The Danes, of course, had had plenty of oak of their own. It was in longships made from oak that the Vikings first arrived off the east coast in June AD 793 when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘heathen men came and miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter’. Nevertheless, in time the English made the tree their own, as witnessed by the devotional enthusiasm expressed by that anonymous author of Timber Trees: ‘To England, which has risen to the highest rank among the nations, mainly through her commerce and her marine, the oak, “the father of ships”, as it has been called, is inferior in value only to her religion, her liberty, and the spirit and industry of her people.’
It is oak, therefore, that will form the backbone of Phoebe’s Swift, and a small selection of bits and pieces culled from Fabian’s hoard now sits in the shed alongside the larch, fully seasoned and sufficiently settled to be worked into stem, sternpost, hog and keel. It might have expected to have found its way into one of Fabian’s boats, which would have guaranteed its easy passage from raw material to beautifully executed component part. As it is, it finds itself having to take its chances at the hands of a man who has never knowingly wielded a plane or a chisel and who still doesn’t really know what a hog is.
10
FIRST CUT
‘There is nothing like building to teach you more than most people ever learn about boats and their various parts, to get to know every piece of wood and fastening that has gone into your boat. Finally there is nothing to equal the deep sense of achievement that will be yours the first time you feel the tiller come to life in your grasp, and you find that the little boat you have built with your own hands sails like a witch. That is the moment you will remember for ever.’
– Maurice Griffiths, foreword to Complete Amateur Boat Building by Michael Verney
10 FEBRUARY 2017
So this is it. Day Zero. Crunch time – the point to which all the fine talk and day-dreaming about building a traditional wooden boat has been leading, the money-where-mouth-is moment, when romantic notion must strap on its spikes and prepare to leap the hurdle of reality.
In my hands I am finally holding a heavy chunk of rough-sawn oak, about 800mm long, 150mm wide and 80mm thick. The very weight of it, the texture, the smell – even the taste of it, somehow, borne on the air – signal to my five senses and, perhaps, a sixth, that I am poised on a threshold. A tree that has grown for more than 100 years has been felled, as trees have been toppled by human hands for millennia. This small part of it has found its way to me and, through me, if all goes well, it will find a new lease of life, not as a piece of furniture, or flooring – or, God forbid, firewood – but as the noble stem of a beautiful boat.
This piece of oak, a century old, has come from a tree that started growing at about the same time that my grandfather was serving with C Battery, 62nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, in France during the First World War. Sourced from a timber merchant about 15 miles from where I live, it was almost certainly grown nearby, either in my home county of Suffolk or next door in Essex, and planted, as an acorn or a seedling, by someone now long dead. There is something of the parent–child relationship about the business of raising trees for timber – protecting the vulnerable young sapling for years against disease, competition from other vegetation and the predation of animals, knowing full well that you will not live to see your charge grow to full maturity.
Making the stem doesn’t have to be the first task I tackle. It is, after all, only one of six component parts that, when assembled, will make up the boat’s backbone – the ‘centreline’, in the jargon – which has to be completed before anything else can be done. But of those six parts, none has haunted my sleep with such symbolic intensity as the stem. As the foremost part of the boat, the stem is the pathfinder, moving through the water ahead of all the other components, and so it seems only right that this is where my voyage of discovery should begin.
But the stem is also the part of the boat that looms out of the mist of the past. Perhaps more than any other element of the clinker-built boat it is in the stem that the genotype is most readily recognised, and can be traced through the ages, all the way back from my humble Nottage dinghy to the magnificent, 75ft fourth-century Nydam oak ship, unearthed in a Danish bog in 1863 and the world’s oldest known clinker-built boat. Even the word ‘stem’ – from the Old English stemn, Old Norse stamn and Old High German stam, and cited in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, thought to have been written in the seventh or eighth century – has its linguistic roots in the heyday of the Viking age.
