Craftsman keeping Cajun art afloat

Kenny Hebert likes to turn nothing into something.

As a young man, his vehicle for creativity was music. But now the 60-year-old Houma native uses his resourcefulness to keep a fading Cajun tradition alive: wooden boat building.

In the spring and fall, he conducts a 10-weekend, $275 pirogue building class at the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve in Thibodaux. The fall class started on Saturday.

However, most days you can find him at The Cajun Boat Shop on the Laurel Valley Plantation outside of Thibodaux, where anyone can learn the craft year round and construct boats of different sizes and types.

“We have more space and freedom at Laurel Valley to make some bigger boats,” said the master boat builder. “Jean Lafitte is a federal park, so we’re limited in what we can do.”

Hebert takes a laid-back approach to instructing his pupils. He tells them what to do and he moves from station to station inspecting their progress.

“The first thing people want to know is, ‘Where’s the plans?'” Hebert said. “This is Cajun boat building. We don’t need no plans.

“Plans are an unnecessary step,” he continued. “The old Cajun boat builders will tell you, ‘We don’t make plans. We make boats.’ Drink some coffee, drink some beer, build some boats.”

Hebert said he could build a standard size pirogue in a few days. For everybody else, it will take a month or longer.

A typical pirogue (two pointed ends) or skiff (has a transom and a flat back) is about 14 feet long, with a 4-foot wide bottom and 2-foot high sides and is made of either cypress or Spanish cedar wood, Hebert said.

Because the availability of good cypress or any type of wood is limited, his students use marine plywood from Robichaux Lumber in Raceland.

Students have to buy their own wood. Estimating a price is difficult because prices fluctuate, but they can expect to spend several hundred dollars.

Still, there are currently seven area residents in various stages of building their very own floating vessel.

New student Paul Fellerman wants to build three boats as an activity for his entire family to enjoy.

“This hasn’t been a lifelong dream of mine, but we enjoy being on the water and I thought this would be perfect for all of us to do together,” he explained.

Bayou Blue resident Tommy Savoie, a retired 31-year BellSouth computer technician, has been building a 14-foot, 32-inch bottom mud boat since June to go duck hunting and frogging with his son and grandson in Lake Boeuf.

“I build it wide enough so that when I build the duck blind it will be stable,” he said. “I can stand up, walk around in it. You can’t do that in a pirogue.”

A carpenter by trade, 53-year old Anna Hebert (no relation to Kenny) began in May and is nearly finished her pirogue, only needing to install a pair of seats and to paint it.

Growing up in Pointes-Aux-Chenes, she and her stepdad would paddle to the St. Louis Canal and catch green trout. She longs to go back to that quiet time and go fishing again.

“I like to go canoeing north of Lake Pontchartrain. There are also some bayous in Dulac that have the cypress tree swamps that you can paddle to,” Hebert said. “I really like the idea of the slow pace of the pirogue. I’m an artist, so I want to be able to drift down the canal with my dog, find a good spot to park and do some painting.”

After not having a pirogue for a few years, she takes great pride in being able to say she made her own. Now that she knows how, she also plans to make model-size pirogues to sell.

As for the real version, she has plans to makes her pirogue stand out.

“I’m going to name her LOUIS E ANNA and paint her with three coats of bright yellow,” Hebert said. “Everybody does theirs pirogue green. I want to go in the Intracoastal (Canal). If somebody runs over me, it’s not going to be because they didn’t see me.”

Before he became a master boat builder, Kenny Hebert played guitar for rhythm and blues singers like Johnny Taylor, ZZ Hill, Clarence Carter, Bobby Marchand and others in the 1970s.

Hebert’s day job has been a DJ since 1980, first at the former Club Beaties and now at The Showcase in Thibodaux.

He said he got into boat building in the early 1990s while recovering from the flu. He was looking for something to do during the daytime. He saw an article advertising a class at the Nicholls Center for Traditional Boat Building taught by Raymond Sedotal and Alex Giroir.

“I just fell in love with everything about it. I just never left,” he explained. “Soon the director, Tom Butler, gave me the keys and told me to keep it going.”

Within a year Hebert was teaching classes at the center. He said he learned from Sedotal mostly by just sitting at his kitchen table drinking coffee.

“I only built one boat with him. That was my first one in the class,” Hebert insisted.

Another mentor to Hebert was Rodney Cheramie, a Larose boat builder who spent his life constructing Lafitte skiffs for shrimping and catching oysters.

After his stint at Nicholls, he taught at the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Maritime Museum in Madisonville for six years, which he said was an eye-opening experience.

“It took me two years to get my foot in the door over there, where they said, ‘Fine, you can have your class,'” he said.

His no-plan approach was a hit with students. The standard boat built in Madisonville was the 18-foot lake skiff with a five-foot bottom.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the museum did away with Hebert’s boat building class. Before he came to Laurel Valley, his workshop was at the Bayou Terrebonne Waterlife Museum in Houma.

Hebert said he left Bayou Waterlife because of a lack of space and other obligations the museum had in the summer months. He approached Nicholls history professor Paul Leslie, who runs Laurel Valley, about moving his operation there.

The two agreed and Hebert has been there since the Spring Festival.

“(Paul) gives me total freedom to do it however I want to do it. He loves it. I love it. Everybody is happy,” Hebert said. “Now we have activity over here where there was none before. There is something going on every week.”

What Hebert likes and is fascinated by most about boat building is the creative process. The ability to take an inanimate object and turn it into something usable is a feeling that is unmatched.

“When I went to Madisonville, they didn’t have boat building over there, just displays,” Hebert recalled. “Madisonville and Jean Lafitte are museum settings. Museums display dead things. Boat building is alive. Creation is what separates life from death.”

“This is a traditional skill that I am keeping alive,” he added. “If you had a pirogue, you could make a living even if you were poor. You could fish, hunt, gather moss, and travel from point A to point B.”

Like a boat ride down the bayou, the journey from musician to master boat builder was not necessarily smooth or straight. However, he has found the spot where all the fish seem to be biting and he doesn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.

“I’m a blessed man. I have fun for a living,” he said. “I don’t punch a clock or have any stress. I could easily retire into this lifestyle.”

Kenny Hebert (left), a master boat builder, works with Bayou Blue resident Tommy Savoie on the construction of his mud boat. Hebert’s Cajun Boat Shop at the Laurel Valley Plantation is open year round for those hoping to build their own vessel. * Photo by KEYON K. JEFF