How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  When I get there, Kate, who has just driven back from nursery with Phoebe, is struggling to close the latch on our garden gate, which has seen better days. It’s made from overlapping lengths of timber – vertical clinker-style, as it were – and braced at the back with a double-Z-shaped frame. Over the years several of the planks have warped, distorting the frame to the point where it is now necessary to lift the whole gate slightly on its hinges to open or close the latch. As we seldom leave the house via the front door, but exit through the garden, it is becoming a right pain and more than once Kate has raised the possibility of my bringing home some of my newly acquired tools and supposed woodworking expertise and having a go. Yet again, I have forgotten to do this.

  ‘So do you think you’ll get round to fixing this?’ she says, pulling open the gate to let me in but apparently failing to notice the large black cloud above my head that has followed me home. ‘Or if you at least bring home the necessary, I can do it myself.’

  I know she could do it – in many ways Kate’s more practical than I am. But somehow it would feel weird failing to fix my own garden gate while building an entire boat just a couple of miles away. On the other hand, pausing to fix a gate while struggling with the biggest DIY challenge of my life would seem a little like pausing for a spot of deckchair maintenance on the Titanic while on my way to man the pumps.

  ‘I will get round to it,’ I say, letting my bike fall to the ground and starting across the garden towards the house. Then, ‘Daddy!’

  Three years on, it’s a word I’m still not used to, which once again takes me by surprise and washes over me like a warm breeze. I look up to see Phoebe, scrabbling around in the gravel near the back door.

  ‘Daddy, look! I have found a snail! She is called Elsa!’

  Of course she is. My mood lifts and I smile. These days, as a measure of our failure to keep Disney’s cultural imperialism at bay, everyone is called Elsa. Phoebe rushes towards me, clutching Elsa the snail, and flings her arms around my legs. I bend down, examine Elsa, then pick up Phoebe, who rewards me with a massive wet and quite possibly snot-mingled kiss on one cheek.

  ‘Have you been doing my boat, Daddy?’ she says, wriggling free. She’s asking me this almost every day at the moment.

  ‘Yes, I have, darling.’

  ‘Is it finished?’

  This too, every day. I laugh. ‘No, not quite yet.’

  She puts her little fists on her hips, gives me one of her stage frowns and delivers the by-now-well-rehearsed punchline to the routine, which, as she knows, never fails to get a laugh: ‘Well, why not?’

  I think of explaining the whole nightmare-on-moulds-street thing to her but suddenly it doesn’t seem such a big deal. ‘Daddy’s been having a few . . . technical difficulties,’ I start to say, but Phoebe has already lost interest and is rushing off to unleash Elsa on the daffodils that are just pushing up through the soil.

  Another two days pass before all four moulds are finally complete. They look good and, so far as I can tell, each one is a faithful representation of the shape of the hull at the station it will occupy on the centreline.

  Fitting the moulds to the centreline, a process that isn’t complicated but demands complete accuracy, takes the best part of another day.

  There is one more job before planking can begin, and one last test for my carbon-paper-and-pattern-wheel technique – transferring the life-size half-drawing of the transom from the plans to the intimidatingly beautiful chunk of mahogany Fabian has provided for the job. The transom is the back end of the boat or, in Eric McKee’s slightly more technical description, ‘the transverse board at the stern, which shapes the quarters and provides the landing for the after ends of the [hull planks]’.

  It is in the transom that the Nottage and most other boats of its type differ most obviously from their ancient clinker forebears, which were built before the invention of the centrally mounted rudder and so had no need for a squared-off stern. Consequently, all Anglo-Saxon and Viking clinker boats were double-ended, with planks converging on a stem at both ends. Whether they were powered by oars or sails, or both, such boats were steered by overlarge oars or paddles, hung over the side at the back – a feature common to boats from the Anglo-Saxon Nydam and Sutton Hoo ships to the later longships of the Viking era. The ninth-century ships unearthed at Gokstad and Oseberg were both found with their side-rudders intact.

