How to Build a Boat

by Jonathan Gornall

  It takes most of the day, and vast quantities of wood and screws. But although none of this qualifies as actual boatbuilding, and every piece of wood I am currently cutting precisely to length and fixing in place will ultimately be discarded, putting all this together is hugely satisfying. When it’s done, the entire assembly resembles an over-engineered wooden beetle, stranded on its back, legs in the air. I open the jaws of the Workmates, freeing their grip on the keel, and for a moment the precarious-looking beast just sits there, unconstrained but perfectly balanced. The whole thing now weighs a great deal but, although there is no one on hand to help me, I think I’ve figured out how to get the beetle over and onto its feet.

  Standing between the legs on one side I slowly pull the rigid cage down towards me. This keeps most of the weight on the Workmates until the two legs nearest me make contact with the floor. By now I am in a deep squat and my quadriceps are on fire, but a final tug and suddenly the entire structure is finally freestanding.

  A quick check with a spirit level tells me the rig is remarkably level, both side to side and fore and aft. Partly this is down to the concreting skills of whoever laid the floor of this shed, perhaps half a century or more ago. But I too have done my bit, cutting and positioning the four legs as precisely as possible. Inevitably, some small adjustment is necessary, but one thin wedge of oak, sliced off on the bandsaw and driven in between the floor and one of the rear legs, is all it takes to square it all up perfectly. It remains only to fix the whole thing in place, by bracing the keel with timbers fixed to the roof beams, and to give the structure extra solidity by weighing it down at the corners with four plastic buckets filled with sand.

  I’m ready to start planking now, the central challenge at the heart of the clinker tradition, but once again progress is delayed by the demands of real-world work. The plan was for Fabian to come over and deliver a planking masterclass as soon as the moulds were in place and the boat was standing on its own four feet, but I’ve had to put him off twice in favour of journalism deadlines and now he can’t make it until next week. This is, of course, extremely frustrating but I can’t expect him to drop everything when I call for help. He’s not Batman, after all, and I’m not Commissioner Gordon. On the plus side, it gives me the rest of today, whatever bits of the weekend I can steal from family life and the whole of Monday to tackle two tasks that have to be completed before Fabian arrives: making the all-important steambox and nippers.

  Back at the start, I’d come over all woozy at John Leather’s casual suggestion that the amateur boatbuilder would be obliged to make a number of specialist tools, but now I am actually looking forward to doing just that.

  Every single plank I am going to fit to the boat will have to be bent, twisted or both if it is going to conform to the shape asked of it by the design. For example, when one of the lower planks leaves the transom at the back of the boat, where the bottom of the hull is quite flat, it is all but a few degrees off horizontal, but by the time it reaches the stem at the front it is quite vertical. As well as this huge twist asked of it along its length, the same plank must also be bent into a pronounced U-shape. From the transom it must curve out about 14in to make contact with the edge of mould four, about the widest part of the boat, and from there it must curve back in another 21in or so to meet the stem.

  Seasoned larch is flexible, but not that flexible, and none of this can be achieved without first softening the fibres of the timber – and that’s where the steambox comes in. Unfortunately, you can’t buy a steambox off the shelf – you have to make one. Both Leather and Verney would like me to rig up an iron pipe, with a cover plate welded over its bottom end and supported at an angle of 45 degrees over an open fire. This can be half-filled with water and each plank boiled for twenty minutes or so (the going rate for steaming is one hour for every inch of thickness, and my planks are 10mm, or a third of an inch, thick). But I haven’t signed up for metalwork and, furthermore, feel that in the decades since they laid down their advice the science of health and safety has moved on to a point where lighting bonfires near a wooden shed stacked high with timber and other combustible materials might well be frowned upon.

