SAN DIEGO — 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 the ...

Building Viking shields is not the thing most teens spend their time on, but for one Aurora high school student the work was a perfect fit. For his Eagle Scout project, West Aurora High School senior ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

S/V Polaris, a Viking boat built by Anacortes builder Jay Smith, was launched from Bowman Bay in Deception Pass State Park on Saturday, Nov. 4. Owner of the boat is Stuart Boyd of Boston, who plans to ...

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 ...