The Unretired Ian Smith

Ian Smith of Sydney, Australia, eats, sleeps and breathes wooden boats. He has built them for clients as a profession and also for himself. He has taught other people how to build them. He has raced aboard them, most notably with his faithful replica of a famous Sydney Harbour 18-Footer BRITANNIA of 1919, which is now in the collections of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney. He has cruised extensively along the east coast of Australia in a succession of his own boats. And even while he was working 40 hours per week as a boatbuilder and running his own business, he founded the Sydney Wooden Boat School for evening and weekend classes. He has written books, made videos about wooden boat construction, and taught hundreds of first-time boatbuilders the fundamentals of the craft.

Even though he closed the school in 2000 and officially retired in 2013, Ian hasn’t stopped building and restoring boats. He is now 74, and his current project, a 24' carvel-planked Ranger class sloop native to Sydney Harbour, began a year after he retired in 2013 and has been progressing methodically ever since.

With his home boatbuilding projects highly likely to continue, his wife, Tricia, asked him recently: “You are not going to die and leave me with an unfinished project in the shed, are you?”