practically knock a cold out of your head. 



Earl Rose is a senior member of the branching family of 

 boatbuilding Roses on Harkers Island. At 72, after 50 years 

 of boatbuilding, during which he worked on more than a 

 thousand boats, Rose has turned his shop over to a half- 

 brother, Paul, and is building for his daughter what he says 

 is his last craft, a 39-foot fishing boat in the classic Harkers 

 Island style. 



Photo by Neil Caudle 



- , - • - ;. 



:- mm 



"It's your typical, Harkers Island commercial fishing 

 boat," he says. "It's got a round transom on 'er, where you 

 can pull a gill net over it, with fish in 'er. And I've got the 

 flared bow in 'er, and I've got the deep vee in 'er, so she'll 

 ride easy in a sea wave. Well, it's just a model that we've 

 built for years, and you can't beat 'em. There ain't no way 

 you can design one any better for the kind of work we do 

 here." 



Like most of the builders, Rose has spent about as much 

 time fishing in boats as he has building them. He fished when 

 the fishing was good, and built boats when it wasn't. What 

 he learned about fishing found its way into refinements in his 

 boats. The shape of a seaworthy craft became lodged as per- 

 manently in his mind as a ship in bottle. Harkers Island 

 boatbuilders construct work boats from their heads, not 

 from blueprints. The only drawings you find them using are 

 a few casual pencil-scratchings on scrap lumber. 



"The length, the width, the depth, all of that, it's in your 

 mind," Rose says. "You make your keel and you cut your 

 frame and you go to puttin' together and puttin' together 

 and puttin' together, until you get 'er finished, and she 

 comes out a nice-looking boat." 



Rose, like other builders on the island, has made his share 

 of sport boats — charter craft, yachts and sports fishing 

 boats. Once, he says, there was all the business the builders 

 could handle. Not so this year. The boatworks on the island, 

 Rose says, are being squeezed by high fuel costs, labor costs 

 and interest rates. 



"Now, if the interest rates drop back down and the fuel 

 drops back some, the bloom will come back on boat- 

 building," he says. 



Some say it will take more than that to keep boatbuilding 

 healthy on Harkers Island. One factor is lumber, which is 

 getting scarce. Most of the island's boatbuilders say that if 

 the lumber runs out they would quit building rather than 



'hoto by Cassie Griffin 



Earl Rose and the old Rose Brothers boat shop on the island 



