A new voyage: Peter Ryan's year of wooden boat building

Above, living the dream: Peter Ryan takes a snap of himself in in boat building heaven.

Words and photos: Peter Ryan

Set on the banks of the Huon River, The Wooden Boat Centre occupies an enviable location in the charming village of Franklin, 40 minutes south of Hobart, Tasmania. This was to be my home in 2024 for the next 10 months as I embarked upon a shipwright’s course in the art of wooden boat building. I’ve loved making things with my hands since I was a kid and regretted not pursuing a career where creativity was more prevalent. This course was my means of addressing this and scratching a lifelong itch!

The view from The Wooden Boat Centre workshop which is situated on the Huon River in Franklin, Tasmania.

The course commenced in early February, where I and my two fellow students were promptly handed a set of oars on day one and shown to our timber rowing boats. It was to be our maiden voyage on the beautiful Huon River and a means of seeing, feeling and understanding what it was that we would eventually be making.

Thankfully every day didn’t commence with an exhausting rowing session, quite the opposite in fact. The course is open to all, be they an experienced woodworker or as green as freshly felled timber. I hadn’t cut a dovetail joint or used a bandsaw since high school so this slow introduction was very welcome.

New tools to master, and a new language to learn.

Under the watchful eye of Cody Horgan, an experienced shipwright and the Wooden Boat Centre Manager, we were inducted. Safety practices in a shared workshop with students, volunteers and staff are paramount. So, before a marking gauge was set or a pencil sharpened, we were put through our paces and signed off in the correct operation of the tablesaw, thicknesser, planer and bandsaw, as well as a whole host of modern battery-operated hand-held tools and the more traditional tools of the trade; chisels, planes and spokeshaves, to name but a few.

Our first lesson was focused on joints. Finger joints to start with, then half lap, cross lap and dovetails. I felt like I was back in my high school woodwork classroom, an equal mix of happiness and frustration with my lack of precision. We used ubiquitous pine initially and then were presented with a piece of Huon pine. This is a buttery golden, slow growing timber endemic to Tasmania that is now a protected species but coveted by boat builders. It’s a timber that is perfectly suited to boat building due to its tight grain, durability, workability and resistance to rot. It has a beautiful aroma and a freshly sharpened blade glides through it effortlessly which makes it addictive to work with.

Trees and timber are close to many people’s hearts in Tasmania and spoken about with passion. We were lucky to be in the presence of one such man, Chris Burke, who gave us an in-depth presentation on the topic, educating us on the biology of trees, endemic species and the history of logging in Tasmania, grain patterns and milling. I sat there in awe, thinking that he had probably forgotten more than I will ever know on these subjects. It was a wonderfully inspiring and timely presentation in preparation for the year that lay ahead.

Practising handcut joinery for a first tool box project.

Every shipwright has their own toolbox and a plastic box purchased from a large green warehouse doesn’t appear to cut it in these circles. Our first project and a means of gauging our varying abilities was the construction of our own timber toolbox. I sketched a design and used other tool boxes to gauge an appropriate size, while my fellow students opted for plans that were downloadable. In retrospect it might have made my life a little easier had I done the same!

I chose some timber and ran it through the thicknesser, cut it to size and started on my dovetails, loving every minute of it. I should have listened more intently when grain direction was being addressed, some of my doves (or were they the tails?) took flight due to the orientation of the grain, a good learning experience to have early and one of many to come.

I had never used a Japanese handsaw before and I loved the precision of its thin blade. After plenty of marking, sawing, chiselling, and a little mallet banging here and there, I had accomplished my mission and had a finished toolbox. For the handle I decided to do something a little different – I glued four square lengths of plywood together to form one large square length of ply. I then proceeded to plane the corners off, starting with 4, then 8, then 16. Little did I know that this was the traditional method of forming a perfectly round mast for a ship, a very coincidental but appropriate way to form a handle for my shipwright’s toolbox.

