East End Classic Boat Society Inc

The East End Classic Boat Society is a vibrant community based operation where dedicated volunteers gather to apply, preserve and teach the craft of traditional wooden boat building.

We do much more than our mission statement,

• Empowering community neighbors, retirees and Sea Scouts, teaching them fine woodworking skills while giving them an enriching maritime experience
• Educating the public, who come to appreciate, admire, and love the traditional wooden craft created by the East End Classic Boat Society
• Reaching out to the local community with six annual events, where our boats serve as ambassadors of traditional boat building, caressed, admired, and loved by a very appreciative audience
• Recycling timber felled for landscaping into beautiful components of traditional wooden boats

                Here is a story that tells how others see us...

Classic Lines and Design for the Water

By Peter Boody – (Edited for this website.  Read full story online - Sag Harbor Express http://sagharboronline.com/hamptonsfestival/classic-lines-design-water/)

There are few objects that have the innate power to touch peoples’ hearts and spirits on sight. One of them is a handmade wooden boat, elegantly shaped to speed through its element and varnished to a luster that brings out the grain of wood and makes it glisten like a breaking comber in mid-summer.

Called a Pooduck skiff, it’s a 12-foot, 10-inch boat with sassafras seats, double-epoxied plywood planking, a turquoise interior paint job and a lightweight mast made of Pacific Coast spruce. The mast is strong but hollow, much lighter than you’d guess.

Handmade by members of the East End Classic Boat Society in Amagansett, the boat has been wooing hearts at community events all summer.

The shop is the place where the magic happens. An easy, relaxed atmosphere prevails. The group’s doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, former restaurant owner, building contractor and others — volunteers all —come and go, mostly on Saturday and Wednesday mornings, and various projects gradually evolve into works of art. The society has 160 members but, according to the Society’s president, Ray Hartjen, “Five percent are active. The rest are dreamers.”

There are a couple of boat restorations underway downstairs, where former Sag Harbor Mayor Pierce Hance, a financial analyst and vice president of the Society, sort of runs the show. Members take the finished works — such as the Molly Gann, a restored Beetle Cat — out for a sail now and then.

Upstairs, Burt Van Deusen, former owner of the 1770 House in East Hampton, and an art gallery owner in Philadelphia before that, pretty much oversaw the construction of the Pooduck skiff, which he championed and managed to convince the group to make. It was completed well ahead of schedule in 2015. They’re now working on a second Sunshine tender.

When you ask these guys who’s in charge of what, they smirk slightly and avert their eyes a little.

“We’re sort of looser than that,” said Mr. Van Deusen.

It seems everyone’s in charge and no one’s in charge at times — but it all works out. The proof lies in the seven other spiffy little beauties the group has built and raffled off since 2005. Their names are almost as intriguing as their lovely looks: an Atkins skiff, two Swampscott dories, a Catspaw dinghy, a Sunshine tender, a Goeller dinghy, and an East End Sharpie.

But isn’t there a quarterback for particular projects?

“No. Different people take different roles,” said Mr. Hartjen, a retired educator, lifelong sailor and former summer kid on Gardiners Bay, who has been heading to the water there since the early 1930s.

He truly was the quarterback who managed the construction of the Hartjen-Richardson Community Boat House in 2006 and 2007. It was named for him and Randolph Richardson.

“We have opened the door to all the people on the East End that come to visit us, that come and massage the boat, that now have a love, that have a new appreciation for the art of classic boat building,” said Mr. Hartjen. “It’s an appreciation that didn’t exist until we were here putting our wares out year after year.

“Wooden boat building and wooden boats are like a romance,” said Don Schreiber, a building contractor from Sag Harbor. “You have to love it.” Time and again he has watched people come “massage the wood,” he said, and exclaim, “Oh, look at this, it’s so nice, oh wow!” whenever the Society puts its boat on display at summer fairs and events around the East End.

If you miss the boat at HarborFest, you can see it at the Community Boat Shop, which is open to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. New members, with or without boat building experience, are always welcome. Neophytes learn by working beside someone who knows what he’s doing. Go to the society’s website at eecbs.org for more information.