  Instead, I decide to build an 8ft-long rectangular box, made with thick plywood screwed together and connected to a £25.99 4-litre Energer wallpaper stripper tank from Screwfix. It looks a little like a coffin for a giraffe’s neck, but it works a treat. Again, it’s not actual boatbuilding. But whereas four months ago it wouldn’t have entered my head to even contemplate making such a thing, now I knock it out with alacrity. This gives me pause. Experience so far has taught me to be reluctant to read too much into small triumphs, but it is hard to resist a rising sense of confidence, if not competence. There is, of course, no one about with whom I can share my delight, to whom I can point out the neat way I have embedded a series of horizontal dowel rods, wedged into sockets drilled into the interior faces of the two sides of the box, designed to keep timber clear of the floor and in the midst of the steam cloud, but that does not stop me savouring the moment.

  Likewise I impress myself with the nippers. A nipper is a homemade wooden clamp, about 12in long and not unlike a large clothes peg, though with a nut and bolt instead of a spring. The nut and bolt can be adjusted so the jaws open just enough to allow a nipper to be clamped over two planks. A fleet of nippers is deployed to hold the planks together, and in shape along their length, while they are being permanently joined with rivets. A thin wedge is knocked into the back end of each nipper to force the jaws tight shut.

  Fabian has gifted me one old nipper – a collector’s item, in fact – which I am to clone. Though it has Fabian’s initials written on it, he thinks he acquired it originally from Iain Oughtred, the fabled boatbuilder with whom he worked on Osea Island more than thirty years ago. That, I decide, is a propitious connection. I buy nuts, bolts and washers, cut up some more lengths of pine and, using the original nipper as a template, spend the best part of a day on the bandsaw, making a dozen copies with wedges to match.

  I’m rather proud of my DIY steambox and nippers, both of which pass muster when Fabian arrives on 11 April to deliver my masterclass. He’s brought cake, too, but before I can put the kettle on for a celebratory cup of coffee, Fabian has perched his glasses on his nose and is peering less approvingly at my centreline.

  I’m back down to earth. There is to be no basking in my triumphs of steambox or nippers, or of my having prepped and framed the moulds and centreline for planking and spun the whole thing over onto its four sturdy legs. In my world, all of this stuff marks a remarkable first. In Fabian’s, it’s merely business as usual. And he’s spotted something I’ve forgotten to do.

  At least, that’s what I allow him to think. In fact, it’s something I’ve avoided doing because, quite frankly, I just couldn’t figure it out. Now there’s no more avoiding it, because the first plank – the garboard, closest to the keel – cannot go on until this oversight is sorted out.

  This all goes back to the troublesome rebate on the stem, the V-shaped groove in which the end of each plank will land, and the cutting of which caused me much anxiety back in February. The rebate doesn’t stop at the foot of the stem; it curves under the hog and continues along the length of the keel, as a notch into which the bottom edge of the garboard plank will sit. The problem is that when the boat’s centreline was the right way up I found this extension of the stem rebate impossible to envisage, partly because its intended course along the keel was hidden by the overhanging hog. And also, to be honest, I just couldn’t pluck up the confidence to chisel out the last couple of inches of the rebate on the stem because I wasn’t sure what course it needed to take to connect smoothly to the rebate on the keel. I lacked two things I needed to pull this off: experience, and confidence.

  Now the boat is upside down, it’s easier to see what’s going on but no clearer to me what needs to be done. I’m still making my excuses when Fabian picks up a one-inch chisel and gets stuck in on the port side of t
he stem and keel. What would have taken me ages and almost certainly would have ended in disaster takes him a few minutes. I watch carefully – in fact, I film it on my iPhone – because tomorrow I’m going to have to do the same thing on the other side. As bits of wood start to fly off in alarmingly large chunks it all starts to make more visual sense. Four pieces of timber meet here – the stem, the keel, the stem knee and the hog – and soon the continuation of the stem rebate is arcing elegantly through them all.

  Working by eye, Fabian next wields plane and chisel to bevel the edge of the hog to accept the garboard plank and whittles away its square end, where it meets the stem, so it blends seamlessly with the stem rebate. Now I can see clearly how the plank will depart from its vertical position on the stem and curve until it is running all but horizontally along the underside of the hog, all the while losing touch with none of the timber along the way. It’s a three-dimensional ballet in wood and steel that surely I could not possibly have choreographed on my own.

