VISTAVISTA — Some carpentry buffs spend their retirement years building birdhouses, furniture or jewelry boxes. Tom Kottmeier had bigger plans. The 76-year-old San Marcos resident has spent much of ...

ROSKILDE, Denmark — For thousands of years, wooden sailboats allowed the peoples of Northern Europe to spread trade, influence and sometimes war across seas and continents. In December, the UN’s ...

For decades, Thomas Kottmeier has been driven by one obsession: to build a wooden replica Viking ship. He thought about it, studied, practiced, talked about it with his family at dinners, and found ...

DULUTH — A group of local volunteers has been working hard to construct their version of a Viking boat, circa A.D. 1045. And they aim to sail the vessel to the Two Harbors tall ship festival in early ...

Viking Yachts has a proven formula for expanding its fleet by building a completely new model within a model. The New Gretna, New Jersey, boatbuilder’s latest example is its 54 Sport Tower, a model ...

BASS RIVER TOWNSHIP - At 4 p.m., the workday is over for the 1,500 or so craftsmen at the Viking Yachts boat works. The line of cars waiting to make a left out of the factory parking lot onto Route 9 ...

• Diana Dretske is a historian curator at Libertyville-based Dunn Museum, operated by the Lake County Forest Preserves. She writes the Lake County History blog for the Forest Preserves. This is her ...

Justin Anderson, from the left, Jaz Sipila, Oliver Swenson and John Finkle work on various features for a traditional, 27-foot-long Scandinavian rowing boat June 1. The vessel is modeled after a ...