TIDELINE ARCHIVE

The Tideline Archive is an extensive collection of documentation on handcraft traditions and maritime folkways. The archive contains a wide range of traditional boat plans, boat models, illustrations, photographs, technical drawings, stories, interviews, audio and visual recordings, and works of art. It is an experiential educational treasure for all ages.

The archive began as the lifetime collection of co-founder Lance R. Lee, founder and director of the Apprenticeshop (1972), and co-founder of Atlantic Challenge (1984), an international contest in seamanship now based in 16 nations. The archive’s most central theme is apprenticing, as adapted from the thousand year-old tradition of learning a trade. It is a fusion of international folk wisdom and maritime cultural heritage that encourages ways of living that value intelligent use of human and natural energy, renewable resources, and the active transfer of perspective and skills from one generation to the next. By making the Tideline Archive accessible to the public we aim to impel people of all ages towards the physical world, towards handcrafts with natural materials, and towards apprenticing in folk traditions. If you are interested in exploring the archive or getting involved with our effort to preserve it, please contact us.

We are a part, an extension of our predecessors, the newest buds on an ancient, living tree. If we do not reach up to the sun and down into the soil for nourishment to help the tree grow, we have not been faithful to the trust invested in us…We need knowledge brought forward from the past, collected, studied, experimented with, and blended together with modern knowledge for the creation of a new culture. 

- Bill Coperthwaite, A Handmade Life