2023 Wooden Boat Festival

A wooden boat can be viewed not so much as an object as a snapshot in time of a work in progress. This presentation will cover the beginnings and the first post-launch year of that work for one new boat. The process of building a new boat doesn’t start with a stack of materials in the shop nor is it finished when the boat is launched. With my boat Camas Moon, a new Copgy18 mini-motorsailer yawl design by Tad Roberts, it started with the realization that I could no longer do what I wanted to do with the boat I had, together with the forced isolation of the pandemic. I will tell the story of how I decided to build a new boat, searched for the right design and was given an opportunity to build an almost-custom boat. It continues with a documentation of the dialogue, as the build progressed, between me and Tad Roberts, the designer. I will show the main milestones of the build and some of the construction details that I decided on, based on my experience, thoughts and preferences. I’ll talk about the launch, the shake-down cruise to this festival in 2022, and the list of fixes and improvements that resulted from the actual use of the boat on the water. I’ll end by describing the current state of the boat, incorporating the upgrades that I made over the winter.