Presentations from Past Shows (2021 – 2025)

with Veronica Skotnes | Sailor, Author

Veronica Skotnes took to the sea at the age of seventeen as crew on a schooner in the North Sea. Since then, the wind and ocean currents have taken her north of the Arctic Circle, where she now steers her own ship. For the past three years, she has been sailing and living aboard a boat along the coast of Finnmark, in the very north of Norway.

with Dave Snediker | Owner, Snediker Yacht Restoration

Having languished in a boat yard in New London CT for 30 years, DORIS, the largest all-wood sailing vessel built by Herreshoff Manufacturing Co., was scheduled to be scrapped at the end of August 2013. Given a one-year lease on life by the generous collaboration of a good friend and Snediker Yacht Restoration of Pawcatuck, a search for a new owner was spearheaded. Now, thanks to an enthusiastic client, DORIS has been saved.

with Akeia de Barros Gomes | Director of the Center for Black History Newport Historical Society

In 2023, a team of 4 boat-makers (Mashantucket Pequot, Mashpee Wampanoag, Togolese, and Ghanaian) collaborated at Mystic Seaport Museum to create a dugout canoe using both traditional and contemporary methods.

The ten-day collaboration explored similarities in Dawnland and African maritime histories and cultures, imagined how these maritime traditions may have continued if not interrupted, and allowed us to imagine conversations on boat construction as free and enslaved African descended people joined Dawnland Indigenous communities.

with Organizers from the Port Townsend, Australia, and Douarnenez Festivals

Festivals are the lifeblood of the classic boat world. They incentivize boat owners far and wide to give their craft a little extra love and care so they can proudly share the fruits of their labor with friends old and new. These gatherings of maritime culture go far beyond just displaying nice boats – they foster a celebratory atmosphere with music, vendors, events, and most of all community.

with Jeanne Goussev | 2x Race to Alaska Winner

Three years of multihull victories indicated the winning formula for R2AK was clear, but in 2018, after 6 days of smashing logs up the Inside Passage and dipping their spreaders during knockdowns in Hecate Strait, Team Sail Like A Girl was first across the line in Ketchikan, becoming the first monohull and first all-women’s team to take home the $10,000 nailed to a tree.

with Kevin Ritz | Systems Lead at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding

For Kevin Ritz, helping create safe marine systems is more than a job – it’s a dedicated personal mission. In the face of a marine-based tragedy, Kevin Ritz went from cruising with his family to an intense focus on learning all he could about marine electrical and electric shock drowning.

Kevin helps demystify the wires throughout our boats and the place individual systems make up in one large system – the boat itself!

with Small Boat Designers/Builders Clint Chase, Ross Lillistone, and John Welsford

Whether you’re rowing, sailing, paddling, or just floating, small craft can distill the dynamics of being on the water and provide poignant experiences often lost in the complication of larger vessels. John, Clint, and Ross used examples from their own drawing boards as well as others’ to illustrate the many different facets of small boat design.