Learn about life on the North Carolina coast — past and present — at the 10th Annual Southport Wooden Boat Show. Wooden boats of various shapes and sizes will be on display on land and in the water at the Old Yacht Basin in Southport, N.C., on Saturday, Nov. 2.
Visitors will be able to talk with wooden boat makers like Dean Dosher, who built the craft featured on the 2019 event poster and T-shirt. The “Ramona” is a 36-foot-long fishing boat named for Dosher’s wife of 52 years. He spent four years building the boat, which was finished in summer 2018.
Similar to working boats of the 1920s to ‘50s, the “Ramona” is “a little more fancy,” Dosher says. A big difference is the hand-crafted cypress and mahogany interior.
The 70-year-old Dosher has been building boats with his brother, Don, since they were children. For one of their first boats, Dosher recalls, the brothers stole nails from a neighbor’s fence and plugged holes in the skiff with fabric scraps filched from their mother’s sewing basket. While they have built more than a hundred boats since then, the Doshers never received any formal training. Everything they know about boats came from growing up on the coast and on the Lockwood Folly River.
After displaying the Ramona at the Southport Boat Show, Dean Dosher plans to take visitors on excursions on the river, so future generations will learn to love the Lockwood Folly as much as he does.
For more information about the Southport Wooden Boat Show, visit southportwoodenboatshow.com.
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