MINIATURE MAGIC

Dan McGuire is a retired teacher whose California home could qualify as an extension of the Watercraft Collection at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport Museum. But his latest obsession is coaxing tiny boat models into bottles.

He got the idea when he was a child, from a television show with “some old man of nautical ilk who hunkered over a bottle and was fiddling with lines running in through the neck,” McGuire says. “Then, like magic, he pulled on the lines and the spars of a clipper under full sail erupted in the bottle.” Someday, he vowed, he would pull a string to create this kind of magic. But this dream had to wait while he taught elementary school and later alternative education, showing students how to restore donated boats.

Many years later, McGuire’s wife, Adrienne, gave him a children’s book about