Romance aside, I have another reason for wanting to get on with the stem. I am painfully aware that of all the tasks ahead of me, sculpting this subtle, graceful form, which will define the very essence of the boat, is among the most challenging I face and I am keen to have it behind me.
Fortunately for me, the Nottage plans include a life-size pattern for the stem. All I have to do is create a plywood template from the plan so I can transfer the pattern to my block of oak, prior to letting rip with the bandsaw. So how to go about it? I could ask Fabian, but I don’t want to start burning get-out-of-a-fix cards before I’ve even cut my first piece of timber. So instead I turn to WoodenBoat magazine’s online forum.
WoodenBoat has been one of the powerhouses behind the American traditional boat revival ever since it was first published in 1974 and, in a fascinating New World ackowledgement of where it all began, its logo is a stylised view of the business end of a Viking longship. Far more than just a magazine, it was, and remains, the advance guard of the traditional boat movement in the States, publishing books, selling boat plans, running a boatbuilding school and staging its own wooden boat show every June at the Museum of America and the Sea at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.
Admittedly I have to trawl back to 2003 on WoodenBoat’s online forum, but eventually I discover I’m not the only one who has ever needed guidance on how to go about transferring full-scale drawings. ‘OK, so I’ve got a full-scale paper plan,’ begins one archived entry. ‘I’ve never found a good way to transfer the lines to a board for cutting . . . so, what’s the scoop? How do you guys get the job done?’
There is no shortage of advice from the WoodenBoat regulars. One suggests gluing the paper plans to the wood, and then cutting along the lines with a jigsaw. But the weight of opinion among WoodenBoat readers favours taping the plan to the template material, tapping in panel pins along the lines and then joining the resulting dents in the wood with a pencil and a length of bendy curtain rail.
So panel pins it is, then. First I tape down the plan onto the piece of plywood from which the template for the stem will be cut, then I start tap-tapping the pins in along the outline. It seems to be going well, if slowly. Eventually, with plan and pins removed, I set about joining up the dots with a pencil and, so far, so good. And I have reached a bit of a moment – I am about to execute my very first piece of actual woodwork, albeit in an operation on a piece of cheap, easily replaced plywood.
I clamp the plywood to one of two Black & Decker Workmates I have added to my arsenal and power up my brand-new jigsaw. I’m about halfway along one side when just in time I realise I am about to saw right through the cable. I have reached another moment, and one that could well have been my last. Lesson learnt. I realign the Workmate so the plug socket is behind me. From that moment on I will always take a moment or two to think about the relationship between electric cables, power tools, and life.
Finally, the template is out and – near-death experience aside – everything appears to have gone well. In fact, so disproportionately pleased am I with the result that I pose for a selfie – my first ever, I should add – smiling smugly with the template in my hands. I am, briefly, hugely encouraged.
How slippery the slope from hubris to bathos. I nearly quit for the day right there and then. In fact, I am on my way to get my coat and cycle home with the good news when, on a whim, I think maybe I ought to place the template over th
e plan to check that all is well. And all is not well. Somehow, the shape I’ve created does not quite conform to the drawing. There isn’t a huge amount in it, but enough to remind me of Fabian’s dire warnings about the danger of compounding errors. If I start off with the stem out of whack, where would I end up?
For the life of me I can’t see how the discrepancy has crept in – all I can think is that the plans must somehow have slipped during the tacking process, or perhaps I was less than diligent with pencil and curtain rail. Either way, there is no getting away from the fundamental explanation – incompetence. Scrap one template.
I shrug. It’s not that big a deal. Then, as I gaze forlornly at the plans, I realise I have also forgotten to transfer onto the template from the plans the waterlines and the all-important ‘rabbet’, or rebate middle line. The waterlines, four horizontal lines drawn at different positions on the plans from which measurements are made and against which bearings are checked throughout the building of a boat, are crucial for determining that everything is coming together on the level. The rebate middle line, which arcs gracefully down either side of the stem, is just as important, for it determines the position of the forward edge of each of the planks that will make up the hull.
