Building a transom dory

Crazy times at the Dory Shop…we are building a boat that is not exactly a fishing dory. We are building a boat exactly like a dory but with a broad transom upon which one could hang an outboard motor and thus tool around the harbour with great swiftness. This dory will be able to carry a ton of gear (or seaweed or lobster traps or kids or a picnic etc). We thought it would be good to build such a boat and figured one of you would like to take her home. When I was a kid my buddies and I would save up a little money and buy such an old transom dory, much used, from the local boat livery when she was near worn out. This boat we would minimally fix up and then spend all our time going out to the islands close off-shore camping in the woods of the uninhabited isles pretty much all year round. Our parents didn’t seem to mind much as this kept us off the streets. At least they didn’t really know all the details of our activities. As Tom Sawyer might have said ‘when discussing things with grown-ups it is best to be economical with the facts’ or something like that. It is still fun to blast around in a proper wooden boat. Those jet-skiers had nothing on us and we could carry anything we wanted in our dories and still pull them up on the beach. When the weather got rough we knew we had a boat that could get us home too.

Anyway, we are building a “Transom Dory”. It’s coming along fine. Jay drew up and built a bottom, then he took the molds for a 15 foot bottom dory and widened them a bit aft, set them on bottom, wedging them down to give it a little rocker and now he is planking her up with broad white pine planks.

Captain Dan