Or a fiberglass boat. Which is what Far From Perfect would be, from a hungry bug’s point of view. With most of her wood solidly mummified in glass and epoxy, she’ll be inedible. And for all practical purposes, eternal. With a little research, I found an estimate of four hundred years for fiberglass’s life cycle, but since the formulation is only sixty years old, that’s merely an educated guess. A few environmentalists are beginning to worry about the growing heap of ready-for-thelandfill fiberglass boats around North America. But I called an array of local and state environmental agencies, and no one in Washington State seems to have focused on it. I finally reached Wayne Krafft, a solid waste specialist with the state Department of Ecology, who confirmed that there’s no economically viable means of recycling fiberglass. “There’s really nothing valuable you can create from it,” he said. “On the positive side, it really doesn’t do any harm in a landfill, either.”
I also reached Mark Goodin, an air-quality permit engineer with the Department of Ecology, who said the acetone and epoxy emissions from my garage were unlikely to waft out in concentrations high enough to affect air quality for anyone except me. “The primary concern would be your health and safety,” he said. “And if you have neighborhood kids coming by, keep the garage door open and make sure the use of any kind of volatiles happened the day before.” The warning labels, he said, mean business.
All this would have been no concern if I could have convinced myself that I was building an heirloom-quality boat, a priceless watercraft that would be maintained and used for generations, as good wooden boats frequently are. (Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats’ collection includes a beautiful sloop dating from 1926; it still sails on Lake Union.) But Far From Perfect was a learning experience, a practice boat for someone who’s starting too late in life to become a master wooden boatbuilder and thus make the world more beautiful and civilized. I wondered: Was my boat just another indulgence that an overstressed planet can ill afford at this point?
Progress on the to-do list dragged and scraped along for several weeks. None of the chores seemed as interesting as the witches’ foam, and I didn’t attack them with great enthusiasm or speed. The core issue was getting the deck to fit properly, which seemed to demand endless shimming and trimming. I temporarily installed the two-piece deck with clamps and then removed it for more adjustments a dozen times, and each time the fit would improve by 2 or 3 percent. Finally, on a rainy Saturday afternoon I decided: enough already. The sheer seam wasn’t quite uniform and the crown of the deck between the forward bulkhead and the bow was a little warped, like an old LP record that spent the afternoon in a hot car, but it would have to do. The danger of terminal frustration seemed greater than the visual offense of minor malformation.
I lathered the sheer clamps with marine caulk. Its label merely warned of cancer and birth defects, which seemed distantly anticlimactic after the prospect of exploding foam. Then I maneuvered the two halves of the deck into place, drilled several dozen holes for bronze screws, and tightened them down. This sounds straightforward, but it was a four-hour operation. Caulk oozed out of the squished-down sheer seam, and I tidied up the excess with acetone (extremely flammable; causes blindness, neurological damage, and death). Then for good measure, I locked everything down in a thicket of clamps and left it for a day.
Just before bedtime, I sneaked out to the garage to rub my eyes over it—the boat had assumed nearly its final form—and my heart sank. Near the bow, the deck distinctly swelled upward, like the suggestive “power bulge” of a Corvette’s hood. What, a sailboat with a big honkin’ V-8 in the nose? Worse, the starboard half bulged more than the port half, creating another ¼-inch gap between them. Quarter-inch gaps were becoming my signature. How many can a builder finesse, shim up, or disguise before the spiritual integrity of the boat is fatally compromised? Hell, what about its structural integrity? When I awakened for my 3 a.m. carnival of worries, these issues tumbled in my head for an hour—messier problems than the ones that were disrupting Peter Gron’s sleep over Alula, but no different in their effect on one’s peace of mind.
At breakfast I told Patty about the bulge. She didn’t think it needed to be an issue. “Just let people assume you intended it that way,” she said. To some extent, that would work. But Potemkin confidence wouldn’t fool Sam Devlin, and I was starting to worry about the day when I would present my efforts to him.
