When I began seriously contemplating a sailboat, I knew absolutely nothing about how to build one, but I had stumbled across a couple of inklings of how not to.
Not long before this, Patty and I had been driving up the east coast of Vancouver Island on one of my travel-story assignments. We stopped at the picturesque fishing village of Cowichan Bay and toured its Maritime Centre, which included a small wooden boat museum. There we studied a not-quitefinished twenty-seven-foot sloop parked at the wharf. A sign sparely outlined its history:
Started 1961. Worked on for 40 years. Given to Maritime Centre 2001.
Back in Seattle, I noticed this classified ad in the Post-Intelligencer :
50‘ sailboat. You finish. $18,000 or best offer.
Pricing a bandsaw at my neighborhood Home Depot, I mentioned to the tool guy what I might be about to do with it. He laughed. “A man who used to work here is building a wooden sailboat, too. It’s something like fifty-four feet. He admits he’ll never finish it.” I wasn’t sure whether this was supposed to discourage me from buying a bandsaw, or make certain that I walked out with a lifetime supply of blades.
Among the seriously boatstricken there is an almost irresistible compulsion to launch an overly ambitious project, and among boats there is a secret pact to put down any stirrings of hubris in the community of Homo sapiens. Any half-built boat can find a way to outsmart its owner. The only defense is humility. Samual Devlin, a prolific boat designer and builder in Olympia, Washington, offers this caveat in the opening pages of his boatbuilding book:If this is your first boatbuilding project, it is wise to start with a small, simple boat. Building confidence and skill is more important than building the boat itself.
This wouldn’t exactly be my first boatbuilding project, but it would be the first in which my own judgment and problemsolving creativity would enter into play. I had decided early on not to build a kit sailboat precisely because I knew I could succeed at it. I had built dozens of things from kits, from knockdown Danish teak furniture with those wordless cartoon “instructions” to that French baroque harpsichord. Building a kit tests your compliance and patience, but not much else. Even if you don’t have much of either, and I don’t, you can generally stumble through by testing the way things fit together until something clicks.
I wanted more of a character-building project, though not one that would last forty years. It seemed reasonable to try to find a plan for a boat that I could build in one year. Projects that have clearly visible goalposts are the most likely to get completed. It also had to be small. Nobody works on a boat outdoors through a Seattle rainy season, which lasts nine months; and our typically suburban neighborhood association also has a rule against storing any boat outside. In an uncharacteristic experiment in thinking through a problem ahead of itself, I measured my garage, drew its plan to scale, and tried to project not only how a boat would take shape in the space, but also how I could move around to work on it. The largest boat that could comfortably be born in the space I had would be about fourteen feet long.
I felt a wave of disappointment. Could a fourteen-foot sailing dinghy function as a serious boat? Would it serve as a character builder, a challenging enough step beyond the kayak projects?
I made a run to the public library and trucked home a foot-high pile of books such as Building Classic Small Craft and Boatbuilding for Beginners. They were lavish with illustrated instructions, and most showed the tatters and smudges of volumes that have been checked out and pawed through by many prospective hands. Projecting from the condition of the books, you would expect to see swarms of small, amateur-built wooden boats plying Puget Sound and Lake Washington. You don’t. Here is what happens: Fifty people check out this same pile of books. Forty-eight spend a couple of hours turning the pages, then say to themselves, “Sure looks like a lot of work. Say, I think I’ll have a beer.” The forty-ninth will actually embark on a project, and turn out either a nice little watercraft or, after forty years, a donation to a wooden boat museum. The fiftieth will go look for an easier way to build a boat, which is what I decided to do.
