His love for boat building started as a child.
It was a time before the road that separates Roy Dennis’s property and the path to the waterfront.
He was six or seven when he would sit and watch his grandfather, Isaac, build boats. Everyone built their own then and the bustle of community was best heard at the waterfront.
When he turned 14, Dennis told Isaac he might like to build one on his own.
His grandfather welcomed the notion and pointed the youngster towards the supplies he would need to build the boat.
Dennis set to work and, a couple of weeks later, he had his first boat construction under his belt.
Now in the loft of the shed he built in the early 1970s, Dennis sits and rubs his left hand over the keel of what he calls a rowing dory.
He figures this will be the last boat he ever builds.
You’d think over seven decades of building a boat — and everything else on his property including the family home and the miniature church on the front lawn — Dennis would be showing some of the effects.
Aside from injuries on his hands from saw accidents, his back is doing well and he is spry for a man of 87 years old.
Dennis wasted little time showing me the shed where he does his work upon my arrival at his home. Grabbing for his coat and hat while slipping on his boats, he took off for one of the two sheds that he built on the property.
If he could just kick the cold that’s been hanging around for a month or so, he’d be even better.
Dennis figures he has built more than 100 boats over the course of 73 years.
Just last summer, he built five.
It is getting expensive to put them together and he can’t take the chance no one is going to buy them.
In the green building, wood shavings crunch under your feet and the smell of sawdust fills the air.
The main level is where Dennis does the actual building. Yellow mounds of sawdust rest below an assortment of saws.
There are chainsaws, a band saw and other tools around the space. In the far corner, an old motorized saw sits from the days when Dennis operated the building as a sawmill.
In the loft, a lit cigarette burns in his right hand as Dennis tells of starting with the flat bottom first before moving to the planks and forming the hull.
The boat I am sitting in now isn’t the only vessel you can find in the loft. To the left of the boat are a pair of smaller models that Dennis put together for his sons.
It looks akin to the famous Lark Harbour dory that originates from the nearby Bay of Islands community of the same name.
Details are interrupted by intermittent drags of tobacco. Before continuing, Dennis lets a plume of smoke escape his pursed lips.
Pointed at both ends, the boat is not meant for an outboard motor, but it is prime for rowing. Just don't ask Dennis to build a set of oars. He hasn’t done that in years. The last set he carved out was decades ago and he still uses them.
He calls his process “messing around.”
When he has a project he wants to complete, he heads to his shed and messes around for a couple of hours.
In a matter of weeks, that messing around turns into a boat.
He has had people come from Isle aux Morts, St. John’s and everywhere else looking for a Roy Dennis vessel. When people are coming to you, that means you’ve developed a quality of work that draws them in.
A Lark Harbour native in Edmonton, Paul Winters, is basing a new business venture off of the design of Dennis boats. Winters spent much of 2018 on the phone with Dennis and even flew a piece of an old boat to his home in Alberta.
The advent of electrical power tools may have saved him, he figures.
Dennis doesn’t know if he’ll see his final creation hit the water.
He would like to, but it isn’t up to him.
Either way, it seems an era in the history of John’s Beach is ending.