In other words, my template is doubly useless. I delete the selfie. Even if the template wasn’t wonky it would have to be made again. So, with what is to be the first of many, many imaginative curses that will be uttered over the coming months, I send the prototype template flying into a corner of the shed. Though more or less boomerang-shaped, luckily it does not come back. I get my coat and cycle home, leaving the bad news behind and the hunt for a solution until the morning.
Figuring out an accurate way of transferring 1:1 scale drawings from the plan to template stock has ramifications beyond the stem. I will have to use the same method to make the transom (the wineglass-shaped back end of the boat), the sternpost to which the transom will be fixed, and which in turn will be joined to the keel, and the three moulds around which the planks of the hull will be bent to give the boat its ultimate shape.
In the end, I stumble on a simple but ingenious solution, involving carbon paper and a dressmaker’s pattern wheel. It’s possible I found this trick on the internet, but in the absence of any evidence to that effect I’m claiming it for my own – apart from the pattern-wheel bit, which was Kate’s idea.
It goes like this: place the carbon paper on the plywood, tape the plan down securely on top of it and then run the pattern wheel along the drawn outline of the stem (and, of course, all the waterlines and the all-important rebate middle line). Hey presto. When I remove the plan, there’s a neat and accurate representation of the lines in tiny blue dots, sufficiently clear and close enough together to obviate the need for over-drawing.
Slowly and carefully – wall socket at my back – I play join-the-dots with the jigsaw. The template looks good and, placed on the plan, matches up perfectly. All that remains is to clamp the template to the block of oak, trace round it with a pencil and fire up my little friend the bandsaw.
I’ve had several trial runs on the bandsaw, cutting an assortment of straight and curvy lines out of random pieces of wood, but now it’s time to do it for real. The words ‘butter’ and ‘hot knife’ come to mind. It demands intense concentration, but I find it fairly easy to follow the curving line of the stem. I even remember not to push either of my hands into the blade. I wear the safely goggles for the first and last time. I have glasses and with the goggles on over the top they steam up. I figure that wearing glasses probably reduces the risk of a stray piece of wood flying into one of my eyes and blinding me, whereas operating a bandsaw in a fog of condensation really is asking for trouble.
Within a few minutes I am covered in sawdust and holding the very first piece of the boat that, suddenly, I have no doubt I am going to build. Now this really is a moment. I should know better by now, but I pose for another selfie, holding the stem close, like a proud parent. In my mind I am all but over the finishing line.
Of course, one stem – especially an unfinished stem – does not a ship make. Instead of celebrating my opening piece of woodwork by clocking off early and cycling home, which is what I do, I really ought to have taken a long hard look at the calendar. I’d found and agreed to rent the shed on 23 November 2016. What with Christmas, New Year, waiting for the previous occupants to clear out their leftover stuff and repeated bouts of journalism, I hadn’t been able to move in until 29 January 2017. It was 2 February before I’d begun work on the stem template and it is now the 10th.
One way or another, simply cutting out the stem has chewed up eight days. I still have to plot out and excavate the rabbet trench down either side and cut the tenon at the base of the stem that will locate it into the yet-to-be-created mortise on the still-imaginary keel, an intimidating 8ft length of oak that lies on the workbench, silently challenging me, with the rest of the timber.
At this rate I will never finish this boat within the year I have, rashly, given myself. But, as a glance at the small yellow disc of wood hanging on the wall over the workbench reminds me, worse things happen at sea.
I did sort of build a boat once, but it didn’t really count. For a start, it wasn’t made of wood wood, but of plywood, and it was pretty much build-by-numbers, with its pre-cut pieces bonded together with epoxy resin.
