Elegant handcrafted canoes, kayaks, paddleboards, rowboats and surfboards...

ROD MILLION

I began my second career in 1997 in boat building. My first boat, the Wee Lassie, was built under the tutelage of Mac McCarthy at the Feather Canoe Boat Shop in Sarasota. After retiring from a 36-year career in radiation oncology at the University of Florida School of Medicine, Shands Hospital, my wife Marge and I took week-long canoe/camping trips on the Lewis and Clark Missouri River, the Green River in Utah, the Ponobscott in Maine and the Buffalo in Arkansas. A 10-day canoe along the Dordogne River basin in France is scheduled for October 2004 with the BattenKill Canoe Ldt. tour group. After the Maine trip, a visit to the Wooden Boat Building School in Brooklin, Maine, set off the urge to build boats. After my first three canoes, I bult a 2000-square-foot shop behind my cottage on Lake Santa Fe in Melrose, Fla., and designed and equipped it to build custom wood boats in relative comfort.