A Hollywood Hurry

I’ve been doing a pretty poor job of updating the website this winter; a fact made amply clear when someone wrote to find out when we would be opening for the season. Oops. We’ve actually been working right through the winter and are having a crazy busy spring thanks to an order for six Handline dories for a movie that’s going to be shot in and around Halifax and Prospect this summer. We also have orders for a Grand Manan dory and another big Fortune Bay boat so there’s no time to waste. In fact, completion of the 19.5 foot skiff has been postponed - Jay got her planked then moved her to ‘Plant 2’, our second building.

Jay also has a second hand in the shop these days. Bub Dares used to help out when Nathan Smith, son of the shop’s former owner Kim Smith, was building dories so he arrived pre-trained as it were. The two of them are going at the movie dories ‘production-style’, that is to say, they started by building all of the bottoms, then cutting the stems and sterns, then each dory is set up and planked, the knees are added, followed by the gunnels. A hundred years ago when Lunenburg harbour was filled with fishing schooners, each of which required 10-14 dories for fishing on the Grand Banks, this is how our shop and a half dozen other dory-building enterprises located in the town all worked. There was one man who worked exclusively on bottoms, others who did the planking, etc. Jay thinks that would be pretty boring, and I take his point, but if we are ever going to take over the world with our boats, he’s going to have to get used to the idea!

Dory Plug