Rowe your boat
Sydney River man ready to launch backyard beauty
Most boats only have one maiden voyage but Rowe’s Wood will have two.
Don Rowe built the 19-foot mahogany runabout in the garage of his Sydney River home over the past two and a half years, and while he’s certain Rowe’s Wood is structurally sound — he previously built two small sailboats — this was his first crack at putting an engine in a boat. So, he wants to be sure the 1940s-inspired powerboat with its attractive contours and reversed profile lines handles as good as it looks before it’s formally christened and launched in front of family and friends later this month in the Bras d’Or Lake.
“It’s going in twice,” said Rowe, a retired harbour master and former Sydney Ports Corp. general manager. “The first time I’m going to sneak it in — I don’t want anybody around because my mechanic is going to be with me and we’re going to make sure it’s going to run right — but the official launch will probably be out in Ben Eoin.”
Rowe was inspired to build the boat in 2014, after his brother sent him a picture of a classic mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft powerboat that was up for sale.
While he never got a chance to buy that boat, he started looking at antique boats online. However, after calculating the exchange rate and cost of travelling to buy a boat and transport it back to Cape Breton — purchasing and restoring a similar boat could cost upwards of $100,000 — he decided to build one from scratch. Once he found the plans for the Glen L Marine Designs Biscayne model, he was committed.
“So before I really thought about it, I ordered the plans,” he said, “and then when the plans did come, I realized they don’t take you by the hand and take your right through the whole thing — they just give you the basic outline of what has to be done. You’d call them up and ask them a question and they would always say ‘Remember: it’s wood. You can always cut it out and replace
it, so don’t worry about making mistakes.’ And then there’s a chat line, so if you do have a problem you can go to the chat line.”
Building the boat, which Rowe and wife Joanne named because of the seemingly endless amounts of mahogany the project required, was a labour of love for Rowe — but that’s not to say it was ever easy. Take for example when he was installing the steering column and tried squeezing his well over six-foot frame into the cramped hull and got trapped.
“You have to think ahead — always think ahead — and I wasn’t thinking of the steering when I put the deckboards on,” he recalled with a laugh. “It took me 15 minutes, stuck under there trying to get back out. I’m in the garage and I can’t get to anybody!”
Even after he finished construction in the fall, the boat still remained a source of consternation right up to the final piece, which was installed a couple of weeks back. The stainless steel protective strip on the tip of the stern called a cutwater had to be fabricated in Glace Bay and Rowe needed to bring the boat there so it could be custom fitted.
“Everything that I did, it was a crisis,” he said. “And when that was over and you would say ‘Well, that was easy,’ then there would be another one — right to the day that I put it on the trailer. That kept me up at night, trying to figure out how I was going to get it on the trailer while it was still in the garage.”
Now that more than two years worth of crises have been overcome, Rowe said he’s anxious to get finally his boat into the water. And while you might think he’d want to buy a special bottle of champagne for the christening, that’s not the case.
“It’s not going to be expensive — the boat was expensive enough. It will be the cheapest champagne you can buy.”