Half models were next. ‘What’s a half model?’, I hear you say and that’s exactly what I thought. Essentially it is a small model of half a boat. Not only is it a beautiful little model that one can mount and proudly display (which is what I plan to do), it’s also a means of physically seeing how a boat will look before it is constructed to scale. It’s an art form but also a science. You draw the boat and divide it into sections and then plot the dimensions on a piece of timber. You then shape one plane/axis at a time using a spokeshave, rasp and sandpaper, measuring with a vernier calipers as you go to ensure accuracy.

I carved a half model of an Inuit canoe and a traditional clinker dinghy. Cody, our instructor, also chose to carve a half model of a boat. He chose a boat called a Melonseed, a wide low-slung boat used by duck hunters that he always fancied the appearance of. Given that Franklin is full off apple orchards he decided to re-name it the Appleseed, and this was to be our first boat building project of the year.

Learning to draw scaled views is a technique referred to as 'lofting'.

Given our student credentials, the boat’s hull was to be constructed from plywood planks, we would use Huon pine for the transom (the rear end of the boat) and some of the boat’s more visible interior sections. The first step in the process of building a boat is called ‘lofting’. Lofting is essentially drawing the hull at full scale in plan, elevation and sectional view. The lofting process provided us with all the necessary dimensions, angles and curves to enable us to make every unique piece for the boat.

Mouldings for the hull and transom in place

Lofting is truly fascinating, I’m still blown away by how much information can be obtained from what is drawn; it is complicated, precise, mathematical and confusing at the best of times but also beautiful and a work of art when complete. New terms such as stem, knee, buttocks, water lines, fore and aft were being used and my head was spinning! The lofting board provided us with sectional views of the hull at equal intervals, we used this information to make templates which we then used to make seven unique moulds. The moulds were fixed at equal intervals to the solid base frame which we also constructed.

Attaching planks to the skeleton frame

The inner and outer stem were made using laminated timber strips which I cold-moulded to the required shape as per the lofting board instructed. We joined three pieces of Huon pine together to form the transom and nerve rackingly cut it to shape, joining both pieces to the keel plank. With the section moulds in place, we had constructed the skeleton of the boat.

Time for a libation after the 'whiskey plank' is installed

We then used a ‘spiralling plank’ that ran ‘fore and aft’, that is, from the front to the back to obtain a template of the unique shape of our first plank. Using the template, we made two identical first planks and fixed them to our boat’s skeleton, we used a ‘fid’ to mark our ‘lands’ for the next plank and connected the ‘scallopinis’ we made using a plane to form the land and repeated the process until we had fixed all the planks.

Traditionally, the final plank fixed to a boat is called the ‘whisky plank’ and is accompanied by a little dram, it was a welcome pause and a lovely way to celebrate a significant milestone.

Laminating the outer stem for the Appleseed.

No two days were ever the same which was wonderful. We had the opportunity to participate in a green timber course and made a stool and a shave horse. In the middle of the year, we made three skiffs over the course of five weeks for a movie about pirates that was being shot on the Gold Coast, a team building exercise like none other I have ever experienced – it was great.

More progress on the Appleseed

Wooden boat restoration projects are constantly on the go in the shed with up to four or five boats in varying degrees of repair being worked on simultaneously. This provides lots of opportunities to learn the art of roving, steambending ribs, scarfing and a whole host of other industry techniques. The wisdom that exists through the array of volunteers and staff who work in the centre is amazing and their willingness to share these skills makes for a great environment.

It’s been an amazing few months that have passed in the blink of an eye and writing this has shown me how much I have learnt. I can happily say that my itch has been well and truly scratched. It will be a sad day when the course comes to a close but I have a feeling it will be start of a new journey rather than end of a voyage!

Learn more about Peter Ryan at Instagram @woodandboats

Learn more about The Wooden Boat Centre at www.woodenboatcentre.com