Five years ago, Rebecca Brown was getting ready to start the eighth grade when she tagged along with her dad to the Big Sky Antique and Classic Boat Show in Lakeside.

The sleek, classic wooden boats mesmerized the young teen from Conrad and planted the seed for a woodworking project back at Utterback Middle School in Conrad.

During dinner one evening she asked her father, who also happens to be the school’s shop teacher, “Do you think I could build a cedar strip canoe for my eighth-grade shop project?”

With her father’s blessing, Rebecca began researching canoes, studying their lengths and shapes. She settled on a 16-foot Companion canoe from Sandy Point Board Works and ordered the plans, plus a how-to video.

“After getting the plans, she realized there was no appreciable rocker or tumble home on the Companion, and the design was only 30 inches at the widest point along the gunwales,” Rebecca’s father, Dan Brown, said. 

“These qualities would make for a rather unstable, unyielding canoe in rougher waters. In addition, she did not really like the aesthetics of how the stems ended in a nearly vertical line.”

With a true craftsman’s heart, Rebecca went to work on the computer-assisted drafting software and redesigned the canoe to be four inches wider at the gunwales, with several inches of rocker to make it more maneuverable, more tumble home to give it greater secondary stability and she also reshaped the stems.

By Thanksgiving that year Rebecca was building her 16-foot “strongback.” She had the canoe form finished by early March 2010, but her cedar didn’t arrive until the last day of school, so the project was shelved while she began her first job as a carhop at the local drive-in in Conrad.

When the active teen began her freshman year, she was taking algebra and geometry, managing a concessions booth for her school’s sports games and working at the drive-in. Life got in the way of boat-building.

“Her entire freshman year flew by without touching the cedar,” her father recalled.

The next summer he used some leverage as Rebecca prepared to take driver’s education. The deal was she could take driver’s ed but could not take the driving test for her license until the canoe was stripped with cedar.

“The challenge worked,” he said.

She cut the boards into strips and routered beads and coves into the edges. Next she steamed and bent the stems onto the rounded forms on the ends of the canoe.

“Over 88 strips later, it actually looked like a canoe,” Dan said.

Sanding the outside of the canoe was the next challenging task. Rebecca was still working at the drive-In, had her concession business at the school, and now was employed part time at the local movie theater. With a heavy homework load as well, “Rebecca could only manage maybe a night a week on her canoe,” her father said.  

The sanding continued for more than a year.

Dan found himself once again issuing an ultimatum during her junior year: Finish sanding and apply fiberglass to the outside of the canoe or there would be no summer job. By now he had been working around the unfinished boat taking up space in the school shop for more than three years.

It was time to get it done.

More than $1,500 had been invested in the canoe — another reason to make haste, he said.

A long story short, Rebecca finished her canoe at 4 a.m. the night before her high school graduation.

Earlier this summer she built matching paddles and applied two more coats of varnish on the canoe before she and her dad launched it in Lake Blaine in early July.

Rebecca’s prized canoe will be on display at the Big Sky Antique and Classic Boat Show in Lakeside Saturday and Sunday, bringing her canoe “odyssey,” her father said, full circle.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.