Eastport class gets boat-building experience

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EASTPORT – Paul Morin of Portland wants to build boats.

Before he sailed into this seaside community, he barely knew how to swing a hammer.

Now he is one of 10 students building a wooden boat at the Marine Technology Center.

Morin, 39, is a first-year student in the Boat School, an affiliate of Husson College.

Classes are conducted in a well-equipped waterfront facility at Deep Cove.

“I like living in Maine and I wanted to do something that was physical and creative at the same time,” he said last week. “Boat building is one of those skills that is portable. You can take it up and down the coast, in the city or on an island, anywhere. It is a good time to be in the industry.”

The skills he learns in Eastport will allow him to travel. “If I run low on money, I don’t have to come home. I can just stop in a boat yard [and start working],” he said.

Morin said he liked the holistic approach offered at the Boat School.

“You start with the basics using wood. From there you go onto composites and systems and so on. When we leave here we know enough to start everything from top to bottom,” he said.

Right now Morin and his fellow students are making a Whitehall rowing tender, one of the oldest seagoing crafts in the country. Instructor Bret Blanchard said students build a tender because it has a lot of big boat features to it, something they will work on once they are in the industry.

The project began with students going to the sawmill to pick out timber. “They actually selected the stock for the boat,” Dean Pike, senior class boat building instructor, said last week. The next step was to lay out the design and then begin building.

Blanchard watched as the students, armed with hand planes, smoothed the hull. “They’d just finished up planking the boat,” Blanchard said. “So what they are doing is now putting the curvature into the planks so the boat will be nice and smooth when they are done.”

Finishing up with the planing, it was time to flip the boat off the jig. “We will be able to work on the inside and outside at the same time,” Blanchard said.

Standing three men to a side and one on each end, the students handily turned the boat over onto its bottom. It was the first time the students had seen their work from the inside. Some of the students snapped pictures.

“They are extremely proud of what they have done,” Blanchard said.

The students began in September and the boat will be finished in May, in time for graduation.

Upon graduation from the one-year program, some of the students will go directly into the industry.

Maine’s boat building industry is robust as the state’s third-largest industry, employing more than 2,500 workers with annual sales of more than $355 million and a payroll of $95 million.

While some students leave after the first year, others return for a second year to learn composite and fiberglass construction.

Pike teaches the second-year students.

He said the students not only learn how to construct a fiberglass boat, but also how to repair one.

“We will knock holes in these pea pods, which were built here, and now they are used as test panels. We beat and drill holes in them and have each student repair them,” he said.

The well-appointed lab has everything, including a computer that talks to a router. “So you can actually input the plans of a boat here [in the computer] and cut out the molds on this machine,” Pike said, “and do it with 32nd of an inch accuracy.”

In addition to classes, the school also provides seminars for professional development for employees in the industry, including marine painting and straddle lift operations. The school has run three to date. A fourth will be held at the end of this month.

The Boat School started in 1969 on the Calais campus of what was then known as the Washington County Vocational Technical Institute. Soon it outgrew its space and after two years was moved to the old U.S. Coast Guard Station in Lubec, according to a history of the Boat School.

Soon school officials began to cast about for a permanent campus, and in 1970 it moved to the 12-acre site in Eastport. Eastport newspaper publisher Winifred French and local historian John Pike Grady led the fight to raise the money. David Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Foundation along with IBM President and U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Thomas J. Watson Jr. helped, the history said.

Soon the WCVTI became the Washington County Community College and the Boat School continued.

Then in 2004, the Boat School ran into some rough seas and began to flounder. College officials announced the boat-building program would be suspended for a year because of declining enrollment.

Staff was cut, and for a while it looked like the program was going under.

Then a group called Friends of the Boat School sailed to the rescue. They got the Legislature to switch the property from the college to the city. They sought the services of Husson College. They appealed to Gov. John Baldacci, who gave them an eleventh-hour $210,000.

Husson took over the first-year program, and when WCCC completes its second-year program, Husson will take that over as well.

The Husson program hopes to have 30 new students in next year’s first-year class. Students who study boat building technology are eligible for a North Star Alliance Education Award of up to $5,000 to help cover their education costs, school administrator John Miller said.

“The first year has been incredible,” Miller added. “We’ve been working with industry. We’ve been out recruiting. We’ve been rebuilding programs and bringing things back and we’re bringing in new programs that hopefully will bring more students than this school has ever seen.”

The school plans to hold an open house on April 17.

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