Background: Greg Rossel grew up cruising on the waters of New York Harbor and spending time in the boatyards on the south shore of Staten Island, where economics, more than anything else, made wooden boats the craft of choice. He now makes his home in Troy, Maine, where he specializes in the construction and repair of small wooden boats.

Since graduating at the top of his class in boat building technology from Washington County Vocational Technical Institute, Greg has had a multifaceted career. For several years, he was an assistant restorer for a major private collection of antique runabouts and airplanes. Then, he spent another couple of years as an instructor and assistant director at Maine Maritime Museum’s Apprenticeshop program. All the while, he was building his own shop at home in Troy, Maine, and tackling a wide variety of small boat construction and restoration projects.

For over 30 years, Greg has been able to work for himself full-time, aside from a few odd jobs, including setting up a wooden Whitehall factory in Mexico, custom lines taking and documentation for museums and other customers, and writing more than 200 articles for numerous marine publications. He is a contributing editor for WoodenBoat, and Maine Boats Homes and Harbors magazines.

Greg is the author and illustrator for Building Small Boats, The Boat Builders Apprentice and co-author with Ted Moores of Kayaks You Can Build: An Illustrated Guide to Plywood Construction. Half Hull Modeling will be released in 2019. Since the late 1980s, Greg has been an instructor at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, teaching lofting, skiff building, and the Fundamentals of Boatbuilding. Also, for the nearly 30 years he has been producing a weekly two-hour world music radio program on WERU-FM  which (mercifully) has absolutely nothing to do with boats.

Photo by Norma Rossel