HEDDY SOROUR

A bounty of wooden boats is about to descend on the village of Merrickville. Siren’s Boatworks is hosting their first annual Wooden Boat Festival on Saturday May 31 at the Merrickville Marina and Boathouse at 253 Amelia street.

“We had said that capacity was 65 boats but I think we’re pushing about 70 now. We have about a dozen boats that we’re also brokering that we’ll have on display – that’s wooden boats for sale,” said Ashley Brash, office manager at Sirens.

The idea started with the Merrickville Boat Club, an informal group of local wooden boat owners who meet for breakfast once a week in the village. Between them they own 14 wooden boats.

“So it started with the 14 boats and then we put it out on social media that we were hosting and some people are coming from as far as Montreal and Port Hope. People just get excited to show off their project and then of course Siren’s boats have a good majority of client’s boats that we’ve been working on,” said Brash.

Specializing in restoring, maintaining, building and storing wooden boats, Sirens already has about 40 boats on site belonging to clients and they too will mostly be on display. There will be about 15 to 20 boats in the water and the rest will be land displays with trailers positioned in a grid. 

“It’s really a matter of space. I think we’re close to max. The idea of putting them in different areas around town has been brought up, that’s why we’re continuing to take registration, and if someone reaches out I’ll put one of my boats in town, and bring them here so we’re trying to accommodate everyone, but we’re certainly not pursuing other clubs, boats or anything of that nature anymore,” said Andrew Lee, owner/boatbuilder.

A few members of the Manotick Classic Boat club will be bringing their boats to the festival, some of them will be driving them in on the Saturday morning of the show.

There is no fee to register a boat for display and there’s no entrance fee to the festival. Lee and Brash started planning the show last November and intend to make it a memorable event for both participants and the viewing audience.

“We’re investing in our show, so we have hired a local bus company [Healey Transportation] to charter into town to our show and the parking area, and they’ll be doing a loop to get people who are in town to come down to our show, we also have local Stella Luna’s food truck to serve our guests, we have beaver tails, we have live music – Rosewood Ave – and we’ll have a barbecue,” explained Brash.

Visitors to the show might not be able to board every boat on display as many of the boats are privately owned but Lee says he will be allowing people to tour some of the boats he has for sale. Visitors will also have an opportunity to score a cruise on a classic wooden boat.

“We’re going to have people fill in a ballot to win a two hour cruise and we’ll take them up the locks and back down the locks just to experience a lock system. It’s three locks to get through town and that’s 20 minutes per lock at least, so a chance to tour the Merrickville locks, and they can choose to go up to Burritts Rapids or down to Kilmarnock.

Brash and Lee have planned the event to cater to all ages of customers because they say their customer base has grown and changed since the pandemic.

“It’s really exciting because we’re finding that the next generation is stepping into the wooden boats. They’re saying ‘hey my dad had this cool Shepherd and now I want the Riviera’ and it’s really neat to see 30 and 40 year olds getting into these super cool wooden boats,” said Brash.

In this, its inaugural year, the Wooden Boat Festival in Merrickville is just a one day event that will run from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Extra parking has been arranged at 115 Grenville Way with a shuttle for convenience. For more information and directions visit sirensboatworks.com