Confessions of a Boatbuilder

Richard Wilbur is the author of The Rise of French New Brunswick and
co-author of Silver Harvest: The Fundy Weirmen’s Story.

Somewhere buried deep within the male psyche is this passionate yearning
to own a sailboat and to take long voyages to distant lands.
Rosborough’s love affair with boats, especially wooden ones, began
when he was a child growing up in Halifax. In 1945, when he was still in
high school, he bought a derelict 30-foot schooner for $50. He fixed the
schooner up so he could take short trips inside Halifax’s inner harbor
and after a few years he sold it “to an unsuspecting adventurer” for
$135.

That sale set Rosborough’s future: he would spend the rest of his
life and all of his resources (largely derived from his regular job with
the NS Telephone Company) buying, retrofitting, and selling wooden boats
and finally creating a name for himself as a designer. With
self-deprecating wit and candor, he writes about his many dealings with
wooden-boat buyers, most of them wealthy Americans. The reader quickly
becomes familiar with many technical terms and with the vagaries and
pitfalls posed in producing custom-designed wooden and other yachts that
were strictly Rosborough. The golden years of wooden yachts occurred
from the 1950s until fibreglass boats started taking over in the late
1970s.

Rosborough’s creations, judging by the many clear photographs, were
things of beauty; an eight-page appendix shows the seven mainline
designs by this talented Nova Scotian. Many are still sailing, a
testimony to a skill equal to those who created the famed Bluenose.