FAIR HAVEN – Navesink Maritime Heritage Association (NMHA) will be holding a boat-building event Saturday, June 9, and Sunday, June 10.
Teams of adults and teenagers will be building wooden canoes behind the Fair Haven Fire House on River Road, Fair Haven. Work starts promptly at 8 a.m. each day.
During Sunday afternoon, at about 2 p.m., the finished canoes will be paraded down Batten Road to the Fair Haven boat ramp for launching.
The canoe, called a “six-hour canoe,” was designed by Mike O’Brien to make use of two leftover sheets of plywood and is quite simple to build, hence the name “six hour canoe.” The design was published in “Building the Six Hour Canoe” as an example of a boat that could be built by novice boat builders.
Thousands of six-hour canoes have been built worldwide.
NMHA built a number of six-hour canoes at its first Wooden Boat Festival/community event in 1999. Since that time about 100 of these boats have been built under NMHA supervision, and the boat has become the standard design for NMHA’s River Rangers, a summer program for kids ages 10-14 which runs for five weeks in July and August each year on the Navesink and Swimming rivers.
Navesink Maritime Heritage Association, founded in 1999, is a tax exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the knowledge and instilling an appreciation of New Jersey’s local maritime heritage through educational programs that teach wooden boatbuilding skills; preserving the maritime history of Monmouth County regional boatbuilders; and through the experiential on-the-water education programs of River Rangers for middle school children and Sea Scout Ship Navesink for co-ed youth age 14-21.