The books I’d checked out were mainly about traditional wooden boatbuilding, which is essentially traditional wooden shipbuilding, just scaled down and made lighter. You build a framework of wooden ribs, usually oak, that looks remarkably like the skeleton of a large sea mammal, then bend a skin of wooden planks around it and caulk the seams between the planks. Wooden boats and ships have been built in exactly this way since the fifteenth century. (The earlier Viking shipwrights built the skin first, then inserted strengthening frame members into it—a much less robust form of construction. The invention of plank-on-frame construction made Columbus and Magellan possible, and then cannon-carrying warships.) I discovered compelling reasons to not want to build this kind of boat. The first was that it would involve making a fire-and-water contraption to steam the ribs, like giant Chinese dumplings, in order to bend them. This sounded terrifying from beginning to end. Another was that a plank-on-frame boat is notoriously impractical if you’re planning to store it out of water, which I would have to. When it’s afloat, the planks absorb water and expand to seal the seams, then naturally dry and shrink when the boat is taken out. The happy skipper can look forward to hours of bailing every time this cycle is repeated. Finally, I wanted a lightweight, beachable boat—something that wouldn’t be a monumental struggle to schlep around on land, and rig and launch. One of the reasons there’s always a lavish supply of used boats on the market is that their owners have realized, belatedly, that the work of boat ownership outweighs the fun.
Small and simple was obviously the most promising way to go.
Still, I almost got seduced by a thoroughly traditional daysailer called the Haven 12½, designed by Joel White, son of the great E. B. White. No amateur boatbuilder is immune to romantic folly, and the genetic link between E. B. and the Haven formed a thoroughly irrational and compelling pull. I discovered the slim collection Essays of E. B. White in 1976, and it was the lighthouse that first began to draw me away from formulaic newspaper writing. White’s graceful, evocative prose is a lot like sailing—it rarely takes the shortest line between two points, but the meandering tacks can be full of unexpected pleasures and insights. Joel White’s design was a respectful update of the Herreshoff 12½, an exquisite classic sloop built in Nathanael Herreshoff’s Rhode Island boat shop from 1914 to 1943. If there is a more heartbreakingly beautiful small boat in existence, there doesn’t need to be. I spent several hours studying Joel White’s meticulous instructions and decided, reluctantly, that the Haven 12½’s deceptive complexity would form a disastrous trap—at least for me. In an introduction that echoed the craftsmanship of his father’s prose, Joel White warned:The construction methods and the fine detailing are so much an integral part of the boats that to build one in a slapdash and crude manner is a sure invitation to disappointment in the finished product.
I felt chastised, and I haven’t even built one.
The wooden boat revival that began in the 1970s, fortunately, hasn’t only been a resurgence of traditional practices. A number of builders have devised ways to use modern inventions, most notably fiberglass and epoxy—the latter scornfully termed “glop” by the hard-core traditionalists. When I stumbled onto Sam Devlin’s online catalog, and then his book Devlin’s Boat Building: How to Build Any Boat the Stitch-and-Glue Way, I felt like I’d found a friend and ally.
The “stitch-and-glue way” needs more elegant terminology—it sounds like scrap-pile boatbuilding. In fact, it’s thoroughly elegant in the technological sense, having more in common with modern jetliner construction than with a traditional wooden boat. There is no rib cage; the stressed plywood skin of the boat, reinforced with bulkheads, provides all the rigidity the structure needs. The skin wears an invisible jacket of fiberglass and epoxy, which renders it perfectly waterproof and impervious to rot. It’s lightweight, so the boat displaces less water and consequently sails faster in light wind. Its history is shor
t but entangled, involving inventors on various continents who apparently weren’t aware of what the others were doing. The first popular surge of stitch-and-glue homemade boats, however, was cooked up by the London Daily Mirror in 1962, which promoted BBC do-it-yourself expert Barry Bucknell’s simple design for an eleven-foot sailing dinghy. The still-popular Mirror Dinghy made modern sailing accessible to the British working class.
Plankton was a stitch-and-glue kayak, so I had had a little experience with the procedure. It still isn’t as easy as enthusiasts like Devlin love to claim. “It’s no harder and no more complicated than building a garden shed,” Devlin chirps in the opening chapter of his book. No, not if your taste in garden sheds includes walls with compound curves, a fiberglassed roof, and a sail rig. I knew from building Plankton and Sea Major how many things can go wrong, how a trickle of small, unnoticed errors can build into a flood of trouble, and how much I had left to learn about building any kind of boat.
