In a modest workspace in the Transatlantic Auto and RV Center on Park St. in Peekskill, Jim Taylor and Justin Hayes have been working steadily to provide the finishing touches to a 14-foot rowboat built over the summer.

Pieces of what looks like a gigantic puzzle are stacked on the front workbench, covered by tools and blueprints. Taylor and Hayes are excited to start putting together the giant puzzle–a 22-foot rowboat–but are going to need some help, so they plan to hold an open house for Peekskill Boatworks in the next two weeks.

Taylor has been running the City of Peekskill Youth Bureau’s Boatworks program for the last two years. Hayes, a tenth-grade Peekskill High School student, is Taylor’s one consistently dedicated Boatworks participant. The program runs after-school during the year and over the summer and enables youth and adults to build rowboats together, an experience that builds self-esteem and self-confidence, while it sharpens math, science and team building skills.

“I am working with kids and giving them an opportunity to explore,” said Taylor, a retired Oakside Elementary school principal. “They are able to learn from this experience and it could possibly even become a career path for them.”

Peekskill’s Boatworks, still in its infancy, had eight kids involved in the summer of 2009, when they built their first 14-foot boat, and about six involved last summer, when they built their second 14-footer. This year, Taylor will be recruiting at area middle and high schools, looking for interested boys and girls who are 12 years or older to help build the 22-foot rowboat from the kit he ordered from Wooden Boat Magazine.

“I like the chance to work with tools,” said Hayes, who aspires to become a professional wrestler, but is also interested in learning to become a mechanic. Hayes had never been out on the Hudson River before 2009, when he launched his first boat made through Boatworks.

The program is modeled after the South Bronx’s Rocking the Boat, a 15 year-old non-profit that has grown from a grass-roots program where a teacher and a few students floated a dingy in a school pool, to a non-profit organization that provides programs for more than 2,000 youth and community members every year.

Taylor has big plans to grow Boatworks into a regular year-round afterschool program that incorporates ecological studies of the Hudson River, works with science and environmental classes in area schools, and partners with non-profits like Rocking the Boat and others. He hopes it can grow into a job placement program as well.

For now, Taylor is just trying to get more interested participants so that Boatworks can race their 22-foot hand-made boat (to be assembled) against others made by teens from as far away as Maine this summer.

“This one will take us about three months to put together,” Taylor said, adding that he hopes to have it complete by mid-June, leaving the rest of the summer for racing, rowing lessons and ecological studies.

Coldspring and Garrison have similar programs and a couple of professional boat builders from that area have volunteered with Boatworks. The program receives most of its funding from the Youth Bureau, and materials are frequently donated by the King Marine in Verplanck and Danes Lumber in Peekskill. The Peekskill Rotary Club and the Omega Psi Phi fraternity have also donated funds to the program.

“People are really interested in wooden boats,” Taylor said, explaining a bit of Peekskill’s history as a major shipping center and emphasizing that all Boatworks projects are historically accurate and use local materials.

“During the Revolutionary War time this was a major whaling center,” said Taylor, who considers himself a fisherman and a carpenter. As a side project Taylor makes colonial era wooden buckets, and gives presentations on slavery and American history at various institutions and organizations in the area.

Taylor hopes for the opportunity to use his passion for boats and education to grow his program into a large-scale extracurricular activity for children from all over the Peekskill-Cortlandt area. He emphasizes that teens from any of the nearby schools are welcome at Boatworks. You can find him and Hayes at the RV Center on Park Street from 3 to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Thursdays.

Once the season gets off the ground Taylor will hold adult nights on Wednesdays after 8 p.m. to get the adult members of the community involved.

Check back with Patch for more information and for the date of the Open House.

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