A lot of people, he says, don’t really care either way. ‘They just want to get on the water and if you can do that in a moulded plastic sit-on canoe or dinghy that’s fine by them, and the boat is just another plastic consumable you don’t have to fall in love with.’
A number of people, including Fabian, James Dodds and Gus at Pin Mill, suggested I should tackle one of Oughtred’s designs, but in my simplistic, ill-informed worldview, there was a fundamental snag with this. Yes, Oughtred’s reputation had been made by designing well-thought-out boats easily capable of being built by amateurs, and there was no doubt that his Acorn skiff, designed in 1982, was a thing of beauty, a ‘sweet-lined, slippery little jewel’, as a contemporary review in WoodenBoat magazine had put it.
The problem, for me at least, was that Oughtred’s reputation was founded on being a pioneering designer of plywood clinker boats. Looking back, it was absurd of me, not to say staggeringly impertinent, to turn up my nose at some of the most beautiful traditional-style boats designed by a modern man. But I had set my sights on real wood, not ply – a sandwiching together of thin veneers of timber and glue. However traditional the design, plywood was a modern material, made for an age in which convenience takes precedence over beauty.
I was proposing to create a boat for my daughter that, one day, she could look upon on one level as a measure of her father’s love, and on another as an abstract demonstration that the limits of our potential lie far beyond the bounds of expectation. The result might be flawed, might offend expert sensitivities – hell, might even leak. But the Swift would not – could not – be made of anything other than solid wood. And Fabian’s Nottage dinghy clearly fits the bill.
Fabian is intrigued about my project but openly concerned that if I tackle the Nottage I will be taking on too much. Though relatively small, because it’s been designed primarily as a teaching tool, the sturdy dinghy incorporates many of the complex features of larger boats and, as such, represents more of a challenge to the first-time builder than might at first be imagined – by, say, the first-time builder in question.
For me, the moment I first clapped eyes on the Nottage it was a done deal, but Fabian mounted a brief, well-meant campaign to persuade me to tackle something simpler. Initially he had cautiously agreed that, yes, it would be possible for someone like me, with no discernible skills or experience, to build a traditional clinker boat. But now the chips are down, and I’m poised to part with £40 to buy the plans for the Nottage, I guess he feels obliged to stage an intervention.
He has, he writes in one email, concluded that ‘it would be best to approach your project on a “skills-learning” basis rather than an “end-product” basis’. I should, he says, consider making not one boat, but two – the first ‘simple and (hopefully) quick’, to enable me to at least semi-master the necessary skills, after which ‘the second boat . . . will be a more superior project’. It sort of makes sense, but time is not on my side. Also, I find the idea of making one boat sufficiently daunting. The thought of making two brings me out in a cold sweat.
Undeterred, Fabian adds the frank warning that, if I stick to my proposed timetable of a year and my ambition of building a complex, traditional hull, ‘you could end up working your bollocks off for a not-very-satisfactory result’. But as far as I’m concerned the die is cast. It’s the Nottage or bust.
If ignorance, as the eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray once observed, is bliss, then as the new year gets into its stride I’m a very blissful bunny indeed. I’ve located a boat shed and now I’ve found a boat to build in it that appears to tick all the right boxes.
The Nottage dinghy can be rowed or sailed and, being just 10ft long and with a relatively broad beam, it’s sufficiently small and stable to be handled reasonably safely by a child or two, or a child with her mummy or daddy as crew. And it’s very pretty. Equally important, it’s a traditional, clinker-built wooden boat whose east coast heritage can be traced back, without too many contortions of poetic licence, for a couple of millennia. Less pretentiously, the Nottage dinghy is also strikingly similar to Rat’s boat in The Wind in the Willows, to which Mole’s ‘whole heart went out . . . at once’, as I hope Phoebe’s will to the Swift.
In fact, I have pressed The Wind in the Willows into service as part of a stealthy campaign of indoctrination designed to introduce Phoebe gently to the idea of owning her own boat.