  There have been just four similar Viking-era finds in Britain. These include two large oak rudders given up by the sea in one place, just up the coast from me at Southwold, and radiocarbon-dated to between AD 850 and 950. The first was dredged up from the seabed in a fishing net in 1981 and ‘narrowly escaped destruction before anyone realised its significance’, according to a contemporary report in the journal Antiquity. Actually, its near-fate was far worse than mere destruction. The rudder was on its way to becoming ‘a design feature in a new bungalow’ when a local man who had worked on the Sutton Hoo ship burial dig in the 1960s saw it and recognised it for what it was.

  By good fortune the same fisherman who netted the first rudder found the second, washed up five years later on a nearby beach after a North Sea storm, and ‘immediately took steps to protect it and alert archaeologists’. Such finds are extremely rare and the fact that two were found along the same short stretch of coastline suggests there was much maritime activity here in the Viking era. The discoveries also hold out the tantalising possibility that the ships to which they belonged are still down there under the seabed, awaiting a violent storm to exhume them from their centuries-old tombs.

  From archaeological finds and contemporary illustrations we know that such rudders were invariably hung over the stern on the right side of the ship. It was this convention that gives the modern English nautical vocabulary the word ‘starboard’, derived from the Old Norse stjórnbordi, via the Old English stēor-bord, meaning literally both steering board and the rudder side of a ship. Logic would suggest that the word ‘port’, meaning the left side of a ship, derives from the fact that only the side of a ship unencumbered by a large protruding side rudder could be docked against the quay of a port. And from port and starboard we get the word ‘posh’, an acronym of the expression ‘port out, starboard home’, coined during the heyday of the British empire to reflect the fact that the most comfortable and desirable cabins on vessels plying to and from India in an era before air-conditioning were those on the opposite side of the ship to the sun.

  As ships grew larger side-rudders became increasingly unwieldy and impractical, until at some point someone twigged that steering a ship with a deep, centrally mounted rudder, fitted with a tiller extension for extra leverage, was much easier. This would have been especially true in a storm, when the tendency of a ship to round up to face the wind has to be countered by heaving the rudder hard over to keep it on course. It isn’t clear when central rudders became commonplace. But Ipswich, our nearest town, has some claim to having been at the cutting edge of the technology: the town seal, granted by King John in 1200, clearly shows a clinker ship and is the earliest known representation of a vessel anywhere in the world with a centrally mounted rudder.

  Phoebe’s boat will, of course, have a rudder – making it will be one of my last jobs – and it will be mounted centrally on the transom. In a sense, the transom is just a fifth mould. This is where all ten strakes on either side of the boat will land and, in the same way that each mould defines the shape of the hull at its particular station along its length, so the transom dictates the shape of the boat at the rear end. The difference, of course, is that whereas the moulds are discarded once the planks are all in place, the transom remains, and as something of a focal point, too, where the true skill of the boatbuilder can be seen to good effect. I plan to paint the rest of the boat, but the transom could be varnished, to show off the beauty of what will be a fine piece of timber. On the other hand, if I make a dog’s breakfast of the complex business of blending the strakes together where they meet the transom,
a liberal application of paint could help to hide a multitude of sins.

  My mind goes back almost six months to my audience with Gus at Pin Mill. On our way back along the pontoon he’d paused alongside a beautiful old sailing dinghy, Silver Cloud, drawn up on a trailer at the edge of the slipway. Again, he pointed out the same detail he’d just highlighted on Skibladner, his son’s boat – the complex way the overlapping planks were bevelled and blended into a single plane where they landed on the transom. ‘If you’re going to come unstuck,’ he’d said, ‘it’ll be here.’ Again, I remember thinking that this seemed like it might be an impossible trick to pull off. I also recall seeing the battered old oar sticking up out of the centreboard case bearing the painted legend ‘For sale’ and briefly thinking that maybe buying Phoebe a boat would have been a whole lot less painful than making one. But now here I am, and I am fast approaching the moment when I am going to have to try my hand at pulling off that impossible trick.

