And You May Ask Yourself, “How Did I Get Here?”

Denver Custom Boatworks launched in the middle of the summer, 2022, about a month after I moved to Denver, roughly a year before I ever thought it would be a possibility.

Before the move, I was living in mid-coast Maine with the ability to work at roughly half-a-dozen boatyards in the county. Boatbuilding, especially wooden boatbuilding, is an established industry there and has been for a long time—in fact, the last boat I worked on was built on the site where multi-masted schooners were constructed for the last 400 years. Wooden Boat Magazine and the Wooden Boat School were just across the bay, and everything from bare-bones lobster boats to luxury yachts came from and often returned to the shops populating the many harbors around. All this is to say, when it came to boatbuilding, coastal Maine had no shortage of opportunity.

The view from my workbench looking out over Rockland Harbor, Maine

When life brought my family and me to Denver, Colorado, though, I had very serious doubts that anyone in this landlocked state would even care about boating, much less the wooden beauties I had come to love. I was anxious. Months and years had been given in the direction of being a boatbuilder and devoting myself to the craft, and now I was moving to a place 900 miles from the nearest seaport (Shreveport, Louisiana, to be exact!).

I started calling around anyway, just to see. I managed to find two people who, at least, didn’t think I was crazy. Ken was a board member of something called the Rocky Mountain Wooden Boat School, an organization seeking to promote the building and restoration of wooden boats based in Grand Lake, Colorado. Ken then introduced me to Doug, a man who, lo and behold, made his living restoring wooden boats just north of Denver. After one phone chat with Doug, he was adamant about two things: that he couldn’t hire me, and that I should open up my shop instead.

Well, that was a new idea.

I had never considered having my own shop. The boat shops I was used to had been around for generations—you didn’t just go out and open up your own. But Doug had a point. He was well on the way towards retiring, and, as far as I could tell, he had the only spot anything like a commercial boat shop around. If I was to continue in this trade, it would have to be out on my own.

Doug seemed to think that I’d have plenty of business building and restoring wooden boats in Denver. I sat down with my wife, Annie, and, together, we created a plan: go to work for someone in need of a carpenter for a year or two, fix up my own boat and maybe one or two others, and then in 2023 or 2024 be able to fully open my own shop and transition full-time once again to being a boatbuilder.

That plan lasted a few weeks.

As it happened, the Grand Lake Boat Show was coming up at the end of the month. I had printed some business cards to just introduce myself to the wooden boat community and let people know that I was planning on opening up a boat shop in the next couple of years. I made a landing page just to let people know that the shop was “coming soon!” As we were sitting and making plans, Annie was the one to say, well, what if your shop just opened now, instead?

Before I could think, I just said, “Yes!” Thus, Denver Custom Boatworks was born in July, 2022.

Over the next few days, I threw together a website and sub-letted a tiny workshop space from an incredibly generous friend. I held my breath. I went to the show and handed out nearly all of my cards to a very supportive and enthusiastic group of people. I drove up and visited Doug’s shop and chatted with him for a while about this venture. I spoke often with my parents who both have run small businesses themselves.

Within that week, I got my first job finishing a half-built skiff, and I exhaled a little. Now there was a boat in a garage shop across town to show up and work on. Pretty soon, I got a call asking if I could replace the deck and the mast of a small strip-built sailboat, and a 1948 Chris-Craft Deluxe found its way to me for a full restoration. I was going to need more than 800 square feet!

The first shop in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. It got a bit cramped!

In October, Denver Custom Boatworks moved to its current home, a 3,100-square-foot shop in north Aurora that was formerly the FAA building for Stapleton Airport. By the end of 2022, it was a fully-functional boat shop housing six wooden boats with various needs of repair, I was providing direction and support to three others wanting to learn to work on or build their own boats, and I had joined and become president of the board of the Rocky Mountain Wooden Boat School.

In other words, I had found boatbuilding in Denver!

As 2023 kicks off, I still can’t believe that I’m here, six or seven months after moving to Colorado, building and restoring wooden boats in my own shop. I am unbelievably thankful for this opportunity to work on your boats, and I can’t wait to see how it progresses from here.