At the foot of a steep dirt driveway on the Newcastle shore of the Damariscotta River sits a cluster of graying sheds, surrounded by shapely boats in cradles. This is Riverside Boat Company, where graceful wooden sailboats and the skills to build and repair them are the rule. It’s where customers are so regular, so loyal that if you’re a new one, well, you might get on the waiting list.
In one shed is a Hodgdon 21, designed and built by Sonny Hodgdon of East Boothbay in the early 1960s. It’s due for refastening of bottom planks. That little sailboat, and Riverside Boat, are a far cry from the 154-foot sailing yacht Hodgdon Yachts launched in September. While Hodgdon’s yard tooled up to create super yachts, Riverside Boat keeps on doing what it’s always done, working on wooden classics. Beside the Hodgdon 21 is a Beetle Cat, a sloop boatyard owner Paul Bryant plans to restore for his wife, Linda. The Cat “needs to be totally re-framed,” Bryant says. “All the frames are bad in her. The frames are usually going to go before the planking, in most of these old boats. They’re often cedar-planked, which will last indefinitely, but the frames are oak, and they sit in rainwater in the bilge.”
“We’ve got a 20-foot Indian class sailboat we’re going to bring into the shop after this Hodgdon is done. She’s going to get totally re-framed, and a new transom put in her, and a new deck on her.” Bryant talks about boats the way a thoughtful doctor discusses his patients. Maybe it’s the same thing. He is the family doctor for wooden boats.
The pint-sized Riverside yard is busy year-round, full to capacity, and has and no intention – and no need – to expand. It doesn’t seek a lot of publicity because, as Bryant put it, “our customers do our advertising for us.” Riverside Boat will reluctantly work on a fiberglass hull for a steady customer, but don’t push your luck. This is a place where tradition is king, and that means working with wood, mostly by hand. It’s where the owner works alongside his crew because that’s how he is, he couldn’t sit in an office, and Riverside Boat has no computer. Bryant grins a lot, a contagious smile whether at the boat yard or watching his daughter play piano at a recital. He is soft-spoken, and sometimes listens without saying much. When at work with son Nat, maybe hoisting an inboard engine from a boat, neither of them needs to say much. But don’t be fooled. Paul Bryant sets exactingly high standards. Those expectations need to be met, or the job isn’t done yet.
At Riverside Boat, some customers pass their much-loved boats from generation to generation, relying on the yard to store and keep their boats trim, ready for the next season.
On an early winter afternoon, Paul Bryant was backing his spruce-green, black-fendered yard truck into a garage, an inch of clearance on either side. The truck was one year old when Paul Bryant’s father bought it in 1935, and like the 1950s Craftsman band saw in the shop, it runs well. You maintain things, fix them when they break, they keep going. It’s frugal and gratifying. A couple of early Electrolux vacuum cleaners on runners are better than the modern, wheeled kind, because they don’t roll around a boat bumping things.
Bryant doesn’t set his sights on making a pile of money. “I’ve often heard that if you want to make a million dollars at a boat yard, you start with two. I’ve done some design work, but I prefer doing woodwork.” He took a home-study yacht design course and has designed and built several sailboats. One of them is his own boat – “I didn’t even get it overboard this year” – it’s a 30-foot sloop, HOOT MON – Gaelic for “hey, man.”
Work continues through the cold months in five heated sheds, while outdoors, snow lays a blanket over boats that seem to hibernate, waiting for spring scraping, caulking, sanding, painting and varnishing, maybe more, and finally a summer launching for returning owners, such as global sailor Dodge Morgan, who has stored his 30-foot wooden schooner EAGLE at Riverside Boat for 28 years. Bryant knows EAGLE’s story. Originally an Alden Malabar Junior sloop, she was driven ashore at Port Clyde by Hurricane Carol in 1954. Badly damaged, she was bought from the insurance company by designer Murray Peterson of South Bristol, who with a local carpenter turned her into a double cabin schooner. Morgan bought EAGLE in the mid 1960s. He said visiting the yard is like walking back 50 years. He said Paul Bryant’s workmanship is extraordinary. “I have complete trust in him. I’ve known him to haul or launch EAGLE alone.” Bryant doesn’t talk a lot, but “he talks to his world through his work, with an honesty and a sense of character,” Morgan said.
