Historic Vessel Preservation Program
CBMM Boats | Public Programs | Skipjacks
Boat Yard Staff | Shipwright Apprentices

The Revolving Door

How do you measure the success of a hands-on apprenticeship in a working boat yard? Unfortunately for manager Richard Scofield, you measure it by how many apprentices you lose.

“If we are doing our job, our guys will leave us for jobs in the boatbuilding industry,” says Scofield, “either at other museums or working in commercial shipbuilding yards. It’s a mixed blessing—we develop their skills and experience and then say good-bye.”

On-the-job training in the form of a professional apprenticeship is the niche that the CBMM Boat Yard defined for itself with the Shipwright Apprentice Program. There are a number of wooden boat building schools and programs. There are very few entry level jobs in the industry however, and the skills and experience gap for those coming out of a school can be bridged by time spent in a working boat yard.

The formula seems to be working. Since CBMM’s apprenticeship program began in 2001, twenty apprentices have worked in the Boat Yard. Eighteen of them have found jobs in the boat building or maritime industries. Some have found opportunities in commercial shipbuilding yards, such as the Benjamin and Gannon Yard in Martha’s Vineyard. Some have signed on with local captains and boat yards around the Bay. Others have become shipwrights on large vessel construction projects, including the Schooner Virginia and the tall ship Spirit of South Carolina.

Former CBMM apprentice Heron Schwalbach-Scott is now the lead boatwright for the Center for Wooden Boats (CWB) in Seattle, Washington. CWB is a hands-on maritime museum, which uses their collection of vessels as a teaching tool. Heron oversees the restoration and maintenance of CWB’s fifty various vessels, ranging from fifteen-foot prams called El Toro’s, to a traditionally-rigged thirty-two-foot gillnetter from Bristol Bay in Alaska.

Heron feels his time as a CBMM apprentice helped prepared him for his job as lead boatwright.

“One of the real benefits of working in the apprentice program was teaching me how to work in and around the public,” he says. “With wooden boats and their heritage fading from economic feasibility, work in this trade has been shifting from production value to public value. And relating to the public is not something they teach you at boat building school.”

The newest of our apprentices is Mike Gorman from Oswego, New York, on Lake Ontario. Mike came to the Museum from the Landing School and began his apprenticeship this fall. He is currently in the floating fleet restoration and preservation track of his year-long tenure, working under shipwright Marc Barto.
“I appreciate the experience here,” says Mike. “I wanted to come south and work somewhere that I can further my skills, while getting time to get out on the water to sail.”

Mike’s work currently includes restoration work to the hull of CBMM’s log-bottom bugeye Edna Lockwood. Anyone interested in the Shipwright Apprentice Program, either for more information or an application, should contact Boat Yard Manager Richard Scofield at 410-745-2916 ext. 136 or email rscofield@cbmm.org.

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