From the sunroom he recently added on to the house he built 40 years ago, Tommy Isbister and his wife Mary look out over the waters of the North Atlantic. Tommy has always been building something or other. He began his career as a joiner, building wooden house frames, but he wanted to work on boats. There was only one floundering boat builder on the island when he was about to go to work, and he was advised not to join up with that shop. So he built houses instead.

 He learned of a fellow who would build and work on boats at night, and Tommy started to hang around, watching and learning. Before long he was building more boats than houses.

The traditional Shetland fishing boat is the wooden sixareen, or sixern, as the word is pronounced, so named because it was a six-oared boat, with three men on each side rowing anywhere from 10 to 40 miles offshore. It’s common to see these boats, or a smaller version called a foureen, in yards that border a voe, or an inlet or bay on Shetland. The last sixareen built for the Shetland fishing industry would have been made in the 1880s. The weather and waters of Shetland require bigger and safer vessels, and as technology improved the old boats became obsolete in the industry.

Tommy has built or restored countless traditional boats. Shetland is home to many elemental things, but plentiful wood is not one of them. Many of the traditional Shetland boats were assembled in Norway, built from Norse Larch trees, and then shipped to Shetland for reassembly, not unlike an IKEA bookcase.

Tommy's great-grandfather built the boat that is currently housed in the Shetland Museum in Lerwick. The boat was used to deliver mail to the even more remote island of Foula.

Today, Tommy's boat building days are probably over. Instead, he has turned his attention and talents to constructing violins and cellos. He tells the story of a neighbor calling to ask if he’d like some wood from a maple tree that was being cut down. Tommy took a bit of the trunk, and in time made a violin from the wood.

A Shetlander who had moved to Minnesota in the United States was visiting, and reminiscing with Tommy about the property he used to own there, and the trees he had planted. Tommy knew of the man’s land, and knew who bought it. Tommy asked if he had by chance planted a maple tree years ago. He had. Tommy went to retrieve the violin, and told his friend that it had been made from the tree he had planted. His friend bought the violin for his granddaughter.

On good days Tommy thinks he might build another boat, but on other days he thinks he's done. The violins and cellos are enough, and playing music with Mary in the evenings overlooking the voe is a good way to spend an evening.

The past isn’t far behind on Shetland, though, and every morning a boat he built in 1992 passes by on the waters just outside his house.