Oarlock and Sail Wooden Boat Club

    Oarlock and Sail keeps alive a long tradition in the Vancouver area: the love of small wooden boats. Club members are attracted to the beauty of wood, the smell of wood shavings, and the pride of using wooden boats that they have constructed together. Over the years, they have built many types of vessels: row boats, sail boats, power boats, kayaks, and canoes.
    Oarlock and Sail brings together wooden boat enthusiasts to socialize and to share ideas and experiences. Small wooden boats are not only fun to use, but building them allows members to use their hands and be creative, and it instills the values of teamwork and community. 
    There are many reasons to join the club. If you have a small wooden boat, you can join the Club to meet people and take part in events. If you are thinking about building a wooden boat or are currently building one, then joining Oarlock and Sail can help you achieve your goal. 
    Oarlock and Sail is registered under the Society Act of British Columbia. The Club publishes four newsletters a year and generally meets on the second Thursday of each month. Meetings feature guest speakers, hands-on activities, discussions, and refreshments. Besides the monthly meetings, there are also lots of opportunities to get involved through field trips and club projects. The yearly membership is only $30. If you can't join the club, you are still invited to visit some of the members, who can usually be found building a boat in the floating building behind the Maritime Museum (the brown building in the center of the picture below).

The following photos were taken in July and August of 2001, when the members were building a 12 foot skiff:

This book provides the instructions.	To construct the skiff from Traditional Boatbuilding Made Easy, the Western red cedar sides and transom are planed to fit, glued with marine adhesive, then nailed with copper clinch nails.

Wooden boats are:

• Beautiful

• Historical

• Warm to the touch

• Made of natural materials

• Enjoyable to build

• Wonderful to row

• A joy to paddle

• A dream to sail 

. . . great reasons to get together and join the Oarlock and Sail Wooden Boat Club!
 

Links:
The Center for Wooden Boats, Seattle
Haida wood carver, Reg Davidson
Haida argillite carver, Myles Edgars
Haida painter, James Sawyer
Polish wood carver, Jan Piotr Ledwon
Polish wood carver, Czeslaw Olma
Mexican wood carver, Fernando Giron Pantoja 
Mexican marquetry box maker, José Antonio Rodríguez
Wood Carving in Foumban, Cameroon, Africa
Silva Foundation Workshops in Lisbon, Portugal   
Intarsia of Granada, Spain    
Religious sculpture in Seville, Spain 
Carol Ventura's Home Page  

Web page, photographs, and text by Carol Ventura.