Last winter, Mother Nature dumped 24 inches of heavy, wet snow on the boat storage buildings at South Bristol’s Bittersweet Landing Boatyard, flattening two of them.
Now Mike Nyboe, who owns the boatyard with his wife, Charlotte, is one of a handful of Maine boat yard owners that are rebuilding.
Shoehorned into a granite ledge, not far from the South Bristol gut, excavators and blasters are carving out space for a pair of 76-foot by 120-foot sheds.
If the buildings look a bit strange, it is because the steel skeleton of the side walls look more like heavy steel industrial shelving.
In fact, they are made from heavy steel industrial shelving. Green building advocates would approve his use of recycled materials.
“I got a great deal on some heavy steel shelving from a Rockland warehouse,” he said.
The clever boatyard owner figured out how to assemble and weld the shelving together to make a skeleton for the outside walls. Inside, the same shelving will be used to store small inflatables and skiffs, he said.
“The bottom line is that we lost 400 feet of storage in the storm and are replacing them with 480 feet of storage,” he said.
Nyboe and his wife, Charlotte, are supervising the construction and using local contractors and local labor to build the facilities.
It is the 17th summer that Nyboe has owned Bittersweet Landing where he stores, maintains and repairs more than 200 recreational and work boats.
The new sheds will feature wooden siding and metal roofs.
