PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE NORTH CAROLINA MARITIME MUSEUM
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lumber, either pine or cypress, and the transom
— the back of the boat — because it’s too wide,
so they already have two pieces glued together,”
Sargent says. “There is a four-hour time limit, they
blow a whistle and everybody just starts cutting
plywood. It’s judged on how long it took you to
build it. Then, there’s a race. You have to race these
boats at the end.”
Today, Sargent owns and operates his own shop
in Wilmington, specializing in wooden boat restora-tion.
He is helping restore the Sylvia II, a 1934 Core
Sounder built in Morehead City and now owned by
Bald Head Island resident Bob Graham. The Sylvia II
was featured in Wrightsville Beach Magazine’s
September 2016 story on local boat craftsmen,
“Floating Masterpieces.”
As a regular attendee at the show and a wooden
boat restoration hobbyist himself, Humphrey has
witnessed many of the annual boatbuilding compe-titions,
though he opts not to join the frantic scene
of teams hurrying to build a water-worthy vessel.
“It’s fun to watch because there are people that try to do it only with hand tools,”
Humphrey says. “It’s like a zoo in there. There are 30 different routers going at the
same time, and then they put them in the water and try to race out and back, and
that’s pretty comic.”
Top: Visitors to the Beaufort Wooden Boat Show
can see vessels on land and water. Above: Jim
Goodwin builds a ship in a bottle. Goodwin is
scheduled to give demonstrations of the craft.
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