Grey-Bruce Boomers Winter2023

At the age of 88, Tom Marcotte spends his
days designing and constructing three-mast
schooners, Royal Navy vessels and even warships.
He has been a master ship builder for decades and
despite his age, the octogenarian has no plans to
turn in his tools.
Of course, it helps that the ships he builds are no
more than three feet long and four feet high.
The Saugeen Shores resident fabricates model ships,
using wood, glue, thread and cloth to craft detailed
miniature replicas of sea-going vessels – and some
rather famous ones at that.
Tom has created small-scale versions of the twin
ships the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, which were
captained by Sir John Franklin on his ill-fated
search for the Northwest Passage. He’s constructed
a bathtub-sized version of the USS Constitution, the
world’s oldest commissioned naval warship still
afloat. He has even built ships of local renown,
fabricating a scale model of the Nemesis, a schooner
built and sailed by Captain John Spence, one of the
men who helped put the town of Southampton on
the map back in the mid-1800s, and another of the
HMS General Hunter, a British ship that battled in
the War of 1812 and now lies beneath the sands of
Southampton’s main beach.
In 1845, Captain Sir John Franklin and a crew of
128 men departed England aboard two ships known
as the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. Their mission –
to find the Northwest Passage, a sea route that would
link the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Tragically,
the expedition was fated to become one of the
worst disasters in the history of polar exploration.
Becoming icebound in Victoria Strait, near what
is today the Canadian territory of Nunavut, the
two ships remained trapped for more than a year
without rescue when the surviving crew members
abandoned the vessels and set out across the ice for
the Canadian mainland. They never made it. The
men disappeared. It would be more than a centuryand-a-half
before search teams finally located the
wrecks of the Erebus and Terror. The locations of the
sunken ships are now protected as National Historic
Sites.
Tom blames his passion for model ship building on
summer camp. When he was seven years old, his
mother worked as a cook at a YMCA camp, and
Tom would spend his summers helping her in the
kitchen by washing dishes.
“After the dishes were done, I would join the other
kids in all the camp activities,” he said, “including
canoeing, taking out the rowboats, and learning how
to sail.”
That started a lifelong love of boats, and Tom
became an accomplished sailor. He took canoe trips
deep into the wilderness of northern Canada and,
for a while, he even became a canoeing instructor.
He also started building tiny ships.
“My then wife and I ran a bed and breakfast for
WINTER 2023/24 • 21