Boat of the Month: Outer Fall
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The first time I ever saw Jimmy Tripp was in late 1982. Jimmy had his boat, the Day Star, loaded with big wooden Anderson traps and was heading offshore. It was snowing and the flakes vanished in the water of Spruce Head harbor. Tripp had his head sticking out a side window to see where he was going—and he was smiling. Some people just love the life, and wooden boats. “There’s something more personal about a wooden boat,” Tripp says. “I don’t know, they have a soul.”
Since then, Tripp had a 72-foot trawler, a new boat built in 1995, the Sea Wife featured in the February 1996 National Fisherman, and another, the Outer Fall, built in 2018—all wood. “I had one fiberglass boat for about eight months,” he says.
“We built his last two boats, the Sea Wife and the Outer Fall,” says Peter Kass, owner of John’s Bay Boat Company in South Bristol, Maine. “We have the Outer Fall on the ways right now. Doing some maintenance on her.” Kass started working on wooden boats at age 17 and opened his own shop when he was 23. “We’ve built 78 boats,” he says, noting his John’s Bay boats are popular with fishermen who enjoy the comfort afforded by wood.
“We build them the standard way,” Kass says. “Cedar on oak. We use white oak for the ribs. We get that from a guy in Ohio. The first time I bought wood from him, I flew to Cleveland, rented a car, and we drove around looking at trees. Now I just buy it. I have plenty for a while.”
