The act of building and sailing boats made out of trees and powered by the wind is a small moment of grace in the face of a digitally enhanced world and throwaway culture. But forty years ago the rise of fiberglass boats nearly pushed wooden sailboats, and the trade of building them, to the brink of extinction. Wood/Sails/Dreams explores the resurgence of wooden boats, the restoration of American maritime history, and the to be lessons learned from the ancient craft of traditional boat building.
Narrated by Wooden Boat Magazine founder and publisher Jon Wilson, the film takes audiences from the rag tag regattas of the 1970s to today’s wooden boat world, from Nantucket to Vineyard Haven, Bristol and Newport, RI, to the rocky coast of Maine, in search of the soul of wooden sailboats.
Wood/Sails/Dreams was four years in the making. It began as a 15-minute look at a slice of island life in the 1970s, through the stories of the men and women whose days were spent chasing the romantic notion of repairing wooden boats to live on and to charter. Those stories led us up the east coast and to a larger story, not only of the resurgence of wooden boats, but a way of life that was built alongside those boats.