Building Church Mouse

In the mid-1990s, Joel White, of Brooklin Boat Yard in Maine, began designing a simple skiff that could be built of two sheets of plywood without having to scarf them together. His client, a minister in a neighboring town, wanted to build boats with kids. I was building lots of boats with young people around that time, too, and Joel shared a copy of the concept drawing with me before he died in 1997.

After losing that drawing for many years, I found it in spring 2024 and decided to flesh out the design and build the boat. I enlisted the help of Kyle Godfrey, an excellent carpentry and architectural drafting teacher at my local high-school career center in Arlington, Virginia. We used the boat as a project for his carpentry students; the school’s digital arts instructor, Tom O’Day, had his students photograph and video the build. Over two and half months, nine students lofted and built the prototype of what my wife, Jessica, came to call the Church Mouse Skiff, in deference to both its ministerial roots and to the legendary protagonist of Stuart Little, which was written by Joel’s father, E.B. White. We worked out a lot of details during that project. The following summer, I coached the construction of four more of the boats during a one-week Family Boatbuilding class at WoodenBoat School.

The following instructions are a distillation of what we learned building those five boats. Will Sturdy, the chief designer at Brooklin Boat Yard, took all of our notes and scribbles, applied them to his own keen understanding of design and engineering, and created a very thorough set of plans.

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