  Or could I? And, more importantly, should I at least have tried? The question haunts me for a few days. Practically speaking, it was without doubt the right thing to do. The cost of cocking up – irretrievably damaging keel and stem, necessitating a will-sapping return to Go – would have been unthinkable. But had I cheated? On one level, clearly not – the only rules at play here were those I chose to lay down myself. But I had let myself down before and didn’t want the building of this boat to be tarnished by the thought that I had done so again.

  I recognised that, psychologically, there was something else going on. An only child, with no father and an unapproachable and frequently unavailable mother, I had never been very good at asking for, or accepting, help. Whenever I had, it had always been as a last resort, and always felt like a failure. When I was fourteen and I found my grandmother dead, I went next door to ask our neighbours, Mr and Mrs Murphy, to call for an ambulance. We didn’t have a telephone. After they’d made the call, Mr Murphy came back to our house to wait with me. As we stood there, waiting in silence by the open front door for the sound of the siren and listening to my mother wailing and berating herself, he awkwardly placed one hand on my shoulder. At the touch I caved in and started crying. Putting his other arm around me he pulled me close, and even alongside my grief there was still room for the stinging sense that in turning to this near-stranger for comfort I had somehow failed.

  Nevertheless, I have no choice but to pay close attention to the planking masterclass that follows, in which once again I play the role of butterfingered apprentice to Fabian’s deft-handed sorcerer. By the end of the afternoon ‘we’ have steamed, fitted and fixed the port garboard plank in place. My steambox and nippers have, at least, played a central role. I think I’ve understood the process. I hope so, because tomorrow it’ll be all me.

  I tell myself that I have achieved a lot but this, as I am acutely aware, is where the real battle begins. It isn’t that everything until now hasn’t been a challenge – it most certainly has. At each stage I have looked back, like a climber crawling slowly up a mountain, vertiginously surprised to see just how much distance I have put between myself and the ground. But all of it – creating the stem, the centreline, the moulds, transom, wooden build frame, steambox and nippers – has been but a stroll in the gently rolling foothills compared to the push to the icy, precipitous summit that now lies ahead.

  I am about to embark on what even Fabian describes as ‘the slog’ – the slow, painstaking and repetitive business of planking, the ancient skill at the heart of the clinker tradition. For months I have been telling anyone who cared, and many who probably didn’t, that I was going to build a traditional wooden boat. Now we would see.

  It takes me most of the following morning to replicate on the starboard side of the keel and hog the continuation of the stem rebate that Fabian executed with such élan on the port side yesterday. I can’t, of course, refer to his example because we – I did help a bit, really – just as swiftly covered up all evidence of it by fixing on the first garboard plank. But luckily I have taken enough photographs and footage to guide me. The end result is okay. It doesn’t feel as elegant or as free-flowing, but it seems to do the job.

  Then it’s time to fit the starboard garboard – my first solo plank. I top up the steamer’s reservoir, set my rigger gloves alongside the box and, while I wait for the water to boil, contemplate the pile of larch planks lying under the workbench. The calm external beauty of a clinker hull conceals the level of skill that goes into its creation, in much the same way that the meaning of ‘clinker’ is hidden within the word, but rendered unintelligible to modern ears thanks to generations of linguistic evolution.

  The word has descended from clencher, via clench, clink and clinch. Clenching, or clinching, refers to the act of deforming one end of a fastening, such as a copper nail, to prevent it being drawn out, and is first found in written references in the Middle Ages but doubtless dates back to much earlier. Depending on who’s speaking, and in which direction their linguistic roots extend, clinker may also be referred to as lapstrake, or even clenched lap. ‘Strake’, derived from ‘streak’, is defined tightly by Eric McKee as ‘a single plank or combination of planks which stretches from one end of the boat to the other’. In other words, one plank that runs from stem to stern is a strake, but a strake can also consist of two or more planks. The ‘lap’ in question refers to the overlap between two clinker strakes – hence, lapstrake.

