PORT HADLOCK — Matt Cannell came from as far away as the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea to learn how to build boats the hard way.
Others have come from Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Japan and Korea, , as well as from Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Russia.
That’s according to Kendra Seaman, student services administrator at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock.
Said Katie Whalen, the school’s business manager, “There’s usually an international student in every group.”
The school offers traditional boat building.
Its curriculum has been a model for the other schools, Whalen said.
But the Port Hadlock school is the original, she said.
It’s the only traditional boat building school to use and teach the methods developed in the early 1900s by Puget Sound shipwrights, according to the school’s Web site at http://www.nwboatschool.org.