SUQUAMISH — For 10 years, Tana Stobs has been a canoe family in search of a canoe. Its crews travel on Tribal Journeys with a non-traditional fiberglass craft, but the mixed Suquamish and S’Klallam family always sought a true cedar dugout.

This week the family’s dream is emerging from centuries-old cedar in a yard off Suquamish Way. Coast Salish master carver Ray Natraoro and two apprentices are helping the family carve its new canoe from Canadian old growth.

“It’s an opportunity of a lifetime,” said Tana Stobs member Nic Armstrong. “We’ve been looking for 10 years for a log. The trees are harder and harder to come by.”

Natraoro estimates the canoe will be more than 90 percent complete by the end of Monday. The family plans to have it ready for the journey to Swinomish in July.

On Friday, the vague shape of a canoe had been roughed from the 10-ton log. Natraoro and his crew were drawing out the canoe’s lines across the tight grains of the cedar.

“It’s amazing, she’s already pretty,” family member Faith Williams said. “She’s not even there yet and she’s already pretty.”

The Tana Stobs canoe family was formed a decade ago, in honor of Santana Ives who died at age 18 in a car wreck. In recent years it has begun a cultural exchange with Maori families from New Zealand. The Tana Stobs family nearly lost its fiberglass canoe in a storm near Port Townsend during the 2010 journey to Neah Bay.

Armstrong said it took years to find a suitable log for a new canoe. They finally located one this spring in Squamish territory in British Columbia. The tree was at least 700 years old.

“It’s hundreds of years old, and it will be around long after we’re gone,” Armstrong said.

The family hired a logging company to truck it to Suquamish and began carving this week under the direction of Natraoro and his apprentices, Simon Rece and Gary Gonzales.

Building the new canoe has been a family effort, Williams said. Women arrive at the carving site at 5 a.m. to start breakfast. Men work through the day and, so far, they’ve worked under blue skies.

“The feeling is just great,” Williams said. “It’s pretty cool, the whole family coming together to work on it.”

Nic Armstrong’s name was misspelled in an earlier version.