December 2011 MAINE COASTAL NEWS Page 7. PROFILE: BOATBUILDER DOUG DODGE
BEALS ISLAND – The coast of Maine is not without its characters. The more you travel the coast the more you find. Add to this a very talented boatbuilder, extremely knowledge- able about engines, loves to race, and has a sense of humor and you have Doug Dodge of Beals Island. In his shop is his newest cre- ation, a 28-footer, which he has had in his head for 30 years.
When asked what she is based on, the reply was, “Speed, what else is there?” Dodge added, “It is my own design, some- thing that I have been mulling around, long and lean, eight-foot beam on the sheer and at the stern just under seven feet. I think she is the first lobster boat that goes from a round bilge to a chine. She is all framed inside and ready for the deck and the superstructure. I want to make a replica of a spray hood, but make it in fiberglass. I want to give her that kind of look. Something different.” As for power, Dodge said, “I’m going to start out with my 455 1969 Oldsmobile just to see if the boat will perform. If she performs good with that then we will go with something else.”
Dodge came to Beals Island to live with his great uncle and aunt, Harold and Nella Gower, when he was four years old in 1950. Eight years later he found himself working in Harold’s boat shop. Dodge said, “I started in the shop when I was 12. The first job they gave me was straightening bent nails. When my uncle went to dinner, the old shop had a hole in the floor we used to dump shavings and stuff down, I told him I would be right along and when he was gone I dump the nails down the hole. That was the end of my nail straightening. Then I started working on the bandsaw, and he could see I could saw and I wouldn’t cut my fingers off. The first job they gave me was putting door jams in the cabin, which is probably the most difficult job in the world for a kid to start out on. I guess he must’ve like it because after that I got to do little finish stuff. Then as I got older, he built one boat, then he would start another one and I would finish off the first one, putting the cabin and house on.”
In 1963 Dodge went away to Southern Maine Vocational Technical Institute in South Portland. He graduated from there in 1965 and went to aircraft school. He gradu- ated from there in 1968 and at the time Harold needed help in the shop. When that boat was finished Dodge delivered it to Orient Point, Long Island, New York. When he got back from New York there was a man, Peter Pierce, in the shop talking to Harold and he wanted to know if Harold was interested in helping to start a boatbuilding school in Calais. Harold said, ‘I don’t want to but maybe my boy would be interested.’ Dodge added, “I said I would try it. The school started in the fall of
1969, but we didn’t have a shop so I taught automotive the first year. The following year we started the boatbuilding school. Then in ‘72 it moved to Lubec and in ’72 or ‘73 they hired Miller and that is the year I quit.” Some of the students Dodge taught have gone on to have great careers in the business. Dodge added, “There was one guy, I know I probably hurt his feelings, but I told him he would never make a boat builder. He didn’t have the ability at the time, but he probably never had done any of it. Teaching something like that is hard to judge because you can have a guy for a student for two years and he really doesn’t look like he’s catching on and maybe in four years he becomes one of the best boat builders around.” While Dodge was teaching Harold’s shop burned down in 1972. Dodge and a friend put up a new building, but in the fall Harold died. Dodge taught for two more years and then came back and reopened the shop in November 1974.
Over the years he has built a number of boats, but it takes time since he is the only one there. Dodge explained, “Course I do every- thing, so I get the name of being slow. It’s just me and my dog, Dozer. My wife helps me once in a while if I have something heavy to move.” Dodge builds different than Harold did. “I build them different than anybody because I put V in the transom,” said Dodge. “Also, instead of just sharp risers, you build string- ers with everything locked into them. It takes time. In this one there is a chine and every one of the frames angles are different. It took quite a while to make the chine. Then I staggered down so one frame would not be over the other, because it would weaken it. The top ones are halved in, not full notches, like a dovetail. So it took quite a long time.” Dodge added, “This boat I made a little fuller, but I usually like them sharper so they draw water in the bow, because they don’t blow off. I also made this one fuller, because if it goes fast I don’t want it to come off a sea and catch its nose and roll on me. This is also the first one that I have ever built with tumblehome. I always built them straight, because there is no advantage to tumblehome.”
Dodge did create a design that he made a fiberglass mould for, saying, “I made five in fiberglass and everyone made me sick for two weeks. So I quit making them.”
One of Dodge’s best friends was Avery Kelley. They did some seining together, but they also could be a little mischievous. The best story about these two was when they built a huge kite. Dodge said, “He figured out I was some sort of aeronautical engineer. So I made a kite just the size of that door, 14 feet square. Him and Shirley Alley put it together with plastic. Then he said I want you to make
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This 28-footer is under construction at Doug Dodge's shop on Beals Island.
me a basket and I will be the tailer. I said I don’t think so. You don’t know what it’s going to do. He said well we can use chain for that tail. He used his lobster boat, a 30 footer. They had the kite hanging out over the railing on the bridge on the western side and he opens up the engine and the thing pops right up with that chain whipping back and forth. The rope parted and it come right back down on the bridge. They fixed it with a double rope and up it went. Well they had to run the engine around 2200 just to hold it. For some reason they slowed her down to an idle and when they did it pulled the stern back so the water shot through the scuppers right to the bulk- head. Wonder it didn’t sink ‘em. Anyway, they got the kite up, quite a ways above the bridge, and they tied it to the railing and left it there. Well, when the wind died the kite
came down and the chain went across the power lines and blew the power out on Beals. Blew the transformer.”
Another time they sneaked into the shop, Dodge adding, “We had some great big firecrackers. We lit them and threw them under the boat. But we didn’t make it through the door before they went off. It didn’t bother Harold too bad, but the other guy was pretty well hung over and I think he shit himself.” There is no question that one of the best boatbuilders on the coast of Maine was Harold Gower. Dodge said, “He was born November 18th
I think at Westport on Brier
Island, Nova Scotia, in 1899. He was one of 20 kids. His father, a fisherman in St. Mary’s Bay, took him out of school when he was about
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