The ladies sit together, patiently, on the crushed clam-shell driveway in front of the 1903 electricity-generating plant and next to the 1831 Aquidneck Mill on Thames Street.

The women boast of their achievements — Olympic gold medals and the like. Once beauties of their time, with age they have become worn and neglected.

But their day in the sun will soon come again, for they are being restored by IYRS, which – as you might assume — is not a plastic surgery group, but the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport.

Formed in 1993 by Elizabeth Meyer, IYRS is a training facility or trade school committed to teaching a small group of students — about 16 per class — the craft of wooden boat-building and restoration.

Tuition runs about $12,000 per year with financial aid and scholarships available. But unlike the typical college environment, IYRS does not provide housing, a Union, or a cafeteria. Oh and certainly no Greek system.

Meyer realized while restoring the well-known, 1930’s J class boat Endevour in Europe that America lacked the European apprentice system that teaches the skills, art and science of wooden-boat restoration.

“When the students graduate from here, they have a skill they’ve developed,” said Susan Daly, director of marketing and occasionally part of Meyer’s sailing crew. “But I liken it to learning how to do math by hand as opposed to with a calculator. If you learn how to do it by hand, you can figure out how to do it with a calculator. If you do it with a calculator, you don’t understand the principles.”

Unlike other boat-building schools, IYRS constructs all boats traditionally, using the plank on plank technique.

In fact, everything at this school is traditional, from the methods to the buildings and right down to the boats themselves.

“All of the boats that we restore are donated to the school first, ”Jay Picotte, a former student and current recruiter and program associate, pointed out. “We’re very choosy about what we take for donation. They (the boats chosen) all have a certain history or pedigree that makes them important and worth saving. We only want boats that have some historical significance. We turn down so many boats.”

The IYRS students have an amazing opportunity to bring life back to these ladies of the water. Each boat, once completed, is then sold and placed back in the water, not in a museum. So, you could say, IYRS is providing multiple services: historical preservation and providing much needed marine job training.

“All of what’s here is a different lens of looking at history,” Daly said. “It’s all of that glorious age of yachting that went up to probably World War II, which was all really based on the expansion of leisure time.”

Daly was once a marketer of the women’s team in the America’s Cup and an entrepreneur of Quokka Sports, providing online coverage of around the world sailing races. She saw an opportunity at IYRS, or as she pronounces it, iris, like the flower. It combined her loves of sailing and preservation.

“It’s not a Sturbridge Village, or another place that people are re-enacting things,” Daly noted. “No, they’re actually doing this and going on as somebody when they graduate.”

In fact, everyone has their own reasons for taking part in IYRS, which accounts for the diverse student population.

“We’ll have two or three students right out of high school,” Picotte said. “We’ll have a couple students on the opposite end who are 60 years old and have worked a long career doing one thing and have always dreamed about building boats, so they’re getting into this for that reason. But we’re a trade school first and foremost. We’re here to place people in the marine industry, building and restoring boats.”

So IYRS is not only about nostalgia, but keeping the industry alive. That is why after 14 years, IYRS is diversifying. Fall of 2007 will mark the first class of the Marine Systems program, a 10-month course focusing on what I call the guts of the boat: plumbing, steering, electronics and more!

Picotte proudly pointed out, “The industry came to us and said they desperately need trained people and can you train them?”

And training them they are, to be craftsmen in the true sense of the word.

I mean, who wouldn’t want to perfect an in-demand skill in a historic building on a beautiful marina in Narragansette Bay?

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