I was really impressed with this documentary on building a Chesapeake Bay deadrise oyster boat by eye alone. This film was obviously made with a lot of love and respect for vanishing skills and a centuries-old tradition. Hope a few here will take the time to watch and be rewarded.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STGwyif5K5M

Great video. Watched it twice.

Thanks for posting. Very neat video. Brings back a lot of memories. Just a few years before that time when my wife was a teenager, my father-in-law (who went all the way through the fourth grade) built a 60-foot steel trawler in the vacant lot next to his house in a residential neighborhood in Luling LA.

All he started with were his years of experience (he had been spending the night out by himself on the marsh in his Laffitte skiff since he was 12), a few sketches he drew by hand, some string, a chalk line, a ruler, compass, and a plum bob. He laid out, cut, and welded just about everything himself with my wife, or her mother operating a crane for him He had some help from a son-in-law occasionally as well.

The narrator was right, those guys do everything themselves, he built the steel boat, did the inside carpentry, all wiring, and rebuilt the semi truck diesel engine himself. It had a separate diesel generator for electric power. He even sewed together his own giant trawls and kept them in good repair.

It took him 5 or 6 years working on weekends and days off while working full-time as a master pipefitter, trawling, and trapping. No video but they documented the build very well with an extensive photo album. Every so often the local newspaper would come by and run a story on him, including one entitled, "Does this Man Know Something We Don't?"

When it was finished they towed it out to the water just like in the video, and launched it. FIL once told me when they were sliding that thing in the water you couldn't have driven a needle up his @$$!

When I met my wife he had been working the boat for 4 or 5 years and was doing very well with it. I spent a year and a half working for him on it. In addition to general deckhand duties it eventually became my responsibility to maintain the generator and keep it running. It was tough but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. It was a very stable and comfortable boat to live and work on. The longest trip I ever made on it was when we stayed out once for 11 days. Most trips were less than a week. The cabin had two bedrooms with bunks, a full bathroom, and a kitchen/dining/sitting area. It had a comfortable pilothouse to helm the boat from. I never spent much time in there; I never did get the hang of driving it, it was very maneuverable. It took quite a bit of rudder to get it turning but suddenly it would bite and turn on a dime. You had to know just when to let off. My FIL could parallel park it in a space with about 5 feet clearance fore and aft, with me lassoing a piling for him. He designed the boat with a very shallow draft, we could go trawl in just a few feet of water and make a killing where hardly any other boats could follow us in.

We worked our butts off but it was a great family atmosphere. This was how I worked my way into the family and made my in-laws think it might be okay to let their youngest daughter marry this ignorant young yay-hoo. Our tradition was to bring steaks for the first night, and after that we lived off the water. Fresh shrimp, the huge ones that seldom make it to market. Fresh flounder, trout, shark steaks, blue crab, stone crab, it was awesome.

My father-in-law was the Real Deal back in the day. Today he is 83 and not getting around so well but sometimes when we talk about working on the boat together we all end up laughing our heads off, we got into some situations now.

What a blast from the past.

Started it twice, finally finished it. Great video, I like how he said he watched when he was a kid and held nails for the old guys. That way he knew exactly what to do when he started building. Couldn't get very many kids these days interested in hanging out while a guy was building a boat.

Beautiful work. My hunting club had a 30' launch built in South
Louisiana (Erath). No plans, welded aluminum. We use it for transporting our hunters across about 5 miles of bay where they are ferried to their blinds in airboats. When I talked with the builder at the first meeting I told him what we wanted he just nodded his head and said "not a problem". I went over from Houston twice a month during construction. Very interesting.
to form the sides of the boat he tack welded a large piece of aluminum to the keel and ribs to the starboard side. We then drew the outline on the aluminum. After cutting out the form he cut the tack welds and used it as a template for the port side.