The Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria is looking to expand its offerings to include a boat building school that could draw students and visitors from around the globe.
The school will be located in the old train depot building on the CRMM campus.
Museum Executive Director Sam Johnson knows his way around wooden boats. An artisan boat builder himself, Johnson helped construct the gillnetter replica currently on display in the museum.
The new program is part of Johnson’s long-term vision for the organization - to make it a center for Pacific Northwest boats. The boatbuilding school is just one facet of a museum initiative designed to document and preserve the indigenous small craft of the region.
Johnson said the old designs are disappearing, and it’s time to preserve them while there are enough old timers (and old boats) left to allow archivists to document boat plans and design details.
"At one time there were thousands of those sailing gillnetters," he said of the museum’s replica. "When we built it here, there was some question about how authentic it was because there were no plans and no boats left to copy."
Johnson’s vision is to partner with WoodenBoat Magazine’s Wooden Boat School based in Brooklin, Maine, and make Astoria the site of the organization’s West Coast branch.
The center would teach classes in wooden boat building and repair techniques, and related disciplines. Johnson also has plans to create a publishing arm of the museum that would periodically publish videos, papers and monographs documenting small craft history.
Cannon Beach architect Jay Raskin is drawing up designs to renovate the train depot and figure out what’s needed to upgrade it into workshop and warehouse space. Johnson hopes to begin fundraising later this year and start classes in 2011.
He said having a boat building school in Astoria could provide an economic boost to the community by tapping into the large, global community of avid wooden boat enthusiasts.
"The people who typically sign up for boatbuilding classes are retired men, 55 and up, with discretionary income," he said.
He estimated that students, who often travel with their spouses, could easily spend several thousand dollars each locally just on lodging and dining during the course of being in town for a week-long class.
Johnson said when he has taught similar classes in the Seattle area, students traveled from as far away as New Zealand to learn traditional boatbuilding techniques.
To kick off CRMM’s new effort to save traditional boats, the museum will sponsor the "Traditional Boats of the Pacific Northwest" Conference in March.
The goal of the gathering is to develop a list of traditional boat types of the region, and identify which are extinct and which still exist. The results will help the museum develop preservation strategies and priorities. Boat types will include native craft, recreational boats and workboats up to 120 ft. in length.
Johnson said he wants to put out the word to people around the region who might have an old boat, or know of one.
"Every year two or three [old boats] get rotted away or burned up," Johnson said. "There are an awful lot that are stuck in somebody’s barn."
The small boat conference takes place on Saturday, March 6. For more info contact Sam Johnson at the museum at (503) 325-2323.