Wood gleams, glows, and adds personality to any object it’s used to craft. For centuries, wooden boats have been treasured for their beauty and their connection to nature. Unlike modern recreational boats that are built in a matter of days on production lines using fiberglass molds and machines, wooden boats were slowly handcrafted by artisans using the plank-on-frame process, requiring hundreds of individual pieces coming together in a manner similar to a jigsaw puzzle. These boats used wood that had been air-dried for months to eliminate moisture, then milled into pieces to achieve uniform alignment of the grain, stuffing cotton into seams to provide a degree of water tightness that was more optimistic than actual. It’s an understatement to say each boat was a unique piece of art with a distinctive soul and personality—and a tendency to take on water. By the 1930s, recreational boaters were embracing the notion of …