Welcome

Welcome to the Silva Bay Shipyard School, Canada's only full-time traditional wooden boatbuilding school, on Gabriola Island, British Columbia.

Here every April our Boatbuilding students, working in teams of three or four, launch the small traditional wooden boats they have built over the winter.

At the launching our little island has a festival to celebrate with the students what they have achieved; a few beautiful, finely crafted small boats that go out into the water and the world to give years of use and enjoyment and that keep alive, through the sheer pleasure of everyone who sees them, the art of wooden boats.

Valuable as the boats they build are, we know that it is our students, including Ships Cabinetry and Marine Woodworking, who continue that art; who through their months of patient work acquire the skills they may polish over a lifetime in boatbuilding or joinery.

The Silva Bay Shipyard School is proud to contibute to the tradition and craft of wooden boatbuilding, to maintaining the art of the wooden boat.