Forty-years after he co-founded the Carpenters Boat Shop, Bobby Ives is a jack-of-all trades volunteer. (Photo courtesy Carpenter’s Boat Shop)
Bobby and Ruth Ives opened the Carpenter’s Boat Shop in 1979 with an emphasis on doing a job well rather than quickly.
On Thursday, May 9 at 7 p.m., Bobby Ives will treat an online audience to the story of how that focus on quality over speed has enabled four-and-a-half decades of apprentices to learn about wooden boat building, making choices, and creating relationships.
Ruth Ives passed away in 2006, but Bobby remains the organization’s ballast and role model. Though he’s stepped down from a formal management role, he still shows up at the Pemaquid campus as part of a dedicated volunteer corps that helps fulfill the organization’s mission of building boats, nurturing lives, and helping others.
Ives’ presentation will close out the Carpenter’s Boat Shop Spring Lecture Series and usher in the Boat Shop’s busiest season that will feature a three-day celebration of its 45th anniversary.
“When we began in 1979, we had dreams for the Boat Shop, but it didn’t grow in a straight line,” Ives said, adding the dream adjusted to “all the different twists and turns that we took to help the apprentices have lives worth living.”
After all those years, the Boat Shop co-founder estimates about 55 percent of the Boat Shop’s apprentices have found lives rooted in carpentry. “They’re boat builders, they’re cabinet makers, they’re violin makers, but they’re all working with wood,” Ives said.
For every apprentice, the woodworking at the Boat Shop starts with constructing a Monhegan skiff, what Ives calls a “beginner’s boa.” Each of those flat-bottomed boat floats on a bit of local history.
In the mid-1970s, Bobby and Ruth Ives lived and worked on the island, Ruth teaching and Bobby serving as the local minister. In 1979, when they left the island to open Carpenter’s Boat Shop, the local boatbuilder who’d designed and built Monhegan skiffs for years “asked if we would continue making the skiff,” Ives said. “He had gone blind and no longer would do the work. “I said, ‘Of course, we would be an honored to do it.’ So, we started building the skiffs to his plans and it’s still the basic boat for our apprentices.”
The basic boat is just the beginning and, over the course of their time at Carpenter’s Boat Shop, apprentices have moved on to dories, Maine Coast Peapods and sailing dinghies.
On occasion, the Boat Shop is challenged to move in an unexpected direction. Ives remembers, a man who came to Carpenter’s Boat Shop in the mid-1980s with a picture of Winslow Homer’s “Breezing Up,” an 1876 painting of three boys and a more experienced hand at the helm sailing on choppy waters.
“He said, ‘Ever since I was the age of the boys, I’ve wanted that boat. Now, I’m the age of the old man in the boat, and I want to have that boat before I die.’” Ives said. “So, I sent down to Mystic Seaport and asked, ‘What would Winslow Homer have seen off the coast of Gloucester where he painted?’ They sent me a couple of plans. We built that boat, and it’s still in Friendship Harbor.”
The Boat Shop apprentices were able to help fulfill one man’s dream of a lifetime. For Bobby Ives, as Carpenter’s Boat Shop begins to plan for its 45th anniversary this summer, the program’s continued strength is his dream fulfilled.
Although boat building is its core program, the founders’ vision for Boat Shop always has included support for its participants that extends far beyond the Pemaquid campus. “One of our apprentices from 1985 stopped by today for a visit,” Ives said. “Forty years ago, he was a very typical person who came to the Boat Shop and also was interested in maybe in going to college.”
Carpenter’s Boat Shop taught him woodcraft but also helped him find the educational piece by pointing him to a college in Kentucky whose model was grounded in the same kind of community focus that supports the Boat Shop.
There’s no admission cost, but the students at Berea College work 20 hours a week on such basic crafts as weaving, carpentry, and furniture building. With the underpinnings the long-ago apprentice learned at the Boat Shop and at Berea, Ives reports, the apprentice alumnus “has been making chairs and furniture ever since.”
Aside from the pride and respect he holds for current and past apprentices, Ives said, “Probably my biggest honor is that I’m still there. [Boat Shop Executive Director] Alicia Witham has been so kind and generous to allow me to come back and help out in different capacities. I show up and she gives me jobs to do—everything from putting new shelves in buildings to repairing doors to working with apprentices helping them learn the basics of boatbuilding.”
For more information about the Carpenter’s Boat Shop or to attend Ives’ online presentation, email director@carpentersboatshop.com, log ontocarpentersboatshop.org, or call 677-2614.
