Building a Dory
Traditional workboat construction with a master shipwright.
- WALT ANSEL —August 5–11
Tuition: $750
Note: This is a six-day course ending on Saturday afternoon.
Imagine you have stepped back with us 100 years to a New England boatshop and are building a 19½′ Grand Banks halibut dory. Thousands of dories were mass-produced for the offshore fisheries from 1860 until the 1920s. They were the workhorses of the North Atlantic handline and trawl fishing industry, landing millions of tons of cod, haddock, and halibut. Carried aboard Gloucester fishing schooners and vessels of all the other nations fishing the Grand Banks, dories were uniquely suited for the task at hand. Of simple construction, with elegant lines, dories were cheap to construct, highly functional, and incredibly seaworthy. For our purposes today, the dory design is a unique instructional example that can take us back to boatbuilding basics, touching the roots of traditional workboat construction.
The techniques demonstrated and employed in this course will come as close as possible to those used in 19th-century dory production. We will build a halibut dory with native pine and oak, fasten it with clench nails, and bed and paint it the traditional way. Having only a week to complete the project, we will be using a few basic power tools that were unavailable in the past—mainly, power saws and drills—in addition to hand tools. Hopefully, these aids will speed us along.
This dory will be built without any plans or lofting. We will replicate an existing boat or work from patterns or notes to build the needed parts. The upright assembly will be by rule of thumb and eye, with emphasis on the use of battens for establishing shapes and fairing. John Gardner’s The Dory Book will be our companion and reference; students taking the course would be advised to acquire a copy.
The completed halibut dory built in this course will find a home on Mystic Seaport’s beautiful Gloucester fishing schooner L.A. DUNTON where demonstration interpreters will use it to set and haul fishing gear. The trawl lines, handlines, and seines set in the Mystic River for the visitors will probably never catch a huge thumping halibut, but you never know…