This was Star Challenger, a one-design 24ft ocean-going rowing boat created for an Atlantic race in 2001 organised by my childhood hero Chay Blyth. Having concluded the log for his 1966 row across the Atlantic with the words ‘I’m not getting in that boat again for nobody’, thirty-five years later the gruff former paratrooper was now happily encouraging others to follow in his wake.
By no stretch of the imagination was this ‘proper’ boatbuilding. I was, in short, putting together a kit that, in the memorably inspiring words of Cap’n Blyth as he addressed assembled would-be Atlantic rowers at the London Boat Show a year before the race, ‘any halfwit could sling together’.
He was right. I knew this because, despite lacking any kind of aptitude, I did manage to sling one together. Sticking bits of plywood together with epoxy resin, I discovered, was the only skill called for. The resin and its hardener must first be blended in a ratio of five parts to one, but even that is easy – a single push on the pump of each dispenser delivers the correct volumes. Stir, and add colloidal silica to thicken the mixture. Applying this goo to act as a joint between two pieces of plywood is slightly more demanding, but after a bit of practice it’s pretty easy to create a neat bead, or fillet, of resin, which can then be smoothed out with a wooden spatula before it sets.
The resultant joint is extremely tough. If you fix two squares of plywood to each other at right-angles, and the following day stick the assembled piece in a vice and bash the hell out of it with a hammer, it is the wood, and not the joint, that will fail. This is reassuring, especially when you’re putting together a boat in which you are planning to risk your life.
But even during the deliriously happy year at Pin Mill in which I spent every spare hour assembling that boat, impaling my hands with splinters and sticking my fingers together with epoxy, while simultaneously allowing at least two relationships to come unstuck, I knew deep down that building a boat in this fashion was flat-out cheating. I had lived long enough on the shingled margins of England’s brooding east coast to know instinctively that boats should be made from solid wood. They should not be made from sheets of plywood, and most definitely should not be stuck together with glue.
Nevertheless, I had fun building that kit boat and I learnt a few things – some of them about boats. But it didn’t end well. Despite all the love and attention I’d lavished upon her, in a moment of moral weakness I abandoned Star Challenger mid-Atlantic, taking advantage of a passing yacht to quit the ocean rowing race I had entered after less than 2,000 miles. One of the things I learnt in the vast solitude of the Atlantic was that my own company wasn’t quite as fascinating as I had always fondl
y imagined it to be. Another was that storms are one thing, but an ocean is never more intimidating than during a never-ending dead-flat calm that reaches from horizon to horizon, blurring all distinction between sky and sea and reducing the entire world to a grey, edgeless singularity.
I also learnt that it is regarded as poor form to leave a bright-yellow 24ft boat floating around on her own in an ocean, where apparently it constitutes a hazard to shipping.
I have never really minded giving speeches, especially those where I get to talk about how clever and adventurous I am, while at the same time disguising my evident smugness with a thin veneer of self-deprecation and artificial modesty. On the other hand, I’ve never been too keen on standing up in front of a large room full of paying punters who have, mostly, turned out on a chilly Wednesday evening in January solely for the pleasure of hearing just what a complete and utter cock-up I have made of what was supposed to have been the adventure of a lifetime.
That, however, is the situation in which I find myself on Wednesday, 30 January 2002.
Some of the greatest names of exploration have enthralled audiences in the octagonal red-brick lecture theatre at London’s Royal Geographical Society with talks of their adventures. In fact, as the society itself points out, ‘the history of the RGS enshrines such famous names as Livingstone, Stanley, Scott, Younghusband, Shackleton, Hunt and Hillary – and is, in fact, the history of British geography, exploration and discovery’.
Failure is not something the members of the society are used to hearing about – unless, of course, it’s that peculiarly British version of failure repackaged for more palatable consumption as a form of success (think the Charge of the Light Brigade, Dunkirk, Scott of the Antarctic and, indeed, Shackleton, who somehow managed to salvage a tale of triumph from the unmitigated disaster that was the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition).
How to Build a Boat Page 11