I took the trash out to the curb after breakfast, passing by the boat. Actually, the power bulge looked slightly cool—or it would, if I could at least bring the two halves of the deck into alignment. There appeared to be two possible ways: pry and chisel the starboard half of the deck off and make a whole new one, or apply brute force in the form of lead weights and fiberglass tape.
Brute force seemed the lesser of the two chores.
I put in an abbreviated day of writing, then went out to the garage to lay down the glass and epoxy. It was now November, and the days were growing decidedly less conducive to boat work. The afternoon light was gray and lifeless, it was raining, and the temperature was hovering at fifty. I actively coveted Peter’s cozy wood stove and light-bathed chapel—it was morphing into a boatbuilding cathedral in my mental video—but this was likely a metaphorical overlay for a deeper jealousy. What I really craved was Peter’s perseverance, the engine in his character that makes him keep after something until it’s right. It’s a commitment to excellence that grows out of a limitless passion for the thing or act being performed. That seemed to be shaded differently from ego-based perfectionism.
It suddenly struck me that Peter was explaining himself more deeply than either of us realized when he blurted that Alula was “probably the best thing I’ve done in my whole life.” His boat had become a passion that will define him, demonstrate what he’s capable of doing, and most importantly, what he believes in. It’s caused him to focus and concentrate at a level that I haven’t yet approached.
No one excels at everything, and we all have the privilege of choosing that defining passion. I wonder if the definition of a wasted life is never getting around to making that choice.
CHAPTER 14
QUALITY TIME
FAR FROM PERFECT HAD a sister ship!
One December morning I clicked onto Devlin’s website to run off a print of the sail plan, and for the first time there appeared a link to a log of another amateur builder’s Zephyr. He’d finished it at the end of summer, just about the time my boat was supposed to slip into the water and didn’t. There were photos—it looked alarmingly good—and a rapturous conclusion. “Every time I launch the boat it draws a crowd of admirers,” wrote the builder, a man named Joel Bergen. “It is fast, stable, and tracks straight as an arrow. Thanks, Devlin, for designing my dream boat.”
I fired off an e-mail. A few hours later he responded in delight. He told me he lived just an hour away, in another of Seattle’s outer-orbit suburbs, and aside from an example in Hawaii, mine was the only other Zephyr he’d gotten wind of. By the fourth sentence of his note he was suggesting a race.
This is one of the ironic curiosities of sailing: even casual enthusiasts always seem hot to race, despite the fact that boats the size of ours are not going to exceed 5 knots—just under 6 miles an hour—under any conditions in which a sane person would sail them. Probably this is because racing a sailboat is truly an exercise of skill and judgment rather than strength, native intelligence, or (at least at our level) the cash one has available to dump into the boat.
It would be some time before I felt ready to race, but meanwhile I had a pile of questions for my brother builder. And of course I wanted to see his boat in person. After a flurry of e-mails we made a date.
I’d also learned just that week that Far From Perfect had a whole flotilla of second cousins, most of them plying assorted bays and inlets of the East Coast. Crawford Boat Building, a shop twenty-five miles south of Boston, specializes in producing fiberglass replicas of the melonseed skiff. Brush Creek Yachts, a North Carolina ent
erprise, makes strip-planked cedar versions. A few amateurs have spun out their own interpretations. None of these is identical to Devlin’s design, but most seem to trace their ancestry to a common source: an 1888 plan reproduced in marine historian Howard Chapelle’s authoritative 1951 book, American Small Sailing Craft.
The melonseed’s history is sketchy but intriguing. Chapelle said the first examples appeared around 1882, apparently as a “drier and more seaworthy” alternative to the New Jersey duck-hunting skiffs called “sneak boxes.”
Sneak boxes were designed to lie so low in the water that they functioned as floating duck blinds, but this also rendered them unusable in anything but the calmest water. Chapelle called the melonseeds “remarkably handsome.” Another historian, Thomas Firth Jones, added that melonseeds were rowed much of the time and then perhaps quietly sculled to sneak up on relaxing ducks. A shotgun of “perhaps 1½ inches bore might have been bolted to the foredeck, and the skipper might have set it off by pulling a string from aft,” Jones speculated. Small-craft historian Barry Thomas wrote that although the melonseed was a very capable sailboat—“it would take an extreme set of conditions to knock her down”—its heyday was short-lived because it was “relatively difficult to build” and therefore too costly for a blue-collar boat that suffered constant abuse from muddy boots and hasty push-offs from beaches and marsh banks. It was encouraging to learn that at least one authority thought building them was “relatively difficult”—it made me feel like relatively less of a bozo.
