Join William Womack on Thursday, August 26, at 7:00 pm for the Sippican Historical Society Speaker Series presentation (via Zoom). The year 2021 marks the 100th Anniversary of the Beetle Cat sailboat. This will make the Beetle Cat the oldest one design that has been continuously produced out of wood and continues to be competitively raced for the past 100 years. The boat continues to be handcrafted by true craftsmen working together using traditional methods to preserve the integrity and quality of the boat.
The boat is a big part of New England history, sailing, wooden boats, and wooden boat building. Its distinctive silhouette is known at a glance; the name brings back memories of learning to sail, first tries at the tiller, and, of course, the smell of cedar, varnish, and pine tar. It is the preservation of a hand-crafted art form used to produce a sweet little boat out of a living tree.
Bill Womack, owner of the “Beetle Cat Boat Shop” is a direct descendant of Miles Standish of the Mayflower. He was born and raised in Alabama and spent all his early summers on Onset Island in Massachusetts sailing Beetle Cats and developing a love for traditional wood boatbuilding.
After three tours in Viet Nam with a Navy Seabee team, Bill worked as a civil engineer in heavy highway construction building bridges, highways, and tunnels around the country for 40 years before taking up ownership of the Beetle Cat Boat Shop in 2003.
Bill Womack, the fourth caretaker of this proud little boat in the last 100 years, will take us through the history of the boat from its development by the Beetle family of New Bedford in 1921 to its present-day home in Wareham.
Bill will present the construction of the Beetle Cat from the cutting of the trees to the finished sailboat. The building of the boat, using very traditional, tried and proven boat building methodology, using hand tools and individual craftsmanship, is very much an art form. The boat is all hand made in the USA.
The presentation will provide the viewer a glimpse into the past of traditional wood boat building. The aroma of the cedar wood, pine tar, and varnish will fill the air and dreams of sailing down Buzzards Bay in a traditionally-built wood boat and will take you back in time to when men were iron and ships were wood.
You may request the Zoom link by emailing info@sippicanhistoricalsociety.org.