Ever noticed the boats floating placidly on Hoyt Lake?

Ever wondered where they came from?

Local high school students piece them together by hand at the Buffalo Maritime Center. 

Inside the old warehouse in Buffalo’s Riverside neighborhood, sawdust coats the surfaces and structures fill rooms from floor to ceiling. The boats are being worked on by anyone from an experienced sailor to others just learning the ropes. 

“We were literally initiated with some wonderful volunteers from literally all walks of life, from a CEO of a steel company to a farmer,” said John Montague, Ph.D. and founder of the Buffalo Maritime Center. “They all came together in this place and we realized, you know, this is actually a community center.”

Through the center's Hand to Hand Program, students at Riverside and Lafayette high schools have been building boats that will be launched in Hoyt Lake sometime next week. While it might seem like a daunting task, Montague said it gives students an almost instant gratification when they make something of such great magnitude.

“Building boats has this tremendous effect on the kids,” Montague said. “You could almost see it happen before your eyes that they were doing something real, they were building something they were doing things with their hands that they didn't know they could do,” said Montague.

While building wooden boats might not seem high-tech, students can apply science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills they might not quite understand in a different setting. 

“We're using boat building as a method of getting at all those, raising those different kinds of questions, why does wood bend, or how does wood bend, how is wood different from metal in how it bends, why does glue stick,” Montague said. “These are all sort of basic questions that we try to access as we're walking on the project, and just keep working from that point of view so they can draw their generalizations from actually touching and manipulating the physical world.”

In a time of easily buying and replacing items, the center wants students to realize things can still be made, and if something is broken, it can be fixed.