Morley Canoes continues craftsmanship

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Building canoes was a hobby that turned into a career and a way of life for Greg Morley of Swan Lake.

When Morley was a young man in the late 1960s, “people were thinking of other ways to do things,” he said. He chanced to meet a canoe-builder in Portland who showed him a method of making canoes from carefully shaped strips of cedar.

“I was intrigued with the method and just started doing it as a hobby,” Morley said.

Morley studied forestry at the University of Montana and began his career as a supervisor at Beaver Creek Park in Hill County, south of Havre. Later he worked as a state park planner in Salem, Ore. But he and his wife wanted to come home to Montana, and Swan Lake was where they wanted to live.

“We knew if we wanted to live here, we’d either have to work for the timber industry or the Forest Service — or do something on our own,” Morley said. He’d built enough canoes to know what he was doing, and going into business seemed the natural choice.

Canoe-building methods have become very similar from one builder to another because they’ve learned from one another what works best, he said. “I’ve taken from what others worked out and others have taken from what I’ve done.”

A number of books explain how to build canoes using the methods Morley uses, and he doesn’t mind if others want to try it at home. After all, it was a good hobby for him before he went professional.

And he’s not worried about losing business to amateurs. Morley and his son, Steve, keep busy all day on the custom canoes and kayaks they design themselves and build to order. They make all their boats to order because the demand is too high to make boats for drop-in browsers to buy “off the rack.” The Morleys don’t need to advertise because almost all their business comes by word of mouth, or someone notices the model they display in their shop’s front yard and stops in.

Most people order one of Morley’s standard designs, but “every once in a while, someone wants a different design,” he said. He designs new models himself, starting by carving a small, hand-sized wooden model of the basic canoe shape. He cuts the model into sections, using them to help him calculate the dimensions of the full-sized boat. He still works on improving designs for better performance.

“I make them faster and more seaworthy all the time,” Greg Morley said.

The Morleys buy most of their cedar from West Coast mills and also use some local wood. The raw wood looks like standard two-by-four boards. Using a shaping machine Greg built, they cut the boards into thin strips with a concave edge on one side and a convex edge on the other, which Greg calls a “cove and bead” shape. The bead edge of one strip fits into the cove edge of the one next to it, just as tongue-and-groove boards fit together.

Greg and Steve fasten the flexible cedar strips together with hot glue, molding the strips around pressboard forms. After the glue has set, they knock the forms loose. Most of the canoes have inlaid designs of wild creatures, such as trout, ducks, whales, swans, even a bee, all of which the Morleys also design themselves. Sometimes a customer sketches a unique design the Morleys refine and duplicate.

Next they apply two layers of fiberglass fabric over both the hull and the inside of the canoe, using a resin to bond the fiberglass tightly to the wood.

“It’s very strong and stiff at that point,” Greg said. They finish the hull with a tough marine varnish.

They design and makes skiffs and kayaks this way, too. Morley’s “Swan Lake skiffs,” designed for rowing and sailing, are becoming popular because they’re easy to row and they glide much better than typical rowboats, Greg said.

He’s been making boats for 35 years now, and sometimes a customer brings in one of his early canoes for renovation. He’s working one now, sanding the fiberglass finish and replacing the worn seats.

“It’ll look nice and shiny and kind of antique-ish when I get done with it,” he said. “Then it’ll be good for another 30 years.”