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Vermont Family Forests
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Lake Champlain Maritime Museum

 

Rowing Gigs

Since 2001, Vermont Family Forests has facilitated the process of providing VFF-certified wood to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum for its annual Rowing Gigs program. Using this wood, Hannaford Career Development Center students team up with Lake Champlain Maritime Museum master boatbuilders to craft a beautiful wooden rowing boat each year. Students build one of two styles of rowing gigs—the 32' six-oared Cornish pilot gig or the 25' , four oared Whitehall style gig. See the beautiful results of this collaboration below. You can read more about VFF's involvement in LCMM's Gigs Program in Vermont Life magazine's Spring 2002 issue and Northern Woodlands magazine's Summer 2001 issue.

 

VFF director David Brynn measuring white pines with HCDC students.    

Vermont Family Forests Director David Brynn brings students from the Hannaford Career Development Center into a VFF-certified forest to learn about forest health and measure the white pine that will yield lumber for their boat-building project. The result? A 25' Whitehall-style gig for four rowers and a coxswain, which they named Eclipse and launched on May 26, 2005.

 

VFF-affiliated logger Bill Torrey fells a white pine from Ron and Karen McEachen's 43-acre woodland to build the Redwing, a 32-foot Scilly Isles pilot gig.

          

LCMM offers all the rowing gigs for public use through its Community Rowing Club. Visit the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum web site to read more about the rowing gigs.