SANDPOINT — Alan Thompson has three wooden boats; well, four if you count the canoe he painstakingly built by hand before taking it out on Round Lake where he promptly tipped it over.

The boat has lived in the rafters of his garage ever since.

The canoe stems from a conversation with his wife shortly after moving to town while wandering along the boardwalk at a past Wood on the Water boat show.

"Honey," Thompson recalls turning to his wife. "I think I could build one of those."

While his wife, Lynn, agreed, she encouraged him to start smaller. Hence, Thompson said, the canoe.

Thompson went online, found the plans for a wooden boat and got to work. While the 16-foot vessel took a year-and-a-half to complete, the Bonner County resident was hooked. It wasn't long after finishing the boat that he found a 1963 Century that needed a major restoration. Four-and-a-half years later, Thompson said the boat has been rebuilt with only two structural support stringers original to the vessel.

His latest boat was found in Corvallis, Oregon, just prior to the couple's journey to their winter home in Arizona. He convinced his wife to stop so he could take a look at it and, on the way home in the spring, they again stopped in Oregon — this time to pick up the boat.

"To me, it's a project," Thompson said. "I don't have a love or a hate, but it keeps my mind busy. I didn't know anything about fiberglass or anything. I knew how to sand. I knew how to cut and I knew other stuff like that.

Thompson has been intrigued by woodworking since middle school, making hutches, tables and lights. He still has the napkin holder, shaped like a dog, that he made as his first woodworking project; it had been saved by his mother ever since and returned to him shortly before she passed away several years ago.

Growing up in Nebraska, Thompson admits he wasn't much of a water person even though he later joined the Navy. But he said he's fallen in love with the challenge of giving the boats a second chance at life, figuring out what the problems are and how to overcome those challenges.

"I love to solve puzzles," Thompson said. "I like building things. I like looking at something and saying, 'I think I can build something like this.'"

He enjoys sharing tales of his boat with residents stopping by the boat show.

"To me, it's just the friendship," he said. "I can sit up on my little one acre, in my house up there, and be perfectly content. But sometimes I need to talk to somebody and people need to talk to me."

Like Thompson, Bill Roberts and Brett Sergeant love the camaraderie found at events like the Wood on the Water boat show: catching up with old friends, trading stories about favorite trips on their respective boats and sharing that joy of having a classic boat with passersby. 

For Roberts, his boat — the "Sweet Annie" named after his wife — was the chance to pursue a passion he's had since he was a teen, growing up around wooden boats with his father and brothers owning such classics.

After retiring from Boeing, Roberts said he was determined to own a wooden boat and soon found the 1956 Chris-Craft Capri. He methodically searched online before seeing the boat and made arrangements to see the boat on a trip back East.

Then known as "Bobby's Girl," Roberts knew he wanted the boat and soon made an offer. But, following the advice of his wife, Annie, he offered $10,000 below the asking price.

"He says to me, you go back out to that little rental car and call your wife and tell her the price is the price and then come back and tell me what she said," Roberts recalled. "I had a 30-second conversation with her."

Roberts walked back into the garage where he was greeted by the owner with "Wow, your wife can really say no quickly, can't she?"

"I whip out my checkbook and said, 'She said yes,'" he recalled with a grin.

Roberts made arrangements to have the boat — one of only eight Capris built by Chris-Craft with the cerulean blue interior — shipped to Star, Idaho, where he lives ... and for one small change that he kept secret from his wife. Before the boat made its way to Idaho, he had the owner change the name from "Bobby's Girl" to "Sweet Annie". It wasn't until the boat arrived and his wife was walking around the back of the boat and saw its new name.

"She cried," Roberts said.

While initially hesitant, Annie Roberts said she loves going out on the water with her husband, and enjoys attending the boat shows.

"You get to meet all the people that are coming from all over the place, or you find out some people are from where you maybe grew up," she said. "It's just interesting. And you get to see all of the boats and how they're all different. They're pristine but in different ways. It's sort of like children … they're all different."

Sergeant has three wooden boats — the Proto and the Finito, the first and last 18-foot Cobras made by Chris-Craft in 1955 that incorporated the distinctive fiberglass fin and curved windshield; and the Stiletto, a Stan-Craft "torpedo" boat that he brought to the Sandpoint show.

"These (wooden) boats, when they came out of the '20s, '30s, '40s, '50s, maybe not so much in the '60s, but they were basically throwaway boats," he said, exchanging details and nuances of wooden boats with Roberts. "I mean, if Grandpa didn't want to work on the boat, the kids didn't want anything to do with it. No, they'd rather have a fiberglass boat."

At one point, Plymouth made the steering for Chris-Craft boats as part of a partnership between the two classic American companies.

The 18-foot models have a KBO engine. The 21s allowed you to select from four different engines.

There's something about all wooden boats that is special, Sergeant said. They are, he added, unique and special — and worth the extra care and attention that modern fiberglass-hulled boats often don't require.

"If you get right down to it, they're alive," he said. "Every time you put them in the water, the wood swells and contracts and expands. It's a living organism."

Sergeant said he enjoyed boating as a teen; his dad always had a boat. But it wasn't until he was on a job with his dad in the Seattle area and they had some time to kill. After his dad suggested going to the Tacoma Dome, where a boat show was being held, his attention was firmly caught by a company that was building new wood boats.

"And I saw those things, and they were just beautiful," the Post Falls resident said. "I kept coming back three or four times and talking to those people. After that, I always wanted one."

Since that boat show with his dad, Sergeant said he's fallen in love with wooden boats, especially the Cobras, which were only produced by Chris-Craft in 1955. Renovations of Proto saw the classic win Best in Show at the Lake Tahoe Concours d'Elegance — one of the most prestigious wooden boat shows in the country.

"It was an honor of a lifetime," Sergeant said.

    Paddleboarders make their way past a few of the classic boat on display at the annual Wood on the Water boat show in Sandpoint on Saturday.
  

    Classic wooden boats line the Sandpoint Boardwalk during the annual Wood on the Water boat show on Saturday.