Years later, in the summer of 2020 after having established a life in the Yukon, I was working in Keno City (which is about halfway between Whitehorse and Dawson City) when one of the residents of the hamlet started talking about a couple sailboats he had inherited with the property he bought, objects that were taking up precious real estate in his shop.  He told me about how the previous owner had grand designs for the larger of the boats, a pie-in-the-sky dream to float the drop-keel craft down the Yukon river into the Arctic Ocean, from there raising the mast to circumnavigate the globe to arrive in his native Ireland.  

Turns out I’d heard this tale before.  More than a little curious, I asked for a tour of the boat, just to ascertain what sort of vessel might have supported this sort of hubris.  The boat was clearly ill-equipped for such a voyage, at that time or likely any point in the past.  But I had an idea while climbing around the dusty vessel in that garage.  If the boat wasn’t made to take on an earth-bounding voyage, it might still have another fantastical dream in its bones.  I decided upon seeing the craft that I would transform it into a sauna.  I made an offer to purchase the sailboat, which was readily accepted, and proceeded to haul the old ark up the highway to Dawson City.

There really are any number of ways to build a sauna, and almost all of them are easier than retrofitting an old sailboat on a trailer.  The original blue sailboat, as shown, retained little of its original interior.  After stripping it to its bones, I began the design and construction in the Summer of 2020, a project which in part served as a distraction from the uncertainty of the pandemic unfolding across the globe at that time.  

Putting the boat to rest through the following winter, I was approached by Aubyn O’grady and Amy Ball, via their community art programming initiative “Local Field School”, to use the existing project as a means to support and evolve the public art offerings in and around Dawson City.   This would take place via informal workshops in sauna building, using the boat as a sculptural medium for gathering members of the community together for a number of informal skill-sharing work sessions.  This partnership contributed resources to the project in exchange for skill sharing and sauna programming as part of their mandate to encourage the sourcing/ foraging/ testing and sharing of art materials, an ongoing activity with the roving object.  

I spent much of the summer and fall of 2021 working on the boat and by the Spring of 2022, after working on the final trim and finishings, it was ready to host users.  During “Riverside Artsfest'' in the summer of 2022, “Local Field School” hosted participants at the local swimming hole by way of a sign up sheet.  Users were able to come book a sweat and then dive off a dock into the cool waters of the dredgepond-turned-swimming-hole.  The boat then sat on the banks of the Klondike River where ongoing informal community usership continued, with the river providing a natural cold-plunge even during the height of summer.