The Globe and Mail Joan Sullivan Published February 16, 2021
Wooden boats built Newfoundland and Labrador, said Pauline Thornhill, host and producer of CBC-TV’s
Land and Sea. And “Henry Vokey has undoubtedly built more wooden boats than anyone in the province.” When she first met him, as the subject of the
Land and Sea episode
Wood or Nothing in 2009 (a second,
One Last Schooner, would be filmed in 2012), Mr. Vokey “was hitting 80 at the time, and suffering from arthritic hands, [but] was still building, in the shed beside his house. He was the guy who just never retired.”
Mr. Vokey, who died on Jan. 27 at the age of 91, had been building boats since he was young, beginning with a scale model and teaching himself. At that time fishermen would have built schooners, “but for their own use, not to make a living,” said his daughter Josephine Johnson. In 1964, when Newfoundland was gearing up to its organized resettlement program, he moved his family to nearby