Denis Paquette and Brenda Houston purchased Wood Duck in 1998 and registered the name. 

The first thing I did was to spend some time in the engine room to get familiar with the systems and in August we set out on our first voyage. 

I spent the whole winter of 98 insulating the engine room for sound. 

Brenda wanted to create a seating area on the aft cabin so I stripped everything off of the exterior and sent WD to Saltspring for Dave Betts to fit the cabin tops with plywood, to strip the cabin sides and epoxy and to make new cap rails. Unfortunately, I ran out of money and had to bring WD back to my home dock. I cut the aft deck open, replaced the water tanks and added a stove oil storage tank. I got someone to fiberglass the decks and had a friend epoxy paint the cabin sides. I proceeded to finish the cap rails. 

I found a retired boat builder and had him build storage boxes and rails for the aft cabin top, he also made a 5x5 table which fit between the boxes and lived under the inflatable. I used sked 80 plumbing fittings for the legs. Over the 20 years I stripped the entire boats interior cabin walls, sanded, stained and re-varnished all. I changed the double bed into a queen size bed and had a custom embroidered mattress made to fit. I took the tub out of the aft head and built a shower enclosure. I re-wired the whole boat and moved the electrical to a new cabinet. I found and old Force 10 boiler, installed a new Dickinson metering valve and a pressure relief valve plumbed into a sump, then built a hot water heat system that operates silently with no pumps providing lots of heat to both heads with the heating lines going around the hull. This heater also has a separate coil to preheat the engine if needed. I had a new header tank made so that fuel could gravity feed the stove and boiler. Again, no pumps. 

I took the Y-16 Olympic stove apart and hired the remediation people to get rid of all the asbestos. I rebuilt the stove using silica mat. David Schmidt built a new fridge enclosure and laid down Mahogany and Birch flooring. I replaced the kerosene fridge with a new propane fridge. 

The Y-16 made the cabin too hot in the summer, so I replaced it with a Dickinson fireplace and a propane stove matched set. 

The engine room needed some sprucing up and the old 6-71 needed a new head gasket. All good now. 

My last job after 25 years of work on Wood Duck was to restore the swim grid, it is now in ‘like new ‘condition, I epoxied and varnished the new wedges that keep it level.