The Story of AWOOGA
A big idea
in a little boat.
She’s 14 feet of marine plywood, epoxy and stubbornness — a mini tugboat with the heart and the voice of something ten times her size. Here’s how she came to be.
Ahoy! Meet the boat
What AWOOGA is
AWOOGA is a hand-built Berkeley Engineering CANDU E-Z — a 14′3″ mini tugboat made the honest way, from marine plywood, fiberglass cloth and epoxy. She cruises at a relaxed five miles per hour, sleeps two, and carries a crew of three to five who don’t mind a cozy cabin. She is small, she is charming, and she is unmistakably a tugboat.
- Length
- 14′3″
- Beam
- 5′0″
- Draft
- ~17″
- Power
- 20 HP
- Cruise
- ~5 mph
- Home Port
- Clinton, CT
- Crew
- 3–5 • sleeps 2
- Says
- AWOOGA!
The Inspiration
It started with TooT TooT
In 2010, at the Mystic WoodenBoat Show, Adam and Taylor met a charming little tugboat named TooT TooT. Taylor took one look and delivered the line that would change the next decade and a half: “You can build that next.”
Twelve years of planning later, in 2022, the first sheet of plywood was cut.
TooT TooT’s builder, Mike, stayed part of the story the whole way through — right down to the tip about redesigning the folding mast as a lever, and showing up in person on launch day.
TooT TooT, of course, had its own ancestors, who had ancestors, who had ancestors — it’s tugboats all the way down. Want to meet the whole salty family tree before AWOOGA shows up and embarrasses everyone at the reunion?
Trace the lineage →The builder story
Built by one stubborn human
AWOOGA was built largely solo, over three years, in the time between everything else life asks of you. The build has all the honesty of a first-time wooden boat: fiberglass that didn’t bond the first time and had to be sanded off and redone, stern pieces re-cut from templates when the plan measurements fought back, and the occasional “in retrospect, I should have…” The motto throughout: caulk and paint make it what it ain’t.
The full, photo-by-photo account — every win and every do-over — lives on the Build page.
See the full Build →How’d it get that name?
Small boat, enormous voice
The name comes straight from the sound. Imagine a giant, comical “BWAAAAA” erupting from a hull barely taller than a person. That delightful mismatch — a tiny boat with a foghorn voice — is the personality of the boat. So she became AWOOGA, and later earned a pair of perforated cartoon eyes and a bubble-blowing smoke stack to match the attitude.
Why this project exists
Dropping anchor in home port
This project exists because someone said “you can build that,” and someone else believed it enough to spend three years proving it. AWOOGA is part boat, part character, part love letter to small wooden craft and the people who build them. She made it into the Launchings section of WoodenBoat Magazine’s October 2025 issue — not bad for 14 feet of plywood with a big mouth.
Ship’s fine print, for sharp-eyed crew. A boat with a voice this big keeps a few secrets, and she scatters them across every page. She always answers to her name — just type it, anywhere — and her mother, TooT TooT, toots back to hers. Say ahoy and the captain waves. The old arcade incantation still raises a wave: ↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A. Three quick taps on her mark earns a toot, and if you wander aboard on her launch day she’ll say so. Mind the volume.
Keep exploring
Where to next?
Follow the build, ride along, or check the receipts.