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After a childhood spent on the sea, the 17-year-old senior from Islip is making the leap from boat enthusiast to boat builder. Or shipwright, for the more sophisticated.
This fall, McEvoy launched a website advertising his custom boat building business, Clam Island Shipwrights. Its masthead proudly proclaims: “A young shipwright building in the old tradition.”
And he does mean old; his “sharpies” (a flat-bottomed boat with a sharp bow) are all assembled by hand using wood. No fiberglass or aluminum here.
“The biggest boat on the website is my 18-foot and took me only 140 hours of work,” McEvoy told Daily Voice. “My current project is a wee one and will probably be 40 hours of work for me in the end.”
Boat building is a natural progression for the teen, who boarded his first vessel as a baby – a family tradition in which newcomers sail on grandpa’s 26-foot boat when they turn a month old. He’s been sailing since he was 7.
But it was in the fall of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, that McEvoy got the idea of constructing his own boats while under quarantine at home.
“I was boxed into a little room and had basically nothing to do. Nothing but a pile of boards in the backyard, and a garage that wasn’t under quarantine,” he said.
“So, naturally, three weeks of absolutely free, absolutely unbridled time wreaked havoc on those boards, and over weeks of quarantine the boards began to assemble themselves into a boat.”
The finished result was a “large but clumsy” 12-foot scow he named “Sparrow.”
“She floated, despite months of my brothers insisting she would sink, and I still have her to this day,” he said. “She was enough to get me hooked.”
Not long after, McEvoy’s mother began taking him to the nearby Sayville Maritime Museum, where he honed his craft under the guidance of several retired shipwrights who volunteer there. Among them was Betty, “the most passionate older woman” who runs a small boat building operation.
“She built my first boats with me and some other children and was very patient and even went out of the way to secure insurance for us to work in her shop,” he said.
There was also Bob Hillman, “the coolest 86-year-old man who still isn’t too old to come over and table saw a thick stem out of 60-pound greenheart with me,” McEvoy said, adding that Hillman has been a “well of brilliant ideas.”
“Whenever I run up against a problem, I bike over to his house and talk it over amidst a pile of chocolate chip cookies.”
And he couldn’t leave out Chuck, the “old, salty” retired missile engineer who took pity on the teen’s dull tools and taught him how to sharpen a plane “beyond a knife’s edge, which is actually a really big deal.”
But it’s McEvoy’s father Kevin, himself a traditional oil painter, whom he credits most with inspiring his venture into the “admittedly fringe and dying tradition” of boat building.
“(He) is the reason I believe anybody can actually chase their passion as a career in this life,” he said.
After wrapping up school, McEvoy plans to continue his boat journey by apprenticing at a small shop in Maine, where wooden boat building "is the most alive." From there, it'll be "the next place God has in store for me."
These days, though, you’ll likely find him in his driveway (which his parents let him use “rent-free”!), covered in sawdust building his next boat. Launch day is his favorite.
“I make six to 10 gallons of clam chowder (I usually try and catch my own clams for this) and invite a dozen people over for the event,” he said. “Collectively, everybody helps push the boat down the ramp into the water.”
You can learn more about McEvoy’s business on his website. You’ll have to excuse the limited business hours; he does have school, after all.
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