Greg Rössel grew up cruising on the waters of New York Harbor, spending his time in the boat yards on the south shore of Staten Island where economics (more than anything else) made wooden boats the craft of choice. He makes his home in Maine where he specializes in the construction and repair of small wooden boats. Since graduating at the top of his class in boatbuilding technology from Washington County Vocational Technical Institute, Greg has had a multifaceted career. For several years, he was an assistance restorer for a major private collection of antique runabouts and airplanes. Then he spent another couple of years as an instructor and assistant director at Maine Maritime Museum’s Apprenticeshop program. All the while, he was building his own shop at home in Troy, Maine, and tackling a wide variety of small-boat construction and restoration projects.
For over 30 years, Greg has been able to work for himself full-time, aside from a few odd jobs like setting up a wooden Whitehall factory in Mexico, custom lines taking and documentation for museums and other customers, and writing over 200 articles for WoodenBoat, including a piece in WB 278 about Staten Island. He has also written and illustrated Building Small Boats, a best-selling book on carvel and traditional lapstrake boatbuilding, published by WoodenBoat Books. He is also the author of The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice, which explores other styles of construction and techniques. He has recently written and published the book Half-Hull Modeling. Since 1987, Greg has been an instructor at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine, teaching lofting, skiff building, and the “Fundamentals of Boatbuilding”. Also, since the turn of this century, he has been producing a weekly two-hour radio program about world music (which mercifully) has nothing to do with boats.