Building on tradition.

• Author: Peters, Tim
• Position: Handcrafted, world-class sailing schooners

In Mahone Bay, along Canada's Nova Scotia coast, four generations of the Stevens family have been handcrafting world-class sailing schooners

THERE IS A PLACE where the wooden schooner has endured as a proud symbol of a people and their relationship to the sea. Steeped in boat-building tradition, the craftsmen of this place developed their skills out of necessity, honing them through generations. This is the story of the Stevens family, four generations of world-class boat builders, as well as the history of Mahone Bay, a small but significant mouth on the Atlantic, on the South Shore of Nova Scotia.

Four generations of the Stevens family have handcrafted sailing schooners--from patriarch Amos Stevens, at the beginning of the century, to his great-grandson Murray, today. They have built boats that have, in a sense, become extensions of themselves. Each piece of wood on a Stevens schooner has passed through their hands to become part of a majestic sailing vessel, and a reflection of the craftsman himself. As third-generation boat builder David Stevens once said, he "built boats because a boat is more like a living creature than anything else a man can build with his own hands."

Nova Scotia fishing schooners descended from a long line of speedy sailing ships that were first employed at the beginning of the eighteenth century by privateers and illicit traders. During the mid-nineteenth century they became known as "salt bankers," roaming the waters of the Grand Banks in search of cod and other species to supply a growing demand for fish on the Atlantic seaboard. The burgeoning offshore fishery called for swift and spacious sailing vessels able to hold a sizable catch and make deliveries to market as fast as the wind could carry them.

Long gone are the wooden fishing schooners that once filled nearby Lunenburg Harbor, and some years have passed since this town was a bustling shipbuilding and fish-processing center. Although the fishing fleet remains, the schooners have been replaced by the mechanized steel trawlers of our modern age. And with the advance of these trawlers, the fishing schooner, as a working boat, became obsolete.

But perhaps because the design was so mature, it was possible to turn the schooner to other purposes, and David Stevens did that. In essence, his cruising schooners adapted the fishing schooner to the purposes of modern cruising. For nearly a half-century, the Mahone Bay region of Nova Scotia's South Shore has been renowned for modifying traditional fishing schooner designs into smaller two-masted, forty-to-fifty-foot cruising and racing schooners.

These design developments had their beginnings long before the demise of working sail. They began on Tancook Island at the beginning of...