A 34-foot power boat seems out of place among the sailing craft: It’s probably the first boat the late Joel White – son of E.B. White – built in Brooklin, where most White designs were sail-powered. Bryant has replaced the deck of the power boat for owner Bob Small, who used to run Great Island Boat Yard in Harpswell. Small knew Riverside Boat and Bryant from years on the road as a salesman for a marine supply company.
Paul said he probably knows the boats better than his customers, but he knows all of them pretty well. “I see a lot more of the boats,” he joked. That was particularly true of a 47-foot sailboat that has been retired at Riverside. A young Vermont couple abandoned it on a mooring, after trying life aboard ship for two weeks. It’s an exception. Most customers are acquaintances of long standing.
His father, boatbuilder and designer Creston Bryant, started the current business more than 50 years ago. Long before that, the Bryants built ships on Great Salt Bay. “I don’t know how they got them down through Johnny Orr, there’s so many boulders up there.”
Once a new ship spent a year hung up on those rocks, he said. Other Bryant boats were launched by what’s now the Lincoln Home for the aged, the former Bryant homestead. “All the ones built right here were fully rigged, sails all bent on them, and I suspect they spent very little time here after they were launched.”
The Bryant family roots on its waterfront date to the 1700s, when the first Nathaniel Bryant settled there.
Some things change, some not so much. Paul’s son, Nat – the sixth Nathaniel Bryant in the family tree – is upholding family tradition. Nat graduated from The Landing School in Kennebunk, learning skills he needed to be part of the three-man crew, working on anything from day-sailers to Riverside’s trio of Friendship Sloops: the 1913 Wilbur Morse-built SAZERAC, owned by Roger Lee of Islesboro; and the 1958 Lash Brothers-built MARY ANNE, owned by Damariscotta dentist Joe Griffin. “Paul takes joy in his work. He is a master craftsman,” said Griffin, who has stored his boat at Riverside since 1979. “He is very dedicated, he is very accommodating, I just trust him implicitly.”
A third Friendship stored at Riverside Boat is the 22-foot ECHO, a Pemaquid class design built by O. Lie-Nielsen in 1965 for the late artist Bill Thon, who often painted Friendship Sloops under sail.
Paul Bryant stood beside the warm stove he and his father bought new in 1964 from the Portland Stove Foundry. His father, he said, “started building small boats in 1946. He was building 12-foot class sailboats that he designed called the SKIPPER, and then he built some 15-foot class sailboats that he designed, called the VALENTINE. The last 12-foot SKIPPER class I saw was over at Thomaston – for a watercraft museum. We did quite a bit of restoration work on it, and never even got a thank you out of it. That’s the last one of those I’ve seen.”
“I built one of the VALENTINE class when I was a sophomore in high school, for my own use,” he said, but he didn’t race her much. “The Twin Village Yacht Club had folded by that time. They had a clubhouse, and a dock my dad had built.” He interrupted his recollections to tell one of his men that a transom should come off, and the knees too, if they could be unbolted. Then he explained that wooden boats may be more work than boats built of other materials, but a wooden boat has a different feel under way, and a different feel when you rest your eye on her lines. Most owners sail their classics, but he knows a few wooden boat owners who just work on them, never actually setting sail.
Paul Bryant graduated from Lincoln Academy in 1961 and went right to work for his father. Ten years later, Creston Bryant died and young Paul took over. His mother, now 83 and living just up the hill from the boatyard, continued to work in the office for decades. Paul, like his father before him, built a house overlooking the yard and river. His first wife, Katie, from Christmas Cove, was the sister of Henry Thorpe, who crewed for Paul. A teacher, she died in 1989, after 20 years of marriage, from an asthma attack. Paul married Linda in 1991, and besides Nathaniel, the children are Jonathan, Graham and Patience.
Linda now works in the office, but come spring and outfitting time, she has to put that work aside and join the sanding and painting crew.
Paul wouldn’t mind some more time to sail. But he wouldn’t want to be doing anything else for work. It pleases him that Nat wants to take over. Nat plans to build his own house on family land this spring.