The best discovery was that I seemed to have chosen, altogether by accident, an incredibly lovely, sweet-tempered, and capable craft. Thomas, who built a replica himself, wrote that “I cannot imagine a safer sailing boat, and unlike so many dinky fiberglass boats, [it] has the feel of a large boat.” Famed yacht designer Robert Perry, writing in Sailing magazine, called the melonseed and its modern replicas “as shapely a little hooker1 as you will find anywhere.” Roger Crawford, whose shop has now produced more than three hundred of the little hookers, has an unabashed love affair with them that stretches back to 1987. That was the year that an owner of a rotted-out melonseed called Crawford’s boat shop to ask if he would try to restore it, and against his better judgment, Crawford agreed to take a look. He got himself bewitched by its lovely lines and not only restored it, but also made a mold of the hull, and from that a prototype fiberglass replica. Two years later the replica entered production.
“The decision to take on the challenge of bringing the melonseed skiff into production was based almost entirely on emotion and passion and very little on economics,” Crawford admitted. But he found no reason to regret it. “Even though we thought the melonseed just might sail a little beyond average we were totally unprepared for the sensations of speed, seaworthiness, and outright delight that the boat offered. This boat just loved to sail. It is a wonderful thing in life when realities live up to fantasies.”
Patty and I drove up to Joel Bergen’s house on New Year’s Eve. I found a portly, amiable man who wasn’t exactly enjoying his holiday season. November and December rains, about twenty-three inches in all, had turned his front yard into a suburban swamp, and he was spending the year’s final weekend planting an underground drainage system. The fall weather had been so dismal, even by Seattle standards, that he’d only been able to sail Quality Time five times since her completion. But the garage door was open as we pulled up, and we could see the Zephyr gleaming in there, perky and eager as a cocker spaniel pup. As soon as we turned to her, Joel’s glum drainage-installation face brightened dramatically.
He told me he had spent two years searching for a sailboat, something small enough to stash in his one-car garage and sail by himself, and that had the integrity of a historic design. He stumbled online onto the professionally built melonseeds, and they struck him as just about perfect—except for the price, which edged close to $10,000. “That led me to Devlin,” he said.
It was obviously the right move for him. He worked demonically and finished Quality Time in four months—one-fourth the time I’d taken to not complete Far From Perfect. In an especially dismaying irony, he had finished on the exact day of my original deadline, September 26.
“I was so excited, so pumped up, it just consumed me,” he said. “I was literally thinking about it all the time. Sometimes I’d find it difficult to put it out of my mind and concentrate on my job or family matters. I’d typically come home from work around four, take care of family business, have dinner, and work on it from six until ten. On Saturdays and Sundays I’d usually work from dawn to dusk. Building this was the most enjoyable project of my life and I just couldn’t get enough of it. I know it probably sounds strange, but it became an obsession—almost an addiction, like a drug.”
Cindy, Joel’s wife, injected her observations. “We’ve been married twenty-five years, so we know each other pretty well. I’ve seen him smile more in the last eight months than any time over the last eight years. He was just glowing over it.”
We turned to the boat. I was a little afraid to commence the examination because Joel’s obviously successful project might be about to illuminate some fatal mistake in mine. All I saw, though, was clear evidence that Joel was a better craftsman. The paint—a lavish royal blue hull with a white deck—was beautiful, the surfaces smooth and gracefully joined. The deck was nice and flat; no V-8 tumor bloated it. I also noted how skillfully Joel had orchestrated his tight one-car garage as a workshop. There was an eye-level shelf with hutches for drill, saw, router, and other tools. Next to it was a wheeled bin for wood scraps. Whenever he needed his semi-portable table saw during construction he would lay a plywood lid on the bin, set the saw on it, and roll it out to the driveway—on days it wasn’t raining—where the confines of the garage wouldn’t be an impediment to maneuvering wood around the saw. The workspace exhibited a quality of organization that I hadn’t approached, and it was reflected in the boat’s workmanship.
