Tales of Families and Boats
Almost two years ago, at the 2024 biannual gathering of the Teaching with Small Boats Alliance (TWBSA), Joe Youcha showed me some drawings of a small skiff designed by Joel White in the early 1990s. The concept had been developed for a Maine-based minister who wanted to start a youth boatbuilding program. The boat was simple but jaunty. It was meant to be built from just two sheets of plywood, and to go together relatively quickly. It had never been built. The drawings seem to have not advanced beyond the concept stage, and Joe had misplaced his copy for many years.
The re-emergence of the design in 2024 sparked a project for us: Joe built a model to work out the construction details. He then built a prototype with a high-school class and photographed the process (page 38). After that, he gathered five families at WoodenBoat School to each build one of the boats for themselves, and photographed that class, too. During that week, my daughter, Louise, a budding sailor, shook-down the prototype for the image that appears on this issue’s cover. By the end of the week, there were six Church Mouse Skiffs (as the design had been named) in the world. Louise is eager to build one of her own, and there are at least five more on the way this summer.
Around the same time that the initial batch of Church Mice was coming together, our old friend Bruce Halabisky wrote with the news that his daughter, Solianna, had just completed the boat she and Bruce had begun building six years earlier. As the photos in the article beginning on page 86 attest, the boat is a work of art. It is also, as Bruce describes, an education in resource use, skill, beauty, and problem-solving.
There are two other family tales in this issue: Beginning on page 60, Jay Panetta tells the story of Vince Todd and Cheryle St. Onge, who raised their family while restoring and actively sailing two sizeable yachts—as well as several earlier boats. I met Vince more than 25 years ago in the dinner line at a wooden-boat regatta. He was then sailing THORA, a Ted Hood–designed yawl he’d recently acquired and refurbished. We’ve caught up every year since, at that same event. But Vince has been modest about the skill and effort he puts into his boats, and it was only recently that I learned, through Jay and others, the full story of how he and Cheryle have deftly woven family into a pursuit that can often distract a parent from family, rather than bringing it together. Vince’s grown children, as you’ll learn, are now the stewards of THORA while Vince and Cheryle sail their newly restored Sparkman & Stephens yawl, INVERNESS.
The final family tale in this issue is told by Nic Compton, who recently took his gang on a multi-day outing on England’s Norfolk Broads, a conserved marshland waterway that gave rise, over decades, to a unique type of shallow-draft cruising yacht (page 22). There’s one yard on the Broads—Hunter’s Yard—that operates a fleet of 25 traditional wooden boats, chartering them to anyone with the skills to sail them. It’s an inspiring story of how a current-day family can have access, for a modest investment, to a truly classical cruising experience.
Editor of WoodenBoat Magazine
