![]() In a five-year span our fans have watched trees become a boat that will cross oceans. All of the goals we put here five years ago, we’re pretty much doing: uploading a video once a week and making frequent Facebook and Instagram posts. This page originally said, “If we can inspire you, convince you to follow along and help us out a little, then maybe, just maybe, we can leave our jobs and build full time.” And we’re doing that now. We started with bi-weekly videos, but we’re now working on the boat full time and we are releasing one video a week to document it all. If we had continued working full time and building part time we expected to take a total of 6-10 years to build Arabella. That is the why and how, and whether we can continue depends on you. We showed a bunch of people that you could weld bronze into the prettiest (and mighty strong) jewelry one can put in a bilge. YouTube went absolutely bonkers when we made a smelter and poured that lead into a mold on video. Almost 100% of the lumber will be harvested from our property we mill boards on a small portable sawmill. We’ve foraged for and handled 12,000 lbs of scrap lead for a ballast keel. Everything for Arabella will be sourced as locally as possible, this is very important to us. When we say “build” we mean just that, from scratch, in our front yard, with our own hands. Thanks to people who document what they do, we all learn that new, difficult, apart-from-the-norm things are worth doing. We are documenting every aspect of the build as we go-we hope to inspire people through our videos on YouTube because we’ve been inspired by others who chose not only to do difficult things, but to also share how they did it. ![]() Once she’s launched, we intend to take her to the most far-flung corners of the world. Atkin calls this design Ingrid (when marconi-rigged) and Stormy Petrel (when gaff-rigged) and our boat will be named Arabella. We are building a 38’ wooden sailboat designed in 1934 by William Atkin. The challenges of building a boat are real, the journey will be long, but the rewards will be magnificent! What’s going on in Western Massachusetts, two hours from the ocean? To me, this is an honest, cheerful and heartening story of skill, determination and community, and a welcome respite from the day-to-day barrage of bad news.When we started, our idea was met with healthy doses of skepticism, admiration, and even envy. The videos are of professional quality, well edited and scripted, and progress is fun to watch without requiring a huge amount of concentration… (it’s not like I am going to build my own boat tomorrow…) However, it’s very importantfor the sake of progress to be sure that work isn’t interrupted. We’ve set up a pretty sweet way to be able to see Arabella in person. Presentation and narration are articulate, professional, honest, detailed and complete but never feel boastful or commercial. Acorn to Arabella Journey of a Wooden Boat Watch on YouTube. ![]() For instance, wood is harvested and shaped by the team, tools are designed to build copper rivets on site and valuable items from a similar old but no longer serviceable boat are recycled for use in Arabella. ![]() There is a focus on manual labor, home-made and old-fashioned ingenuity, rigs, gears and recycling.
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