Snekke ~ A Norwegian Classic

Tucked away in a non-descript woodshop, on the edge of a dusty New Hampshire road, Traditional Boatworks owner, Andrew Wallace, is bringing new life to an ancient Norwegian tradition. As you enter the tiny wooden boat building shop, you are immediately cast back in time to a day where fine craftsmanship was honored for the underlying years of diligence along the journey from apprentice to master. The fragrance of cedar woodchips lingers alongside fumes of pungent oils and varnish. A new history is in the works with every path of the tiny block plane that shapes each plank into the monstrous hull.

"My mother is from Oslo," Andrew Wallace explains. "I guess I have a bit of Viking in my blood." Ever since he can remember, Mr. Wallace has been awed by the historic Norwegian vessels now preserved out of water in various museums. "My first boat was a raft I made with sticks when I was seven. I tried to sail away from home, but I didn’t get very far. I guess I’ve come a long way in the last 30 or so years."

Wallace first discovered the snekke as a boy. Though he grew up in the suburbs of New York and Connecticut, he spent his summers in Norway. To calm his boyish energy, his mother often sent him off with a local fisherman friend of the family for the day. Wallace recalls how the neighbor would pick him up at 5am and take him back to his home for "a bread", which consisted of toast, cheese, caviar paste and jam. After a quick bite, his neighbor would lead him through the brightening dawn to his fishing boat, a sturdy Norwegian snekke, and they would cast off into the intensity of the North Atlantic to fish as the sun rose over the collection of islands surrounding the village of Grimstad. Though his neighbor spoke no English and Andrew knew not a word of Norwegian, they communicated easily with lines and jigs. Leaning over the side-deck of the 24 foot snekke, dipping his drop-line for mackerel and cod, Wallace discovered two passions at once: fishing and wooden boats.

"Ever since those days, I have always been fascinated with wooden boats," Wallace admits. "I sometimes think I grew up in the wrong day and age, as if I was supposed to be living back in historical times. Things were simpler then." As his woolen shirt and stained Carharts suggest, Wallace is a traditionalist, building his own snekke design with the tools and techniques employed by his Norwegian forefathers centuries before.

The snekke (snekkja) is a double-ended, lapstrake design with a shallow keel, built to endure North Atlantic waters, but light enough to be beached. They are built most often as a rowing vessel or a motorboat with an inboard motor, but there are also sailing versions that can be found. The snekke was originally a subclass of the Viking longship, though one of the smallest, and served primarily to carry men, rather than as a war ship. They are documented as being used in battle as far back as 1028 by the Norwegian king Canute the Great. Over time, they gradually evolved into the traditional workboat used throughout the fjords and coast of Scandinavia for fishing, pleasure craft and even sailing.

Given his upbringing, you would think Wallace’s path to boatbuilding would be simple. He may have been meant for this work, but Wallace did not originally set out in search of it. In fact, he was only 24 years old and down and out on his luck after a few years’ stint as a ski bum, that he called his father to ask for gas money to get back East. His father challenged him in return. "’Come home, but go back to school’, he said. So, I signed up for the Apprentice Shop right there from the pay phone," Wallace shares.

He began his apprenticeship at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath Maine in 1992. Wallace was no stranger to woodworking, having served previously as a carpenter and furniture maker for various craftsmen. But it was the boatbuilding that would capture him. Following his apprenticeship, he served as a volunteer and later Head Boatwright under founder Clark Posten, at the John Gardner School of Boatbuilding in Annapolis, Maryland. In 1998, when the school closed, Andrew Wallace founded Traditional Boatworks.