Even if his clients want something other than a boat, he feels confident he could provide it. The faculty endorses that sense of being able to extend one's skill to other aspects of the woodworking craft. If you can do this, you'll have the cognitive ability and dexterity with tools to do any of that. They learn how to transfer plans from scale drawings to the actual wooden members that make up the vessels, and help construct boats that the school builds on commission. About the only things that weren't are the cleats and the port lights.
Hundreds here work in boat maintenance, canvas shops, boat design, and other marine trades.
Wooden boat repair provides about two-thirds of the business to a specialty sawmill that employs nearly twenty people. The festival's sponsor, the Wooden Boat Foundation, is raising money for the Northwest Maritime Center as well, a workspace where boats would be built and repaired, complete with interpretive areas, apprenticeship opportunities, a conference facility and resource center. The wooden boat economy is one of the three legs of Port Townsend's livelihood, along with tourism and the pulp and paper mill. Without it, Port Townsend would be just another quaint town on the coast vying for tourist dollars, holding its breath until the mill ran out of timber and moved overseas. So the town and Rod Silvey have hitched their futures to wooden boats.