We kicked off the long Victoria Day weekend this afternoon with ‘graduation’ ceremonies for participants in our spring dory building course. Once again, we were blessed with a great group, all eager to learn about traditional wooden boats, to get right in there with the plane or the hammer or the paint brush, and to enjoy the offerings of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia and our waterfront in particular.

The gunwales are in and the guys are making the seats, known as thwarts, for their handsomely crafted Black Rocks dory. This afternoon we’ll get out of the shop a little and visit Michele Stevens Sailloft in First  Peninsula.

For those folks fortunate enough to have grown up on the water, thoughts of summers spent ‘messing about in boats’ bring back some pretty wonderful memories. And it’s just those warm thoughts that have our gang here at The Dory Shop so stoked as we begin building a big Fortune Bay sailing dory for the Tim Horton Children’s Foundation Summer Camp at Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia.

It’s that time of year again – time to receive our annual delivery of dory knees, courtesy of the Hatt family. For more than 50 years, and through four generations, the Hatts have supplied The Dory Shop with this oh-so-critical construction material

Once every year, about this time in October, The Dory Shop welcomes a pair of very special visitors. They arrive in their stunningly clean pick-up truck (always wonder how they do that!) and unload the equivalent of dory building gold. They are Edgar and Otho Hatt and they supply our “naturally-grown” dory frames or knees.

I can’t resist posting a link to what’s often been called the greatest movie entrance ever, and it takes place in a Lunenburg Dory Shop dory. I’m talking of course of Capt. Jack Sparrow’s entrance in the original Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Curse of the Black Pearl.

This is a Lunenburg dory, which means it’s 12 feet on the bottom, 15.5 feet overall. Jay finds it a nice change after building two big Fortune Bay dories back-to-back.