June may feel like a long way off, but a group of Suttons Bay High School students is already looking forward to spending time on water this summer in a wooden canoe they built by hand.

Canoe builders involved in a class at the Inland
Seas Education Center in Suttons Bay include
(from left) Suttons Bay High School freshman
Joel Kurek, his grandfather, Larry Wineger,
volunteer instructor Chuck Dickerson, and
Suttons Bay freshman Sean Patterson.

The Inland Seas Education Association (ISEA), based in Suttons Bay, this winter has begun a new after-school program for local students.

For the past 10 months, the ISEA Boat Shop has been training adult volunteers to assemble 16 foot-long cedar strip canoes. The volunteers have built three canoes so far and are now offering a Canoe Building Class to Suttons Bay High School students. An initial class is currently under way; another will be offered beginning in April.

The class meets after school in the ISEA Boat Shop for 90 minutes to two hours, three days per week, on a flexible schedule to accommodate other student activities.

The class is free, and ISEA will retain ownership of the finished canoes. However, canoe building students and their parents or guardians may use the canoes in the Suttons Bay harbor area after proper training and certification.

“I’m just doing it for the experience of building a canoe,” said Suttons Bay freshman Sean Patterson. “It’s fun and it’s a good after-school activity,” he said.

“I just thought it would be cool to build a canoe – and it is,” said classmate Rein Bruining, who also happens to be one of several students in the class who are also members of Boy Scout Troop 131 from Suttons Bay.

In the summer of 2007, ISEA began offering Boy Scout oceanography programs at the Inland Seas Education Center and aboard the “schoolship” Inland Seas. The program was designed to provide scouts with the skills needed to complete their Oceanography Merit Badge. A merit badge for boat building or carpentry may not be far off, according to volunteers.

“I enrolled in the boatbuilding class because a lot of my friends are doing it,” said Suttons Bay freshman Joel Kurek. “So, I get to spend some time with them; and I also get to spend some time with my grandpa.”

Kurek’s grandfather, Larry Winegar, is one of nearly a dozen ISEA volunteers helping to conduct the class. Other grandparents and parents are also involved in the program.

ISEA volunteer Chuck Dickerson has been serving as a lead instructor for the canoe building class.

“When you think about it, 300 or-so years ago, a canoe like this was really the only way to get around in the Great Lakes,” said Dickerson. “So, building wooden canoes really is in keeping with the association’s mission of teaching Great Lakes history.”

The canoes are constructed of quarter inch-thick cedar strips bent over an inverted form known as a strongback. The first few canoes constructed in the ISEA boat shop have been based on patterns provided by an East Coast firm. Since then, however, ISEA has received permission to reproduce the forms based on the association’s status as an educational institution.

Dickerson explained that Michigan White Cedar is the best material for use in the canoes. To create a color contrast for aesthetic reasons, strips of Alaskan Red Cedar, Western Red Cedar, Redwood and Alaskan Yellow Cedar are also used.

As the strips are secured to stations comprising the strongback, they are held together with a waterproof glue. Then, both the inside and outside of the canoe are fiberglassed, coated with transparent epoxy, and sanded to a fine finish.

Students in the canoe building class do not use any electric-powered cutting tools, but use hand saws, electric hand sanders and electric-powered screwdrivers.

Dickerson noted that when students are aboard ISEA’s 77 foot-long schooner Inland Seas, they are sometimes 10 feet above the surface of the water. Aboard the 16-foot-long canoes, however, they are within 10 inches of the water and experience the Great Lakes more fully.

Suttons Bay students currently enrolled in the canoe building class include Patterson, Bruining and Kurek as well as Guy Beaton, Nate Carlson, Thomas Herman, Emma Kelly, Lenora Paige, Clayton Queen and Chelsea Moyes. Parents or grandparents include Winegar, Jim Beaton and his son Tim Beaton. ISEA’s volunteer instructors are Dickerson, Gary Battle, Dan Bohlmeyer, Bruce Bowen, Bob Chamberland, Sander Kusher, Doug McInnis and Ed Woessner.

Now beginning its 20th season, the Inland Seas Education Association has accommodated more than 75,000 students aboard its “schoolships” and at the education center in Suttons Bay. For more information on ISEA and its programs, visit its website at www.schoolship.org or phone 271-3077.