Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival 2026

Mark Shiner maybe owns a copy of every English language book about sail making published in the last 250 years. More importantly, he has read them, so you don’t have to! But when, and more importantly, why, did we start putting the art of sailmaking into print? How did the thousand-year tradition of apprenticeship training go head-to-head with “book learning”? Join Mark, an island sailmaker, teacher and researcher, on a walk through time, starting with an Elizabethan eviction notice in 1571, meeting some interesting characters along the way, some good books and some dreadful books, and ending with a look at Mark’s favourite text, the Sailmaker’s Apprentice by Port Townsend's own Emiliano Marino. (and if you made the Ditty Bag in chapter 1, bring it!)

If you own a boat which was owned by a famous writer, if your father and mother owned her before you, if her other significant owners did adventurous voyages of a type you'll never even dream of, how do you cope with the feeling of inadequacy? Put it another way, how do you manage to care for the boat and have fun on your own terms, without feeling like an undeserving imposter? They are the ghosts on your cabin. An individually designed and traditionally built yacht is the work of many hands, all of them highly skilled, most of them poorly paid.  They are the forgotten people whose labour is too easily taken for grant ed and forgotten.Writing my new book about 80 years of Peter Duck, I'm trying to face up to some of these questions: lay the ghosts, celebrate the makers. It was teh Port Townsend invitation that started me on this quest, please come and join me.