September / October 2026

In our shop, we’ve been lucky that our customers usually approach us with aspirations for electric power, with no hard sell needed. Most don’t have electric cars, and although green-energy ideas do inspire some, for many the attraction of electric power in a boat is about the experience, not the carbon credits.

Many wooden boat owners are drawn to the sensory experience of being afloat. The appeal might lie in the honey glow of a varnished coaming, the soft roughness of a bare wood sole, or the splash of water against a lapstrake hull. A quiet electric motor complements the subtleties that many of us appreciate about wooden boats.

Maine is blessed with a pantheon of top-notch builders of working boats, but few have the legacy of the Lowell family, which extends beyond commercial fishing boats to yachts and government vessels. They are the descendants of William (Will) Frost, widely regarded as the inventor of the iconic Maine lobsterboat, and his grandsons also became noted boatbuilders and designers. They, and most of the region’s powerboat builders, have been influenced in some way by Frost’s signature semi-displacement, semi-planing hull.

Jamie Lowell, one of Frost’s great-grandsons, has become something of a curator of his family’s 400-year boatbuilding legacy, along with his wife, Ruth, and other family members.

Years ago, a boatbuilder friend of mine showed me a flexible curve template. It consisted of a thin spring-steel plate about 8′ long connected to a series of stand offs that in turn were connected to a number of slotted flat pieces of metal. The slotted pieces were tightened to the stand offs with thumb screws to hold the spring-steel batten in place, thus picking up whatever curve the batten was formed into.

The view from Ralph Woodring’s house, close by the sandy shore on the north side of Sanibel Island, Florida, is of sparkling San Carlos Bay. There’s a little scrub-covered island out there, and beyond it in the distance, the green and red buoys marking the Intracoastal Waterway. On weekends the Waterway hosts an endless parade of noisy powerboats but on this calm midweek morning in late March, the bay is largely undisturbed and ripples with a pleasant whisper against the pilings of Ralph’s dock.

Who doesn’t love a schooner? I sometimes ask myself why schooners pull so strongly on the heartstrings of so many sailors. Is it simply the name, or is it a deeper, less-tangible quality? Whatever the reason, I, for one, would like to own just one more schooner before weighing anchor for that final voyage. A couple of good friends feel the same. But schooners tend to be big and therefore costly and time-consuming to build and maintain. My friends and I no longer possess the stamina that in our youth allowed us to lavish energy on big boats.

The heaving mallet, or “heaver,” is a tool used by traditional riggers when a piece of cordage, usually of small diameter, needs to be pulled with a great deal of force. Examples include setting a strand’s tuck in a large splice, tightening the frapping turns of a fiber or wire seizing, or getting the lark’s-head hitch taut to finish tensioning the lanyard on a deadeye. All require a very short but powerful pull. A heaver relies on the binding effect of how the twine is “loaded” onto it, combined with leverage achieved by its handle.