  Copying the outline of the transom from the plan to the mahogany goes flawlessly and by now I should jolly well hope so. This is the last same-size pattern I have to transfer from the plans and, after the time-consuming process of trial and error that dogged the creation of the stem and the moulds, I finally seem to have got the hang of it. I cut out the shape of the transom on the bandsaw. Because the transom is tilted back at an angle of about 15 degrees, its edge must be bevelled so the planks can land flat on it. I give my spokeshave, blade sharpened to within an inch of its life, another outing and discover a strange, sculptural delight in the process. The close-grained mahogany cooperates fully, yielding to the steel like a soft cheese. More adjustment will be needed later. The edge of the transom is a curve now, but it will have to be chiselled into a series of flat surfaces to accommodate each plank.

  There is, of course, no planking in place yet. But with the transom screwed to the sternpost and all four moulds squared up and on station, it’s possible to squint through narrowed eyes and all but see the boat that this growing collection of parts is destined to be.

  14

  EASTWARD HO!

  ‘We often think of Johnstone and where he is. How fortunate for him he has a cabin. If both boats make this I’ll shake his hand. If he’s having it the same as us, as he must, he’s having it rough.’

  – Chay Blyth, log of English Rose III, 29 July 1966

  30 JUNE 2004

  Call it vanity, a bruised ego, or simply a nagging sense of unfinished business that wouldn’t go away, but three years after my 2001 rowing debacle I once again found myself at loose on the Atlantic in a small boat. This time, though, it would be different. For a start it was somebody else’s boat and, consequently, somebody else’s dream. And, as one of a crew of four, there would be little chance of being left alone mid-Atlantic and every chance of experiencing the sort of camaraderie I had missed out on in 2001.

  Our skipper was Mark Stubbs, a firefighter and former British Royal Marine who in 1997 had taken part in the first of Chay Blyth’s transatlantic rowing races. He and fellow marine Steve Isaacs had placed sixth, crossing from Tenerife to Barbados in a highly creditable fifty-eight days. In 2002, Stubbs and three other men made an attempt on the west–east crossing, setting out from St John’s, Newfoundland, in a specially designed super-lightweight carbon-fibre boat. They were on course for a record crossing when, after more than 1,000 miles and twenty-one days at sea, the boat’s rudder broke and they had to be rescued.

  Luckily the expensive boat was fished out of the sea along with the crew. Stubbs strengthened the rudder, found a new sponsor and a fresh crew and, on 30 June 2004, the four of us set out from St John’s, aiming to row the 2,000 or so miles across the North Atlantic in a record time of under fifty-five days.

  Waiting for the right weather window, we spent a week or two in St John’s, enjoying the sights (icebergs drifting past outside the harbour) and submitting to the quaint local ceremony known as the screech-in, which involves strangers kissing a cod and imbibing quantities of a locally produced rum-based beverage (the screech in question). Mercifully the window finally opened and we were on our way. We had a decent send-off and an escort out of the harbour from the Canadian Coast Guard – keen, perhaps, to see us off the premises – though the pomp and ceremony of our departure was marred slightly by some unfortunate comic timing. Some British Royal Navy warships that had been visiting St John’s chose to leave at the same time and our little rowing boat, rechristened Pink Lady and repainted accordingly in honour of the apple company sponsoring the attempt, made a faintly ridiculous sight following along in their wake.

  Though I was fit and had thrown myself enthusiastically into the months of training and sea trials, at forty-nine I was the old man of the crew, but Stubbs had sought me out and recruited me anyway, despite my well-publicised solo failure in 2001. Or perhaps because of it. I didn’t really care why Stubbs had offered me a seat in his boat – I was just grateful for the chance. But I suspected he thought that having a Times journalist on board would help to generate the sort of publicity upon which expensive adventures like this one depended, and he was right. The newspaper covered the attempt keenly. That the rest of the UK media followed suit was down entirely to the stellar efforts of PR guru Tina Fotherby, who kept the story afloat from start to finish. Behind every lunatic adventure is a great publicist.

  I’m not sure why we set off from Newfoundland – as a latecomer to the team I wasn’t privy to the tactical discussions that led to the decision. But among Atlantic rowers there is a great debate about the comparative benefits of setting out from New York, conveniently situated for quick and easy access to the west–east travelator of the Gulf Stream, and from Newfoundland, which is not, but which is almost 1,000 miles closer to the finish line.