Devlin’s catalog of designs included a lovely little sloop called Nancy’s China, whimsically named in the 1980s after the ritzy china that Nancy Reagan ordered for the White House in the depths of a recession. Devlin suggested that one of the boats could be built for about the same cost as one of Nancy’s place settings. At just over fifteen feet, it was a slight overmatch for my space, but I figured I could squeeze myself around the ends to work on it (note here the early warning signs of ambition/hubris). Devlin even offered an ingenious new version that uses an auxiliary electric motor with two twelve-volt batteries and a solar-cell panel for recharging them underway. Nancy’s China was a floating showcase of environmental virtue. I ordered study plans—an incomplete version of the full blueprints—for $15.
Doug Lee, one of the physicians in the oncology clinic where Patty works as a nurse, had recently bought a Nancy’s China built in Devlin’s own shop, so I made a Saturday afternoon appointment to look at her. “She’s a salty little boat,” Doug said. “She’s very forgiving to sail.” I crawled over, around, and through her for an hour, taking notes and pictures. Between the study plans and this in-the-flesh example, I cataloged about forty things I had no idea how to do. It looked nearly as intimidating as Joel White’s Haven 12½.
Isn’t there more significance in achieving a monumental, overwhelming goal than in accomplishing something that looks manageable from the outset? It’s what our culture teaches us at every turn: Sinatra crooning “The Impossible Dream,” Edmund Hillary crowing on return from Everest, “We knocked the bastard off!” A couple of decades ago a New York investment magazine publisher named Gilbert Kaplan immersed himself in Mahler’s gargantuan Resurrection symphony, took conducting lessons, hired an orchestra, and knocked the bastard off—to critical acclaim, even—in Carnegie Hall. He didn’t bother with training wheels, like maybe conducting a Rossini overture or two for practice. (I’ve long been in awe of Kaplan, especially since I’ve conducted the Resurrection myself—at home alone with a miniature score, a pencil baton, and the Chicago Symphony on the stereo.)
I chewed on the prospect of building a Nancy’s China for several days and finally consulted Jeff Kissinger, a carpenter friend who races motorcycles and resembles Hercules. I expected him to pile on the encouragement, urge me to go for it. Instead, he offered a gentle helping of Zen.
“You need to think of this as a ladder of little steps, and conceive of each one as something joyful,” he said. “When you’re done, you don’t want to look back on this and be reminded of how miserable you were at some parts of it. And if you feel burdened or resentful at any stage, you’ll build that into the boat.”
A possibly less burdening alternative was Devlin’s Zephyr, a 13½-foot sailing dinghy based loosely on the little duck-hunting skiffs called “melonseeds” that were popular around the bays of southern New Jersey in the late 1800s. Devlin’s brief catalog description called her “stable and remarkably fast . . . the type of boat that you can both teach your kids to sail with, and keep yourself satisfied on a spirited evening sail at the end of the day’s struggles.” A Zephyr, he claimed, could be built in a little over one hundred hours.
I ordered the complete plans for $65 and discovered a remarkably simple, elemental sailboat that had none of the complex features of Nancy’s China—no cabin, no provision for a motor, no solar panel, a single sail instead of the mainsail and jib sloop rig. It wasn’t at all homely, but it appeared to be . . . honestly, a bit rustic. I figured I could maybe build it in two hundred hours. For a person whose leading character defect is impatience, I am a remarkably slow learner. I had no illusions about being able to work efficiently or intuitively, and I was factoring in the certainty of making cascades of mistakes and doubling back to fix them.