Kate and I take it in turns to read Phoebe bedtime stories. We limit her to three a night, but unless she’s exhausted herself at nursery or her weekly gymnastics session, she nearly always manages to talk Daddy into four.
Phoebe has some favourite books, of course, but she and Kate keep the selection fresh with weekly visits to the library. And then there’s The Wind in the Willows, which Daddy produces not infrequently. ‘Oh, look, what a pretty boat,’ I might say, pointing to the illustration of Rat’s little dinghy. ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a boat like that!’
Phoebe’s ‘Yes’ was never that convincing, but recently she’s taken to substituting a non-committal kind of shrug. Of course, The Willows is not the only book that features a boat – The Storm Whale in Winter, The Night Pirates, Bear, Bird and Frog (which features an actual clinker-built boat, no less) and many others all offer Daddy opportunities for shameless boat-plugging, and every time one pops up I’m quick to exploit the PR potential. Phoebe is equally quick to give me a look that says, ‘I do know what you’re doing, you know.’
I’m relaxed. She’ll come round. When the time’s right I’ll take her to the shed to view the work in progress so she can compare the Swift with Rat’s boat. Beyond the colour scheme – blue outside, white within – Kenneth Grahame offered no further description of the boat, but at the time none would have been necessary. All such small boats then would have been clinker-built, which is how successive generations of illustrators since 1927 have depicted her.
About a week after my visit to the Nottage Institute, Fabian finally relents and sends me a set of the plans. It’s a pulse-quickening moment. It’s fair to say I am daunted, but at the same time I feel I’m finally getting somewhere.
There are three large sheets, which I spread out on the dining table. Sheet two, the construction plan, is such a thing of beauty that my first instinct is to frame it. My second is to call Phoebe over for a look.
‘Is that wise?’ says Kate. It isn’t. Phoebe runs over from whatever it is she’s doing at the far end of the room and clambers up onto my lap. Too late I realise that what she was doing was colouring in a drawing book and now she is enthusiastically amending Fabian’s delicate draughtsmanship with bold strokes of a brown crayon. ‘Told you,’ says Kate, as she leans over my shoulder to study the plans.
‘What do you think of this, darling?’ I ask Phoebe, confiscating the crayon with a bit of a struggle. ‘This is the boat Daddy is going to build for you.’
She frowns, puzzled, and who can blame her? Even allowing for the brown stripes, at first glance the plan is utterly indecipherable. Phoebe loses interest, snatches back her crayon and jumps down. Kate lingers, staring at the minutely detailed drawings. She’s also frowning. ‘Does any of this make any sense to you?’ she asks.
‘A bit,’ I say, defensively. ‘This here’ (pointing) ‘is the front of the boat . . . this is the back . . .’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ Kate interrupts. ‘But what’s this, for instance?’
She’s planted a forefinger on the drawing. I see what she’s doing – it’s a test. Each part is numbered, corresponding to a key at the bottom of the plan that gives its name, all relevant specifications and other details, such as the type of wood and fixings to be used. Unfortunately Kate’s finger is obscuring the part’s number. I hazard a guess, which sounds more like a question than a statement: ‘It’s a bit of a foredeck of some kind.’
‘No,’ she says, sliding her finger down to the key. ‘It says here that it’s a breasthook, whatever that is. Really, are you certain that this is a good i
dea?’
No, I’m not, but I am certain that Kate is about to raise the spectre of my generally acknowledged ineptitude with all things DIY. To her credit she doesn’t, not in so many words, anyway, but the theatrical shrug she offers as she walks away speaks volumes.
It’s Kate’s turn to give Phoebe her bath. I’m dying to start poring over the plans but I know it could be a while before I have the room to myself. We’ve noticed that Phoebe is a contrarian, which is to say that – like most three-year-olds, we hope – she not only rarely displays any kind of enthusiasm for doing what she’s told, but much prefers to do precisely the opposite.
Last year I had a T-shirt made for Phoebe featuring the words of what at the time was her favourite expression: ‘I don’t want that because I don’t.’ Needless to say, she refused to wear it.
Eventually, Kate manages to herd Phoebe upstairs to the bathroom, and I settle down to study the plans carefully.