  The hull of the Nottage dinghy consists of ten strakes on either side, from the garboard at the bottom to the uppermost, the sheer, at the top – and those ten strakes are made up of eighteen planks. Only two strakes on either side of the Nottage dinghy consist of a single plank – the garboard, which runs alongside the keel, and the seventh. This is because these two are the straightest strakes on the entire boat, and so can be got out of a single piece of wood. All the other strakes consist of two joined planks. Because of the vagaries of hull shape these strakes curve sufficiently along their length to make it wasteful, or impossible, to try to take them from a single board. It also makes it harder to avoid any imperfections in the wood, such as knots. Instead, two shorter planks must be used, and joined together on the boat to form a continuous strake.

  ‘Joined together on the boat’ . . . so easy to say and write. More on the exquisite torture that is the fashioning of a so-called ‘scarf’ later.

  Working up from the bottom, or keel, of the boat, each successive strake overlaps the one before it by 20mm. This narrow strip on which the new strake lands is called, unsurprisingly, the ‘land’. The two planks are riveted together through that overlap with copper nails, driven through at 140mm intervals along their entire length. On the inside of the joined planks the points of the nails are hammered out – clenched, or clinched – over a copper washer, called a rove (also known in times past as a roove, ring or ruff). No glue, caulking or any other kind of sealant is applied to the faces of the two strakes where they meet. The boat’s watertightness relies solely on the perfection of the fit between the two strakes, and the grip of the rivets holding them together.

  Now that wouldn’t be so bad if the hull of a boat were flat, top to bottom and end to end. But that would be a box, and the hull of a boat is anything but flat, in any plane you care to contemplate. It curves, continuously and variously. This introduces a fiendish dynamic into the art of fitting one strake to another, because no two adjacent strakes lie either on the same plane, or consistently on any plane along their conjoined length.

  To understand a little of what this means, hold your hands out horizontally in front of your eyes, fingertip to fingertip. Keeping both hands horizontal, move the right hand so it’s overlapping the top of the left by about an inch. Now, keeping the fingers on both hands straight, tilt the right hand down, just a little. See the gap that’s opened up between the top of the left hand and the bottom of the end of the fingers on the right? Where two strakes overlap, that gap equals leak. To close that gap it is
necessary to bevel the edge of the previous strake (i.e., the fingertips of the left hand) to match precisely the angle created by the lie of the next strake (the right hand).

  And that wouldn’t be too difficult, perhaps, if one was simply overlapping two strakes that were dead straight along their length. But one is not. At any one point along the ‘land’ where the two strakes meet the angle between them is dictated by the shapes of the four moulds along the length of the boat, around which each plank is bent. So the aim is to plane a bevel on the edge of the receiving strake so it and its mate – two strakes that curve and twist from stem to stern and so lie at varying angles to each other along their entire length – are in perfect and consistent contact.

  And there’s more. In a devilish additional detail surely dreamed up by the maritime wing of the Spanish Inquisition, at the point where the planks terminate at both stem and stern they must no longer only overlap but also blend seamlessly together over the last few inches of their run.

  I’m back at Pin Mill, gazing in awe at the stern of Silver Cloud. This disappearance of the visible overlap is achieved by planing and chiselling a tapering rebate on the overlapping faces of both planks. This detail, exquisitely difficult to pull off, is pretty much purely aesthetic, designed as it is solely ‘to avoid too deep a rebate [in the stem] and to achieve a neat appearance at the ends’, says John Leather. But it is nevertheless absolutely necessary for the clinker look. It might not be appreciated, or even noticed, by the casual admirer of a clinker boat drawn up on a beach – I’d never clocked it, for sure – but were it not done the resulting clunkiness would surely stand out.

  In short, in creating a clinker hull, the amateur is confronting the prospect of engaging with tricky, three-dimensional geometry, complicated by unhealthy dollops of physics, materials science and . . . well, from where I’m standing, alone in a shed with an intimidating pile of timber, black magic, quite frankly. At no point has Fabian or anyone else suggested sacrificing chickens. But really; what harm could it do?