From loft to launch
|creators of n.c.
MARK BAYNE SENDS HIS WORKS TO SEA. by Wiley Cash | photographs by Mallory Cash
M
aster shipwright Mark Bayne is standing in an open bay at the workshop where he has been teaching wooden boat building at Cape Fear Community College in downtown Wilmington for the past 10 years. Over his shoulder, the murky brown Cape Fear River plods slowly eastward, where it will meet the Atlantic Ocean in just a few miles. It’s not quite summer yet, but the day is hot and bright. A stiff, warm breeze rolls in off the river, adding to the late morning’s warmth. All around us, people are working on a half-dozen wooden boats in various stages of construction. There’s a flats boat that was specially designed so fishermen can stand with stability and cast a line from the broad deck. Beside it is a beautiful, narrow melon seed just waiting for a sail. In the far corner of the workshop is a Jersey speed skiff that, as soon as it’s complete, will move next door (to the engine program) for the fall semester, where the team who built it will fit it with an inboard motor. After decades building boats on his own and another decade of teaching people to do the same, Mark is accustomed to being surrounded by the sounds of saws and routers, the fine mist of sawdust floating through the air. He’s also accustomed to teaching others to build a variety of different kinds of wooden boats, because that’s what he made a career doing before he found himself in the classroom. “I’ve specialized in not specializing,” he says. It’s as easy to picture Mark captaining a boat as it is to picture him building one. He’s quick to smile, and he’s still carrying the glow of holding a new granddaughter who was born down in Charleston, S.C., just a few nights before. That’s where Mark was raised, and his whole family, including his wife and their four grown children, live there now. He splits his time between the low country and the Cape Fear,
teaching at the college during the week and heading home to Isle of Palms on the weekends. His wife used to make the trips with him, but now that she’s surrounded by grandchildren she’s less likely to leave home. Bayne understands. He hears the call to home. For that reason, this is the last course he’ll teach for the college’s wooden boat building program. But in order to understand how his time at the college is ending, you have to understand how it began. He grew up on “the backside” of Isle of Palms, in the marsh, sailing small boats, swimming and crabbing with his younger brother and kids from the neighborhood. When I ask if they were ever so bold as to round the island and head for the open water, he smiles and pauses as if his mother and father are within earshot. “Officially, we did not do that,” he says, meaning, of course they did. After a brief stint in college, Mark dropped out and worked at Mount Pleasant Boatbuilding Co. as a helper in the joinery shop, where he learned to build and fit small, intricate parts to boats. He already loved boats, and he found that he also loved building and working on them. A welder in the boatyard mentioned that he’d heard about a new wooden boat building program beginning up the coast at Cape Fear Community College. Mark enrolled in 1978 and was a member of the program’s first class. With his classmates and instructors, he literally helped build the program: They put down the hardwood floor in the workshop, and they built the workbenches from old bowling alley lanes that had been stored in a chicken coop in Southern Pines. After completing the program and getting his degree, Mark went back to Mount Pleasant Boatbuilding with the knowledge of how to loft boats, which is the process of drawing out plans on the floor, cutting and fitting the pieces, and constructing the boats using southparkmagazine.com | 61
