It was a long time since anyone in my family had built a boat. The last was my Uncle Paul. He was a shipbuilder who learned his trade beginning at age 14 in Hamburg, Germany. Every morning, the boy ...

Clint Chase, from Saco, Maine, knows how to make a really great boat. “The first thing I do is design a really fantastic boat, and then I figure out how to kit it,” he says, in the video above.

At a time when fewer young adults seem to know how to make anything from scratch, some New York City high school students are building wooden boats by hand. But woodworking isn’t the only skill ...