Northshore Magazine

Northshore September 2015

Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.

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232 "Do not let me touch any tools," she warned. The 18-year-old had moved to Amesbury from Upstate New York less than two years be- fore. She had no building skills or maritime knowledge. "I think I was 14 the first time I saw the ocean," she says. And she'd never even heard of Lowell's Boat Shop. That is, until she participated in "Math on the River," a partnership between the shop and Amesbury High School, which teaches students hands-on math skills by rowing out onto the Merri- mack River with sextants and other navigational tools. "We learned trig by actually going out on the river, collecting data, and going back to the classroom," Wickard says. That experience "got my toes wet," she says, and got her inter- ested in Lowell's Boat Shop. By early December, she'd joined the appren- tice program, which teaches high school students how to hand-build WHEN BRIANNA WICKARD FIRST JOINED THE BOAT-BUILDING APPRENTICE PROGRAM AT LOWELL'S BOAT SHOP IN AMESBURY, SHE HAD WHAT SHE DESCRIBES AS A "CONFIDENCE ISSUE." the same traditional wooden boats— dories and skiffs—the shop has been making since 1793. Wickard spent much of her senior year building a wooden dory with her fellow apprentices, using the same traditional hand tools that the shop has used for centuries. And her fear of those tools is long gone. "You build the boat as much as you build your own awareness and confidence," she says. That's what Graham McKay, executive director of Lowell's Boat Shop, had in mind when the shop first began its apprentice program in 2012. "If they gain marketable woodwork- ing skills, that's great," he says. But really the program is about much more than that. "I would hope that it would help them in a time in their lives when they're maturing, and give them some direction and, ide- ally, a lot of self-confidence." The shop, a National Historic Landmark and museum that's been

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