  Harbo and Samuelson, the first to make the west–east crossing, had set off from New York in 1896. Blyth and Ridgway, who attempted to emulate their feat in 1966, began their ill-fated voyage 200 miles or so further up the coast, from Orleans, Cape Cod. Inexplicably, fellow Britons David Johnstone and John Hoare, who set off more or less at the same time as Blyth and Ridgway and died in the attempt, had elected to start their row from Virginia Beach, more than 300 miles south of New York.

  Though I had no say in the decision, setting off from Newfoundland, the easternmost part of North America, seemed to me to make sense – it was so much closer to home it almost felt like cheating. I also liked the historical resonance that Viking longships, powered by as many as sixty oarsmen, had made it at least as far as Newfoundland. Now the four of us, relatively soft modern men, were planning to row over 2,000 miles back to the Old World, and not by hugging the coasts of Greenland and Iceland as the Vikings most probably did, but by heading straight out across the Atlantic.

  Heading southeast from St John’s, it took us six days to cross the Grand Banks, a relatively shallow area that extends about 250 miles out into the Atlantic. For a while we were in the Labrador current, which carries the icebergs we had seen from St John’s south from the Arctic Circle. On 14 April 1912, one such monster had sunk the Titanic, just south of the undersea ledge we were now crossing. Coincidentally, the Gloucester fishing boat Andrea Gail, which was lost with all six hands during the ‘Perfect Storm’ of October 1991, was overwhelmed in almost exactly the same place that the Titanic went down.

  We saw no icebergs during our crossing of the Grand Banks, but it was an eerie six days, cold and foggy, the Stygian gloom illuminated at night by the hellish glow of gas burning off from the surrounding rigs of the offshore Hibernia oil field. The journey wouldn’t, we knew, be without risks – after all, we were following in the wakes of five men who had died attempting to row west–east across the Atlantic. At times, when the fog closed in at night and the deadened sound of the oars in the rowlocks bounced back as if from an unseen, solid wall of ice, it was hard to shake the feeling that we weren’t alone out there.

  This never really went away throughout the voyage. Later, we discussed a sensation tha
t all of us had experienced at some point or other – the sense that there was a silent, unseen fifth crew member, whose presence felt benign.

  This sort of thing is not unusual in such circumstances. While alone in the southern Atlantic three years earlier my mind had conjured up phantoms for conversational purposes and in this I was in distinguished company. Joshua Slocum, who set off from Boston in April 1895 to become the first person to sail alone around the world, later reported waking from a feverish sleep mid-Atlantic to find the Spray, his gaff-rigged oyster sloop, in the grip of a storm and with a spectral figure manning the helm.

  ‘One may imagine my astonishment,’ Slocum wrote in Sailing Alone Around the World, his account of the voyage. ‘His rig was that of a foreign sailor, and the large red cap he wore was cockbilled over his left ear, and all was set off with shaggy black whiskers. He would have been taken for a pirate in any part of the world . . . I forgot the storm, and wondered if he had come to cut my throat.’

  He had not. ‘Señor,’ said the figure, ‘I have come to do you no harm . . . I am the pilot of the Pinta, come to aid you. Lie quiet, señor captain, and I will guide your ship tonight.’

  The Pinta was one of the three ships Columbus had led to the New World in 1492. Perhaps Slocum’s ghostly helmsman was none other than Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor on board the Pinta credited with being the first European – after the Vikings, that is – to see the Americas. Or perhaps Slocum had had a dream inspired by the arrival in America three years previously of replicas of the Pinta, Santa Maria and Niña, sailed across from Spain to the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage.

  Slocum was destined to end his days at sea. After his three-year, 46,000-mile circumnavigation, the Nova Scotia-born adventurer returned to Newport, Rhode Island, in June 1898. His account of the voyage, published in 1900, was an instant success. But his final act was to prove the adage that, even for sailors as accomplished as him, worse things do happen at sea. On 14 November 1909, he set sail from his home on Martha’s Vineyard for a solo voyage to South America, and was never seen again.