Drawn in fine pencil on a scale of 1:5, the main sheet shows every detail of the boat, in three views: from above, in cutaway from the side and in three cross-sections. A second sheet consists of life-size patterns from which templates can be made for various parts of the boat. There’s also an intimidating table of ‘offsets’, which as far as I can make out is a kind of set of coordinates, a bewildering array of measurements to and from various points along the centreline of the boat. Another table gives precise measurements indicating the height at which the top edge of each of the ten planks each side that will form the hull will lie at various points along its length.
I glance only briefly at sheet three. Drawn on a scale of 1:10, this carries all the information I will need, should I ever get that far, to make the mast, centreboard, rudder, tiller and so on – the oars, even. But I’ve decided my only chance of making any kind of progress is to proceed on a need-to-know basis, to avoid overloading my brain, and I will need to know none of this stuff until I have actually built the boat.
And that, as I am now beginning to realise, might be easier said than done.
I swallow hard and spend most of that night, and then the night after that, taking in every minute detail. And then the night after that. Some things I manage to work out, but others have me completely foxed. Late on the third evening, I make what is probably the mistake of trying to count all the component parts. There’s the planking, of course, and the keel and the other major components, and including all the as-yet mysterious knees, gunwales, inwales, risers, cleats, fillers, breasthooks and so on, not to mention all the screws and countless copper nails and other fittings, I estimate there are well over 1,000 parts inviting me to bring them together as one. And no one without experience, I am convinced, could do so without guidance of some sort.
As though picking up telepathically on my anxiety, Fabian emails to stress once more that ‘the Nottage dinghy could end up being a nightmare for you’. I see what he’s doing, of course. He’s given me a few days to absorb the plans in the hope that on seeing the extent of the task laid out in black and white my resolve will be shaken. I am, he fears, ‘at a disadvantage in not being able to commit 24/7, which would likely become necessary at some point’.
He’s right, of course – time will be at a premium. Although a professional boatbuilder such as Fabian might be able to knock out a Nottage in little more than 300 hours, I know that it has taken some of the part-timers tackling the boat on the course up to four years to complete theirs. Others have simply given up and walked away. For better or worse, I have set myself a timeframe of a year in which to get the job done, and it won’t be easy. There’s work, of course, and Kate and I have established a routine with Phoebe that I have no intention of giving up. What would be the sense in building a boat to bond me closer to my daughter if it meant spending less time with her? Every morning I get Phoebe up and make her breakfast while Kate gets ready for work. Every evening we eat together as a family and Kate and I take it in turns to give Phoebe her bath or to read to her in bed. These are all priceless, magical moments.
At this stage I still fondly imagine that I will be able to limit work on the boat to two or three days a week, while continuing to pay the mortgage with journalism on the other days. The reality will quickly dawn on me.
The email is Fabian’s final plea for me to see sense, and it clearly comes from the heart. ‘I would not wish some of the struggles I have had – always due to running out of time, let alone money; most of my building projects are one-offs being made for the first time, and that’s the point – on anyone else,’ he writes. Such difficulties, he adds, are ‘a fairly common theme amongst the boatbuilder set!’
Looking back, this was the moment when, really, I ought to have panicked. I’d found somewhere to build a boat and a boat to build, but I’d made glacial progress in getting my pop-up boat shed ready, thanks mainly to the ever-pressing need to continue writing to earn money for luxuries, such as mortgage, gas and electricity.
Now the arrival of the plans, the mind-boggling detail of which casts a harsh light on the extent of my unsuitability for the task in hand, seems to suggest that maybe I should just wise up, cut my losses and save my money. The fact that I don’t is testimony less to my resolve than, once again, to my ignorance. I literally have no idea of the challenges that lie ahead and, thus insulated against reality, plough on regardless.
Besides, though I have yet to buy even a single tool, I have already installed three essential items in the shed and, to my mind at least, in so doing have irrevocably nailed my colours to the mast.