Patty and I also suspected we needed a very small, lightweight, simple boat in which to learn sailing—something whose response to a stupid move with the sail or rudder will be to plop over and pitch the offending skipper into the water, rather than to plow out of control into a marina and t-bone a Microsoft millionaire’s yacht. The Zephyr would be so modest, so unobtrusive, so slow—Devlin’s “remarkably fast” in the universe of sailing actually means 4 or 5 knots—that it would be absolutely harmless. If the Haven 12½ is the distillation of pure beauty and Nancy’s China an energy-conservation showpiece, the Zephyr could be just a quiet testament to the almost-forgotten virtues of simplicity and humility. It felt like a plan.
CHAPTER 4
IMPATIENCE
THERE ARE NOT MANY absolutes in the design and construction of boats, as you can readily see just from poking around Seattle’s assorted waterfronts. There are boats that look like and function as houses, boats that amount to nautical motorcycles, and boats that drive up out of the water to become cars or buses. There are boats that resemble overgrown washtubs and boats that look like mahogany rockets. There are boats built out of every conceivable material, and at least one that is inconceivable: concrete. (When I first raided the library for boatbuilding books I passed up the Manual of Ferro-Cement Boat Building, not regretfully.) But one rule that nobody ever violates is that a boat must be absolutely symmetrical, at least wherever it meets the water. A warped boat is a lurid embarrassment to its builder and an insult to the forms in nature from which it derives both its beauty and functionality. Have you ever seen an asymmetrical porpoise? Could you respect a shark whose port side was taller than its starboard?
Even before I ordered a stick of wood, I worried about cutting out the Zephyr’s hull pieces precisely and stitch-and-gluing them accurately. In his book, Sam Devlin himself admits he once had to abandon a half-built boat because he glued it up ¾ of an inch out of square. I realized I was going to have to teach myself a new way of working if I were to have any hope of doing it right: more patient, more careful, more focused. No, deeper than that: more dedicated to an ideal of quality.
Like a million or two others, I read Robert Pirsig’s modern classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in 1975 and struggled to digest his philosophical pursuit of the ghost of Quality—he capitalizes the word to place it on the same plane as the Buddha, a commodity both physical and spiritual. In the course of the book Pirsig throws off much wonderful, practical advice that can be helpful to a boatbuilder, as well as to a motorcycle mechanic or a mountain climber, such as to live fully in the moment of each step, keeping eyes off the prize. “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.” The more he chases the definition of Quality, though, the more tangled it becomes. Eventually I gave up trying to understand it, except for this simple and profound connection:I think it’s important now to tie care to Quality by pointing out that care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.
Often, I think, quality eludes us because we’re caring about the wrong things. More pr
ecisely, our institutions are caring about the wrong things. Quality is conspicuously absent in much of the vast buffet of consumer goods and services we encounter every day, which at first seems paradoxical because there are so many forces at work today that ought to be enhancing and insuring it. Thanks to the global marketplace, competition in every arena is fiercer than at any time in history. Designers and engineers are working seventy-hour weeks. Laser-wielding robots assemble products to infinitesimal tolerances. The reason all this still doesn’t add up to quality is that so much of industry’s effort is being diverted away from the actual service or thing that’s being created, and instead working on all the peripheral aspects: value engineering, marketing, advertising, packaging, creating the illusion of advantage over the competition. Nobody markets a cell phone today claiming it’s more reliable and more durable. The parameters are inevitably more style and more features. The thing will be obsolete in a couple of years anyway, so it’s presumed the buyer doesn’t care how well it’s made. Actually, I do. I don’t give a flip about the camera, the video game parlor, or the ringtone library in my phone; I just want it to not drop calls in midstream—in other words, to be a good phone. But that’s not what phones today are about.
As an amateur boatbuilder, I figured my venture would be a little easier because I didn’t need to care about anything but the end quality of the object itself. I wouldn’t have to make it appeal to anyone outside my household, wouldn’t need to advertise it, didn’t care about the efficiency of my personal manufacturing process. It wouldn’t matter whether I took five hours or fifty hours to cut out the pieces of the hull, it only mattered that I do it correctly. I recalled a bumper sticker I once saw that maybe encapsulated a deeper truth than its author intended:AMATEURS BUILT THE ARK.
The Year of the Boat Page 4