Show, don't tell: Eamonn Doorly's boat building and education career

Eamonn Doorly doesn't like to talk about himself. Luckily, his work speaks for itself.

Born into a family of academics and writers in Lake Huron, Doorly knew early he didn't have quite the same mind as those around him. While most of his family was happy with their nose in a book, "I was always out in the fields building something," he says. In school he struggled to understand concepts on paper, but he loved working with his hands and he loved being on the water. "Right from the beginning, I was so passionate about boatbuilding," he says.

He was particularly drawn to sailing. "It was always sailing," he says, "I loved the way in which sailing is all about a compromise, even in the construction." He built his first boat, a simple nutshell pram, at 14, but went through school and then earned a Geology degree before he finally got into boat building, where he really wanted to be. "As soon as I graduated from university I said, 'I'm never going into academia again,'" he remembers. "'Multitasking' was really popular," he explains, "I just decided that I was going to reject that...I'm going to do one thing and one thing well, for the rest of my life. I'm going to be a career journeyman boatbuilder."

Doorly with "Puffin," an 18-foot Handy Billy boat built with a group from the HomeBridge Youth Society in 2023.

He already knew he learned by doing. Doorly found his way to the Landing School of Boatbuilding and Design in the United States when he was 20. After training there, he was hired as an instructor in his second year and taught for a couple of years until he met a nice girl from Nova Scotia. She suggested he come back to the province. Lots of boat building there. It changed the direction of his life.

In the late 1980s, Doorly arrived at Snyder’s Shipyard, where he was introduced to Nova Scotia boatbuilding in unforgettable fashion. Trying to make a good impression, he wore a new three-piece suit and drove a borrowed white Cadillac to his job interview. His employer later told him he got the job because it seemed like it would be "a funny experience."

His first job involved helping a planking crew on 80-foot scallop draggers. In February, with spring tides flooding the shop, he and the crew carried 30-foot oak planks, fresh from the steam box, through the water while wearing hip waders.

It was hard work, but Doorly remembers it with gratitude. "I got to work with old-timey woodworkers," he explains. The older wooden boatbuilders he worked alongside had little formal education, but he describes them as among the smartest people he ever met. Their approval was hard-earned. After two years of being told he “didn’t know nothing,” Doorly took it as a compliment when an older builder trusted him to sharpen his chisels.

After Snyder’s, Doorly worked with Gerald Stevens in Chester and Back Harbour, and with Steven Swinemar in Western Shore. He built lobster boats, high-end wooden yachts, Cape Islanders and a tanker schooner before joining the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in the early 1990s.

At the museum, Doorly’s work became tied to the idea of “preservation through use.” Rather than restoring vessels simply to display them, the museum restored boats to put them back in the water. Doorly sailed those boats, shared them with the public and helped old vessels continue gathering new memories.

Doorly at the now-open Irving Shipbuilding Boat School

He has many interesting stories about being on the waterfront. After Hurricane Juan hit in the fall of 2003, the boat shop was spared serious damage. "I was able to get down to the shop and at some point it seemed like there was maybe two or two-and-a-half feet of water in the boat shop," he recalls, "so everything was moved around, but they're all boats, right? So the lighter ones just got picked up and moved around and the heavier ones sustained not too much damage. We were very, very fortunate."

And a few years ago, Doorly arrived early in the morning to work on the Acadia to find someone checking it out from the dock. Seeing Doorly, the person put his hood up and rushed away, but something about him gave Doorly a funny feeling. Out of character, Doorly called, "Hey, you! Come back here!" The man turned and came back and Doorly recognized him. It was Sting. The musician was in town after doing a Broadway show about the last of the steamships that were built in his hometown, and he was very curious about the Acadia. Doorly gave him a thorough tour, and then showed him the boat shop, and chatted with him about boats.

In later years at the Maritime Museum, he shifted his focus toward youth education. Doorly wanted young people to have their own origin stories with boats. Through boatbuilding programs connected with groups such as HomeBridge Youth Society, high school Options and Opportunities program and others, he helped create practical learning experiences for students who often struggled in traditional classrooms.

Having been a kid who struggled with pen-and-paper work himself, Doorly derives particular pleasure from helping kids who also learn by doing. "I would always keep the description of what we're about to do very brief," he explains, "and then what we're actually going to do is always experiential, actually picking stuff up and moving it around, and then gluing it and clamping it, because I understood that's how I learned and I could see it in a lot of these kids. That's exactly how they learn as well."

The workshops with youth went so well that there is now a brand-new Boat School on the waterfront, right next to the Maritime Museum's boat shop. "The organizations we've worked with always kind of want more. They want more opportunities, more time in the boat shop," he says, "and so that was really the impetus behind the Boat School, providing a bigger space, because we saw that the demand for these programs is far more than we can possibly provide." After the effects of Hurricane Juan, the Boat School is built three feet higher than the level of the wharf.

Each youth who worked on the build of Puffin signed their name under a seat aft.

For Doorly, wooden boatbuilding is the perfect balance of art and function. He loves the smell of cedar, the use of sharp hand tools and the daily “micro successes” that come from shaping wood by hand. Asked about boat building, he says "it's given me a life. It's kind of satisfied my very innate yearning to create." He's also formed lifelong relationships through boat building. "I met my wife in a boat shop. I've met so many wonderful friends in a boat shop," he says. "Everything good in my life has usually revolved around boats."

Now retired, or as he puts it, "time affluent," Doorly continues to build boats on his own. His favourite build ever, he says, is "the next one." After building so many sailboats he is working on a picnic boat, aiming for the perfect balance between form and function, between beauty and practicality. His new small picnic boat is stripped-back, almost down to a workboat style, but with enough elevated touches that you get a hint of luxury. You can hear his excitement as he describes it. "It's gentrified utility," he says, "that's what it is."

After a long career full of real, hands-on successes, his advice to young people is simple: "Just show up...look to people within your own community, within your own peer group, who are doing well at whatever it is they're doing...spend more time with them."

And of course, keep building.