito plague.

With an annual budget of just $25,000, the school already has raised enough money to order lumber and start classes. A substantial grant from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation assured success. Other grant applications are pending, and some local merchants have offered preferential rates or actual gifts of marine hardware and other supplies. Sponsorship by the Island Institute provides the venture with the helpful tax-exemption for contributions.

In what appears to be quite a businesslike enterprise, the Ravenhills have promoted the enterprise with its own Web site, www.islesfordboatworks.org, and full insurance coverage, which costs five times as much as the lumber.

So a community project is taking shape that will teach boat building to a new generation of summer and year-round islanders and help keep alive Maine’s tradition of wooden boat building.