Unity students learn art of wooden boat building Class helps teach kids tool use, other skills

UNITY – A few local middle-school students are learning the art of wooden boat building and occupational skills for life.

Greg Rossel, owner of Greg Rossel Boat Carpentry in Troy, has been a boat builder since 1970. As a youth in Staten Island, N.Y., Rossel grew up around boats and worked in boatyards.

“Everything was boats,” he said. He moved to Maine in the late 1960s and tried different jobs, including driving a school bus, until he enrolled in the two-year program at The Boat School in Eastport.

Besides constructing boats for more than 30 years, Rossel has written two books, “The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice” and “Building Small Boats,” and several magazine articles on boat building.

He and his wife, Norma, live in an 1840s cape on Bangor Road in Troy, a few miles from Unity. The couple are active in many volunteer projects in both towns.

Rossel founded the Unity Boat Shop with the idea of offering a boat-building school to youths. The first class opened with 10 students in mid-November, and is scheduled to meet Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings until April.

The program is a Unity Barn Raisers’ Project, a local nonprofit community betterment organization. Barn Raisers Executive Director Tess Woods said her organization received a $40,000 grant from the Maine Office of Economic and Community Development to help the students with their tuition.

“The grant allowed us to pay for tuition for 12 children in each class for two years,” she said.

“One of our questions before we started was how to get young people to realize boat building is for them,” Rossel said.

“The hook was to get the kids to build the boats and then use them in the Unity Barn Raisers’ sailing program,” he said. After a boat is built, it is turned over to Unity Barn Raisers to sail on nearby Unity Pond.

Rossel attributes the comeback of wooden boats in Maine to WoodenBoat magazine, started in 1974 by Jon Wilson, and the Washington County Boat School in Eastport, which also started in the 1970s.

“A lot of people thought wooden boat building was dead,” he said. “You couldn’t get trained people with the experience to have a business.”

“Now, a boat builder from the 19th century could be brought up to speed very quickly in one of our shops,” he said.

“What’s great about being in boat building here in Maine is that you can work in a shop building everything from wood and canvas canoes to working in a place like Rockport Marine,” Rossel said.

Rossel believes that boat building is the backbone of a local economy along coastal Maine.

“Starting in Eastport, you can go up and down all these peninsulas, and on the end of each of those peninsulas there’s going to be a boat shop,” he said. “And on the islands, as well.”

Rossel said each boat shop is a localized powerhouse, and each one has a spinoff, or multiplier effect, producing work for local cabinet shops, woodcutters and sandwich shops.

“As you know, boat building is one of the bright spots for Maine’s economy,” he said. “Yet, sometimes for young folks, the notion of being a boat builder is something that doesn’t really seem like an option.”

“Inland, you don’t see boats being built, high schools have discontinued shop classes, and even access to the water on lakes is limited,” he said.

The program was designed to open the door to the trade, he added.

Rossel, whose name is Swedish and is pronounced “Russell,” pointed out the number of bonus effects of a boat-building program for youths.

“There is no way to build a boat without learning about hand-tool use, safety, pattern making, mathematics, geometry, applied physics, chemistry, history, architecture and proportion, team building – all in a practical rather than a theoretical application,” he said.

“The students and instructors don’t think anything about it because it’s all part of the construction process,” he added.

The students are building a 12-foot glued lapstrake Shellback dinghy, which is a Joel White design, Rossel said of the late Brooklin boat builder, who was the son of writer E.B. White. The students started with a kit, then proceeded to build all the pieces for a second boat.

“When they’ve finished, they will have learned a job skill that will stay with them,” he said. “They will have learned skills, a healthful lifestyle and a career path.”

gchappell@bangordailynews.net

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