A total of ten students, aged between 25 and 55 years old, have participated in the construction of an eight and a half meter long boat that will be delivered upon completion, within two months, to the Latin Sailing Federation.
This is a workshop, which began in May, and has allowed participants to learn the techniques of boat construction. "The boat is made of strokes, piece by piece, and you don't see the result until the end," commented the master craftsman, Agustín Jordán, so he assures that when they saw the skeleton of the boat assembled "the boys couldn't believe they had done it with their own hands," Jordán said.
During the course, the students have not only built an eight-meter-long boat with their own hands, but the tools that have been used to work during these four months, such as brushes and scantlings or false squares, have also been created by themselves. "To build a boat you have to have a lot of marine and carpentry knowledge that I have tried to transmit," says Jordán. "I don't want to lose this type of craftsmanship that is so linked to Lanzarote because since the first boat landed on the island more than 600 years ago, there was already a carpenter among its crew."
The workshop is taught every day from Monday to Friday for three hours. And the boat they are building, at the request of the Latin Sailing Federation, is a falúa: a light, elongated and narrow wooden boat.
The carpenter Agustín Jordán, who began his work at just fifteen years old, conveyed to the public representatives his intention to create a workshop school where the children can also learn because, according to him, "Lanzarote cannot afford to lose this tradition." He assured that he has a "very large" list of people interested in learning how to make their own boat.