One is a photograph of Phoebe, dancing through the surf on an east coast beach, which I have mounted on the wall. Hanging from a nail alongside it is a small yellow disc of wood salvaged from Star Challenger, the rowing boat I abandoned mid-Atlantic in 2001. Fixed to the wall below them both is a framed section of the Admiralty chart for the North Atlantic. On it is marked the 2,000-mile progress of another rowing boat, Pink Lady, from launch in Newfoundland on 30 June 2004 to destruction by the tail end of Hurricane Alex thirty-nine days later.
As I know better than most, failure is always an option, whether it originates from within or is imposed by external forces. But giving up now, before I have even started, is most definitely out of the question.
A day or so later, Fabian drops by the shed, ostensibly to check out the suitability of the space I’ve rented and to talk timber. It’s the first of what over the next few months will be several visits, to which I will always look forward, and not only because Fabian invariably arrives bearing a slab of homemade fruit cake. But on this occasion I fear he’s driven up from Rowhedge to make one last attempt to dissuade me from the madness.
So before he can say anything I deliver a little speech I’ve been rehearsing. I appreciate his concerns, I say, I really do, and I know he has only my best interests at heart. He’s a nice chap and I know he thinks I will be wasting my time and money, but that isn’t his responsibility. ‘Building this boat is my idea, not yours, and if it all goes horribly wrong the blame will be entirely mine too,’ I say.
He seems physically to relax. ‘That’s what my wife said last night,’ he says. Blimey. He’s so convinced I’m a duffer he’s talking over the morality of aiding and abetting me with his wife.
Then I play my bluff. I would, I say, really like to have him as my guide on the journey ahead. I’ve already made it clear that I will pay him a mutually agreeable hourly rate for any crash-course tuition I might need along the way – Fabian is, after all, a professional boatbuilder, and time spent with me is time he can’t spend otherwise plying his trade. But if he really doesn’t want to have anything more to do with it, I say, then somehow I will struggle on with trying to build the Swift without his invaluable guidance.
‘Either way,’ I add, ‘I’m now committed to building this boat and, come what may, I’m not going to quit.’
I hope I managed to sound a whole lot more confident than I felt. The thought of trying to pick my way through the riddle of the plans without
being able to fall back on advice from the man who drew them up is beyond daunting, but I try not to look anxious as Fabian considers his reply.
Finally, he sighs. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘that’s fair enough. Shall we have a piece of cake?’
By the time Fabian leaves it’s about 3.30pm. We’ve passed the winter solstice but the light’s already starting to fade, so I wheel my bike out into the farmyard and lock up the shed. I’m just strapping on my helmet – for me a novel, example-setting precaution, adopted since becoming a father – when I notice a large black bird standing in the yard, a stone’s throw away.
I might not know my swifts from my swallows, but thanks to Nanny I do know a raven when I see one. I don’t think I’ve seen one this close – or at all, perhaps – since I was a child at the Tower of London. It’s a big, dark bird, hook-billed, gimleteyed and an altogether ominous presence in the fading light. It’s also, apparently, quite fearless and merely hops a little to one side, uttering a terse ‘Kraa!’, as I push my bike past. When I reach the lane at the top of the yard I turn to look back but it’s nowhere to be seen.
7
THE LEAGUE OF DEAD EXPERTS
‘The layman considers boatbuilding to be a complicated pursuit with a baffling language of its own. We will now proceed to unravel such mysteries and provide the average handyman with all the confidence needed to create a dream ship.’
– Michael Verney, Complete Amateur Boat Building
Unlike flatpack furniture, boat plans, as I have discovered to my disappointment, do not come with instructions. This, as Fabian advises on his website, means that an amateur builder attempting to build the Nottage dinghy ‘will need recourse to “the texts” ’. Such texts are not ten a penny. But in what is clearly not an overcrowded field, four names consistently present themselves as the go-to sources of indispensable boatbuilding wisdom and, as I know I can’t rely exclusively upon Fabian for advice, I have been quietly assembling my own panel of experts. As a journalist I’m accustomed to contacting experts out of the blue and tapping them for information. Why should boatbuilding be any different?
How to Build a Boat Page 7