ROCKLAND — Tucked away in a small workshop on Rockland Harbor’s North End, a scruffy part of town where the marine trades and industry intersect, and noisy ospreys nest atop rusty poles, the little wooden sloop Wren is undergoing a transformation, a Cinderella tale that will culminate this week with her relaunch into Penobscot Bay.
For the last six months, this Herreshoff 12½ day sailor sat on a boat cradle inside Cody Smith’s workshop, surrounded by tools, ladders and an armchair covered with boatbuilding supplies. She was carried there on a cold day last February on the back of Steve Laite’s trailer, after being transported to the mainland in 2019 from a North Haven boat shed.
That’s where Wren’s owner, Lisa Morgan, first spotted her, a neglected hull with a “Herreshoff for free” sign unceremoniously hanging off her side.
“Why not,” thought Morgan. No one likes to see a Herreshoff languishing, and to Morgan, an artist who works with her hands every chance she gets, the opportunity to learn how to restore a wooden craft ignited her imagination.
While a sailor, Morgan is not a boatbuilder. She put the word out and found Cody Smith, a young master builder on the rise. (He more modestly refers to his training as hawsepiping – learning on the job).
“It was in terrible shape,” said Smith, when he first laid eyes on the boat.
The frames were cracked and the fasteners gone. Peeling paint and varnish hung from her sides, and planks were rotting.
Morgan asked Smith to help her take on the project, and he did, tackling it with gusto. He obtained plans of another Herreshoff, tacking them up on the shop wall for reference, as he probed and calculated how to make repairs on a boat that had been built by masterful Rhode Island boatbuilders at the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company generations ago.
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