The Dory Shop

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada | (902) 640-3005 | info@doryshop.com

Stories from the The Dory Shop


Hooray for Santa Claus!

The historic port of Lunenburg has a unique way of welcoming the holiday season. Like many communities, the town hosts a Santa Claus parade, but there’s something that makes ours just a little bit different. The parade here has a boat theme; specifically, parade organizers seek to place as many of the entrees as possible in dories and other wooden boats. As you can imagine, we tend to get a few calls!

Dory class celebrates successful launch

Two very pleasant weeks with our latest dory  building class wrapped up Friday as the group launched the fruit of their labours, the HMLD NAK. The what, you ask? Well, as always, the dory built during the class is available for sale to one of the participants and in this case will find a new home in New Brunswick.

Stop and smell the cedar

Jay is still working away on a lovely steam-bent Alaskan Yellow Cedar dinghy for the Schooner Martha Seabury. It’s a much fussier project than a Banks dory, which planks up lickety-split using nice, wide planks fashioned from pine with no need for a steam box.

Dory Plug’s in love again

They say that the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. So here goes. I, Dory Plug, have a problem. Please don’t just me too harshly. I’m not really the philandering type but, well, I do tend to fall in love with every new boat we build.

Motor dory for Maine

Jay’s hard at work on a new dory. Or trying to be. There are a lot of tourists strolling along the Lunenburg waterfront on this beautiful sunny day and while we enjoy having an open shop, it can make it a little hard to get to the job at hand.

A little story about dory knees

The Hatts were here yesterday with our spring shipment of Hackmatack dory knees. Naturally grown frames, or knees as they are known in dories, are the defining feature of a Lunenburg-built Banks dory. While other ports built their frames using pieces of wood fastened together with a patented metal clip, ours are cut from a single piece of wood. They are not steamed, nor bent, but instead are cut from the lower trunk and roots of the very strong and rot resistant Hackmatack tree. For four generations the Hatt family has supplied The Dory Shop with this critical building material. Edgar Hatt, shown above, began cutting knees with his father Arthur and his grandfather. He now works in the woods with his son.

Our multi-talented dory builder

Posts to this blog regularly bear witness to the incredible boatbuilding talents of our team here at The Dory Shop, particularly the work of our master dory builder Jay Langford. But Jay’s talents extend well beyond the boatbuilding world as proven by the painting – his latest! – shown here.

A new learning opportunity at The Dory Shop

Want to build a classic wooden boat? There’s no better way to learn how than to take one apart and fix it! That’s just the opportunity available at The Dory Shop this spring when master boatbuilder Jay Langford restores an aging Monomoy pull boat. Brought to The Dory Shop straight from Cape Cod, where these boats originated, this fascinating project offers a unique learning opportunity for up to four new and would-be boatbuilders.

On their knees

Our two-week segment with participants in the Boatbuilder Employment Preparation Training Program, sponsored by the Nova Scotia Boatbuilders Association and the Employment Solutions Society, is moving right along. Yesterday, the gang was fitting and installing the knees (frames) in the 13-foot-bottom, 17-foot overall Handline dory they’re building with Jay.

Schooners all planked up

There was much merriment in the boatyard this weekend (too much?) as we celebrated the installation of the last plank in our twin schooners – the Shutter Plank. Actor-adventurer Billy Campbell, for whom one of the 48-foot schooners is being built, did the honours – dousing the plank with rum and hammering in the fastenings. The more than 150 people who joined us also got a look at the dory being built by participants in the Boatbuilder Employment Preparation Training Program.

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