ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, May 24, 1996 TAG: 9605240081
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CARVINS COVE
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
FOR THE 10TH YEAR in a row, the Lord Botetourt armada turned out in force. Josh Bare looked like he should have been off skateboarding someplace.
His denim shorts sagged below his knees, barely clinging to his hips. His bleached, cropped hair peeked from beneath his backward baseball cap.
But on this perfect-weather Thursday, Josh was a skipper, not a street surfer.
The Lord Botetourt High School honor student abandoned Botetourt County's concrete curls to cruise the slightly choppy surface of Carvins Cove in a boat he and two classmates crafted in shop class.
Bare, 16, and Chris Slocum won a nautical engineering award from the school for the blue - VERY blue - 16-foot runabout they designed. Its sleek appearance on the water belies its plywood skeleton, held together, Bare said, with "a lot of Bondo, a lot of water sealer and lots of paint."
"It's not the fastest boat, but I think it performs the best," Slocum said.
The best among Lord Botetourt's fleet of student-built ships, that is.
That fleet is four boats built by 20 unlikely-looking shipwrights, all students in Bill Kohler's Power and Transportation class.
The boats buzzed, purred, sputtered and slogged Thursday. They cornered and bounced and did about everything else a boat can do within the limits of 25 horsepower. They took on a little water, but not a single one sank.
This is the tenth year in a row Kohler's students have launched their own small flotilla. It takes them all year to build the boats, and they celebrate their completion with a picnic and a day on the water. Even the shop students who haven't worked on the boats come to eat, fish and jockey for a chance to ride shotgun in one.
"You have all these hangers on," Kohler said. Kids that suddenly become the best friends of anyone who might take them for a spin, even if it is on a plastic seat about 3 inches off the water.
The fastest thing on Carvins Cove Thursday was a viciously aerodynamic affair designed by Kohler and built by about a dozen students in three woodworking classes. Shaped like a shark's tooth, it's based on a raft called the "Galactic Warrior " Kohler's students entered in the Festival on the River race four years ago. The motorized version left the other boats in its spray Thursday.
"I figured it would," Kohler said. "After 10 years of building them, you get pretty good at it."
They don't move at breakneck speed, mind you, but plenty fast enough to catch a few bugs in your teeth. Just ask Charlie Agee, whose son Brandon helped build the red boat.
"It does run good," he said after a ride. "I was surprised."
Kohler said the students are usually just as surprised. It's hard to get them motivated at first, he said.
"You have this cadaver, this skeleton laying there, but when they put the sides on and it starts to look like a boat, they perk up," Kohler said. "And when you start putting the motor on, they know."
Kohler said he started the course a few years ago for woodworking students tired of building the same old gun cabinets every year. Over the years, Kohler's students have put 30 boats in the water without a single accident. A few have leaked, but none has ended up on the bottom of the lake.
The students keep the boats all summer, but have to return the motors, steering mechanisms and trailers, which belong to the school, in August.
Chris Slocum said a neighbor has already offered him $850 for the blue boat he and Josh Bare designed. Not bad for a boat with $350 worth of materials in it.
Bare said he knew "absolutely nothing" about boats before he took Kohler's class. "I just wanted to build a boat, I guess."
Zipping across the cove, hunkered down behind the wheel of his blue boat, Bare said it was a beautiful day to be on the water.
If he wasn't here?
"I'd be skateboarding somewhere."
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: PAUL L. NEWBY II/Staff. 1. Bill Kohler, accompanied byby CNBLee Whitaker, drives the speediest boat his students built this
year, as Bryan Atkinson and Richard Ferguson test another. 2. In an
annual rite, Lord Botetourt students wait their turns to ride the
boats built by the Power and Transportation class. color.