A recent stormy Monday morning, Thames Street Newport. The wind is howling and the rain nearly sideways, and even with its protection the harbor behind the International Yacht Restoration School (IYRS) is a choppy rising mess.

Inside the school’s massive brick shop, a crew of about five second-year students and instructor Warren Barker are oblivious. They’re working on the 1,000 minute details of a boat that a century ago might have been called out on a day like today — a 25-foot double-ended lapstrake cedar surfboat that when finished will be permanently housed in the Buzzards Bay Coalition’s restored lifesaving station in Westport.

Barker, a Westporter who has instructed students at IYRS since 2003, is all over the place, keeping track of the students and what they’re up to. A few are working on the hull’s oak frames. Another is in a separate room, drawing out lines on a long section of half-inch Atlantic white cedar. Upstairs, one is engrossed with the third of nine oars that need to be built, and downstairs another second-year student planes smooth contours along a freshly-cut section of lap.

“It’s a lot of fun, but it’s sort of like herding cats around here,” Barker jokes.

Old boat, new boat

When the boat is finished, Westport will have its own lifesaving vessel for the first time in more than a century. It was commissioned by the Buzzards Bay Coalition to replace one, currently on loan to the station, that will be returned to its home on Cuttyhunk some time next year. Under the arrangement, the coalition pays for materials and IYRS, as a non-profit school, supplies the labor free of charge.

When coalition members heard that the station’s current boat was being reclaimed by Cuttyhunk for a new visitors’ center on the island, they started looking around for a replacement. Westport’s original boat is long gone, and the coalition had no luck looking around for another.

“We...  very quickly realized we were going to have to build something ourselves,” said the coalition’s Stuart Downie. “It’s got a lot of similarities to what would have been in the lifesaving station” during its heyday from 1888 until it closed in 1913.

“The great thing about it is it will be an actual museum piece.”

The boat is based on the design for the Race Point Surf Boat, many of which were built for the dozens of lifesaving stations that once dotted the shore from Provincetown and parts north all the way down to Buzzards Bay and Westport in the late 1800s through the mid-1900s.

IYRS and coalition members found an original, and plans to build one, at Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Ct., and have been working on the replica since the summer. They plan to have it finished up by the Spring, and have to deliver it to the coalition on Saturday, June 1.

“May is when I start panicking,” Barker joked.

Though modern technology has long since eclipsed them, Westport’s new surf boat will certainly be able to handle Buzzards Bay, if it’s ever needed:

“For a light boat that would hold together in spite of rough use, yet was a match for whatever screeching gale came along, the Race Point boat was hard to beat,” according to a passage in Mystic Seaport literature sitting on Barker’s work bench.

Even if the need’s not there, the coalition will get plenty of use out of the boat, using it as a “living artifact” in rowing programs and community events.

Partnership

Back in Westport, Don Dufault is anxiously waiting the boat’s completion. He is a coalition board member and before it merged with the coalition about six years ago, was active in the Westport Fisherman’s Association. It’s that group that restored the lifesaving station at Gooseberry, officially the 69th and last one built by the Humane Society of Massachusetts, about 15 years ago.

In its 25 years of active service, the station — originally built at the west end of Horseneck Beach but later moved to its current location to the east — never saw much action, or at least any action remembered in contemporary accounts. The only reference to any rescues is an old postcard showing the beach in the winter, with wagons and objects being moved across the ice. It’s titled “Horseneck Beach Disaster 1905.”

The station itself, a simple structure about 32 feet long and 16 wide, fell into disrepair after it was decommissioned 110 years ago.

In the years that followed it became all manner of things — a small restaurant, a bait shop, and was slowly incorporated into other structures adjacent to it. By the time the fishermen’s association decided to rebuilt it, “there wasn’t much left,” Dufault said Thursday.

But what’s there now is probably very close to what it would have looked like in the early 1900s, and more so once the new boat comes home.

As such, the station will remain a fully outfitted, proud piece of once-forgotten Westport history. According to an association paper written during the station’s restoration, “its story has links to old Westport families, ship building, whaling and the late-nineteenth century development of the town and East Beach area in particular, reflecting population growth, prosperity as well as cultural shifts in leisure time.”

Dufault has been following along with the boat’s construction, and said he considers the merger of the old association and Buzzards Bay Coalition a milestone that has improved not only Westport, but Buzzards Bay itself.

“They have a good legacy (and) they’ve been great stewards.”

At IYRS, Barker is also thrilled to be involved in the build. Students in the two-year school usually start out working on beetle cats their first year, moving on to more complicated, larger boats their second. He never knows what’s going to be built, but is glad it’s a Race Point surf boat this year. The techniques and details students are being exposed to through its construction is an excellent opportunity to learn, he said.

“Since I’ve been here it’s the first double ender we’ve done,” he said. Students more commonly build transomed boats, but “this was a real gift (from) the coalition and to partner with that organization, we thought it was worth the sacrifice to do away with a transom.”

Then, whispering to a visitor so no one will hear, “I love it. it’s a great gig.”