Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2024

In 2019, John C. Harris and the team at Chesapeake Light Craft resolved to build a faithful and accurate replica of a late-Viking Age working craft. The target was the 26-foot "Gislinge Boat," built around the year 1130AD and recovered by Danish archeologists in 1993. A number of Gislinge Boat replicas have been built, but CLC's would be the first to be cut on a CNC machine and assembled stitch-and-glue style. It's certainly the only boat of its type that can be ordered as a flat-pack kit. John tells the fascinating (and amusing) story of the fraught design process, the challenge of the prototypes, and "defiling the temple" by building such a boat out of marine plywood.