The life aquatic
By Joe Sweeney; photos by kc kratt
Caleb Basiliko at work.
Until I started to work on this article, I had no idea that I harbored a bizarre stereotype in some dark corner of my mind—when I hear the term “boatwright,” I instantly picture a man of incredibly advanced age. This grizzled, leathery creature can build you a boat with his eyes closed, and in fact has no other choice, seeing that he lost his eyesight after being hit in the face by a foul ball at a Philadelphia Athletics game. His talents are vast and would have been in high demand 100 years ago. The boatwright that lived in my deeply prejudiced mind was as old as the hills and as irrelevant as The Hills.

Wherever this closed-minded thinking sprung from is a mystery to me—a character from The Shipping News or Cirdan the Shipwright from The Lord of the Rings are possibilities—but regardless of its origins, my prejudice no longer exists, thanks to a pair of vibrant, undeniably relevant local boatwrights: Caleb Basiliko and Lew Markle.

Basiliko, whose self-titled business on Amherst Street specializes in the repair of wooden boats, is a thirty-five-year-old Buffalo State alumnus who got his foot in the door of the local boating industry before he was even graduated from college (with a degree in Watercraft Studies).

“I started my business in 1995, while I was in school,” Basiliko explains. “Then I found one of the local boatwrights, who had been doing it pretty much all his life. At that point, he was getting older and had a couple of big boats he was working on that he wanted some help with. He passed on a bunch of his knowledge, and then all the rest of it was self-taught—thanks to countless copies of WoodenBoat magazine and any book I could get my hands on.”

Markle didn’t explore his interest in canoe building and repair until his retirement—he worked in construction for thirty-five years—and has taken to it like a singer with perfect pitch. Around eight years ago, his workshop, located in a converted barn behind his home in South Wales, evolved into a successful business that he calls Lew’s Canoes.
Lew Markle, and a finished canoe (below).
“It started out as a hobby and very quickly turned into a small business, because people found out that I was doing this and started bringing me old canoes that they wanted to have restored,” Markle reminisces. “These boats become family heirlooms. I have had several customers whose canoes were in pretty rough shape; I could build them a brand new canoe for less than they were going to spend to restore it. In each case, they wanted it fixed.”

Because Buffalo’s proximity to water has been famously underutilized, Basiliko’s and Markle’s success stories are encouraging; while “waterfront” remains a dirty word around these parts, Western New Yorkers are still an amphibious lot.

And Basiliko has hope for the future of Buffalo boating.

“The new Inner Harbor slip and the Naval Museum are nice, because finally we have a place you can go to by boat in Buffalo. There’s a tie-up; there’s power there; there’s public access,” he shares. “Hopefully, the outer harbor takes that same philosophy.”

One of the biggest perceived problems for Buffalo boatwrights is cold weather—how can they make a living in the winter unless they start building icebreakers?

“It’s actually more active in the winter, because in the summer everybody wants to be out paddling their canoes,” he responds. “I start in about September and go like crazy; I have everybody’s boats ready by the first touch of spring. I’m already booked solid for this coming winter.”

If you’ve got a banged up wooden boat or canoe, or are looking to have one built, the man for the job is going to be either an enterprising young business owner or a down-to-earth retiree making the most of his freedom. Both were born after the Teapot Dome Scandal, and neither are the least bit grizzly.

When I confessed my stereotypical thoughts to Basiliko, he soothed my guilty mind.
“I’ve always had a good rapport with grizzly old men,” he laughs. “I wanted to learn about caulking plank boats; there are very few people left who can do that. I found this guy, Red, who was up visiting from Florida—I think he was eighty-six. Got a chance to sit with him for four hours, talking about how they used to do it back when he was a kid. That’s the fun stuff.”

Joe Sweeney looks forward to becoming grizzled and leathery in the near future.


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