“If we ever go out and launch our boats together, we can rename yours for the occasion,” I told him. “Not Nearly So Far From Perfect.”
There were possibly one or two small details in which Far From Perfect trumped Not Nearly So. Joel was having trouble fitting the exterior stem, so he just gave up, instead wrapping the bow with several layers of fiberglass cloth to survive the inevitable bumps with beach. Functionally it would be just fine, but the heavy oaken outline of Far From Perfect’s bow gave her an additional cut of authority, like the set of an admiral’s jaw. Joel’s decision had been a practical compromise. “I wanted her to look good, but I also wanted to go sailing by the end of summer.”
It seemed like a reasonable trade to me, particularly since it was long past summer and I was not sailing.
I felt privately embarrassed by the beauty contest that was playing out in my head, and not just because I was losing it. What was the point of comparing our efforts? We weren’t building these boats to sell, so the only competition was one we imagined. Such a thing can be destructive, battering down self-esteem to the point of paralysis. I’ve had writing students who quit trying and dropped out because they thought their classmates’ work was on a plane unattainably far above theirs. And yet, there must be a biological reason that we Homo sapiens are relentlessly competitive, even where it can’t possibly have anything to do with mating.
Could it be that competition is how our species makes progress—as simple as that?
As I surveyed the details of Joel’s boat, I realized that his mind worked differently from mine. He anticipated problems before they could actually occur, and devised preventive solutions. For example, he visualized Quality Time capsizing and lying on her side in the water. If she were then being hammered by wind waves—altogether likely, since it would have been big wind that caused the blowdown—the commotion could cause the mast to pull free from its step. On small boats like ours, nothing but gravity normally holds the mast in place. Righting the boat, bailing it out, and then re-stepping the mast complete with wet sai
l, all this in a howling gale, would be impossible for a solo sailor. He’d have to cut the lines, abandon his mast and sail, and row to shore. Any witnesses standing around would have great fun, at Joel’s expense, contrasting his boat’s name with the fiasco they were observing. To avert all these unhappy events, he simply installed a two-dollar stainless steel pad eye on the deck, where he could lash the mast to it with a few inches of clothesline-size rope. It was the cheapest, simplest insurance I could imagine. Only I didn’t imagine the problem until I saw his solution.
He has an engineer’s mind, which he uses as a technical designer for Boeing. He designs the tubes, fittings, and brackets involved in jetliner fuel delivery systems, which struck me as a fairly critical job. I’d be a little worried about my next flight if his boat had looked carelessly built. My mind doesn’t readily function like his, but I believe this way of thinking through problems can be learned. We liberal-arts types aren’t fated to muddle helplessly through life, ignorant of physics and plumbing and electricity, unless we choose to. It’s a function of patience more than a matter of aptitude: taking the time to think through a problem, consider all the directions events might take, and fabricate insurance or a rational response.
When I got home, I went out to look over Far From Perfect, hoping maybe to find a few extra merits somewhere, something to help justify all the time I’d lavished on her in contrast to Joel’s blitz. Instead, my thinking drifted toward a potential source of future trouble that had been vaguely gnawing at me for weeks: the half-oval brass rub strips I’d screwed to the bottom of the stem and keel to help absorb impacts. Somewhere long ago I had read that when building anything that’s supposed to be waterproof, you’d better train yourself to “think like water.” Well, if I were water, I might just slither around those screw heads, capillary myself up into the wood, and rot it from the inside out. What fun! Thinking now like water’s determined enemy, I grabbed a tube of marine caulk and built a little waterproof anthill around each screw head. It took ten minutes, and although the boat might look a little messier for it beneath the waterline, I felt a lot better.
The Year of the Boat Page 17