When Walter Baron built his workshop on a side road in Wellfleet 40-odd years ago, he knew what he wanted to do:
Build boats.
He hadn’t even built his home yet; the shop came first.
It cost about 15 grand, he did it in a week and a half, and the workshop had the biggest swinging doors in Wellfleet at the time.
Now in his mid-70s, Walter figures he has built 180 boats in that “Old Wharf Dory” shop.
“If you’re patient, I’ll build you a good boat,” he says. “I’m only doing three or four a year now.”
He’s not high-end fancy. Baron is known for unpretentious hulls that ply near shore, prams with flat bows and flat sterns, no bigger than 16 or 17 feet, “Lumber Yard Skiffs,” named because the materials come straight out of any decent lumberyard, no special ordering. His prams might weigh 55 pounds, so, as he says, an old man and lady can pick them up.
The first ones he built for 1000 bucks, using spruce framing, plywood, and marine adhesive. It took 35 hours to fashion a hull.
He also offered an unusual option: He’d sell his lumberyard skiff plans to anyone for $50. He’s sent plans to New Zealand, England, Brazil, Barbados, up and down our coast, more than 1500 sets. His guess is well under half of them actually got built.
He’s finished 50, built to order, but he’s stopped making lumberyard skiffs because they’re getting too heavy and awkward for him to handle solo. He spent too much time swearing at the last one, he laughs.
Seeing as his shop is 40 feet long, his biggest hull was 35 feet. The smallest was six and a half.
There aren’t many Walter Barons anymore — never were, but fewer than ever, on-Cape you can probably count them on your fingers, though he believes that if a young person with the talent and interest to build wooden boats started today, they could make a go of it.
He enjoys meandering around the creative space of his own invention. A woodstove in the corner gets plenty of scraps to keep winter cold out. A pencil is stuck under his cap, over his ear, always at the ready. Time slows down.
Then he looks up, shrugs, smiles, and says,
“So that’s what I’ve been up to for 40 years, man.”
