“I agree,” Sam says.
After we finish dissecting the details, he asks about the big picture—how I felt about the boatbuilding experience. I tell him that first, there was quite a bit more of it than I had expected. “You advertise ‘just over 100 hours,’ in the plans catalog.” I say. “I logged 419 hours before the first launch, and the clock’s still running.”
He laughs, not apologetically. “I had to put some number in there. I’m actually less of a liar than a lot of designers. There’s a famous plan for a ‘six-hour canoe’ out there. I’ve seen a lot with sixty hours in them.”
I tell him then that it was a character-building experience, and that it has enriched my life in ways that are yet to fully play out. It doesn’t seem like the right time or place to talk about the cycles of self-doubt and discouragement. He seems to want to make this into the ceremony I had denied myself, only a private one, without the crowd and champagne-drenched launching. He asks me to sign a photo of Far From Perfect for him to keep. As I do it, I find my eyes becoming moist and my throat tightening. I can’t believe I’m having to fight back tears. I don’t cry, ever. Not my style. I look away so he won’t see my eyes.
“You’re a boatbuilder now,” he says. “You’re entitled to wear the boatbuilder shoes, boatbuilder pants, boatbuilder jacket. This wasn’t a kit. I don’t mean to denigrate that process, but that’s just assembly. This is taking a pile of wood and breathing life into it. For us as men, I think this is the closest we can come to giving birth. This is as creative as we can possibly be.”
I remind him that I named my creation Far From Perfect and that it richly deserves the name. I’m still trying to deflect undeserved praise. But Sam doesn’t seem to care how imperfectly his design was realized. The simple fact that the birth occurred is miracle enough to make him happy.
“I love the name,” he laughs.
The only thing left to do today is talk about the next boat. Most of the people who buy a Devlin plan and actually complete a boat—he estimates the success rate may be as high as 40 or 50 percent—have a next boat in their dreams. Bigger and more ambitious, it goes without saying. I tell him I’d like to buy the study plans for his Winter Wren, a nineteen-foot, gaff-rigged sloop that I’ve been sneaking periodic looks at in his online catalog. He fetches the plans and refuses my fifteen bucks.
“Save it for your pile of wood,” he says.
CODA
THE TEACHINGS OF A WOODEN SAILBOAT
FAR FROM PERFECT IS IN her place at the September Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, docked demurely between a fifteen-foot Devlin Nancy’s China and a twenty-five-foot Folkboat. More than two hundred boats have crowded into this year’s show, ranging from the breathtaking one-hundredyear-old schooner Martha to a sixty-pound sailing canoe. The atmosphere is pure festival, a celebration of the rediscovered splendor of wooden boats. There’s no competition, and none of the snooty hauteur you’d find at a concours d’élégance of classic cars. Although some of the boats represent serious money, an unspoken egalitarianism seems to embrace all of us participating in the show. Building or maintaining a wooden boat takes hard work, dedication, and occasional ingenuity; it has no correspondence to social class or formal education.
I had spent the summer slowly improving Far From Perfect: an entirely new rudder, better rigging, stronger brackets for the removable rowing seat on top of the centerboard trunk. Against Sam’s advice, I invested ten days in trying to smooth out the deck with a new round of epoxy and five more coats of varnish. It yielded maybe a 50 percent improvement, which seemed well worth the trouble. And now at the festival, Far From Perfect has been favored with a happy accident of celestial geography: the southerly arc of the September sun is preventing dockside viewers from seeing the direct reflection that would reveal how imperfect the finish remains. From comments I overhear, people seem to think she’s rather fetching, and they’re charmed by her name. “Far From Perfect—ought to be the name of everything I own,” one man said. When they ask, I tell them the name was the smartest move I made in the entire construction process—it relieved a lot of pressure. They get it.
The dumbest move now appears to be one I made a week ago in last-minute preparations for Port Townsend: I defaced the deck with two-dollar plastic horn cleats to tie on dock lines and fenders. Several more festoon the mast. When the boat was alone in the garage, or even at this book’s cover photo shoot at a lake, they’d seemed like a reasonable choice—honest, functional, and unpretentious, like the Zephyr design itself. But in the context of the festival, a sweeping celebration of craftsmanship, they now look inexcusably cheesy. They’re functioning perfectly well, but contradicting the spirit of the whole wooden boat revival. I wander through the forest of boats and fail to find any mass-produced plastic in such prominent use.
There’s a small bronze foundry with a display of its boat hardware at the festival. I wander over to inquire about their cleats—I’m thinking of slipping back into the marina in the evening with my drill after the crowds have dispersed and prematurely retiring the plastic. Twenty-six bucks apiece, the bronze man says. The boat has twelve cleats. No, this isn’t the solution.
I vaguely recall clipping and filing an old article about how to make wooden cleats with a bandsaw, so I shamble over to the Edensaw Hardwoods tent to ask the experts what kind of wood would be hard and tough enough. Purpleheart, they tell me, and for twenty bucks I can buy enough to fabricate a whole boatload of cleats. Of course, the same qualities that make purpleheart strong enough to do the work of a cleat will make it fiercely resistant to being shaped into a cleat, so I’m looking at several weeks of labor to replace my perfectly serviceable plastic.
Is this reasonable? There’s no universal answer, no absolute right or wrong. It depends on the boat, the owner, and what they intend to do together. It is a question of values, which is more a spiritual issue than a practical one. And this is what building a wooden boat does for you: It becomes an ongoing workshop in clarifying values, sifting through the options, and making the best decisions. Through practice on the infinitesimal, irrelevant-to-the-rest-of-the-world issues of whether to craft a bunch of four-inch cleats by hand, or make another run at an improved finish on the deck, or ponder the temptation to tack on swoopy but nonfunctional flying buttresses, you build up the moral muscles for making the big decisions: the ones that affect other human lives, or the quality of life on earth.
It doesn’t have to be a boat. Another person’s Far From Perfect could be a cabin in the woods, a bluegrass band, a new career, or teaching sustainable agriculture in Nicaragua. Many of the underlying questions of values and applications of principle will be remarkably similar. There will be the same struggle to reconcile the ideal with the possible, and the same tension between discipline and creative flexibility. If it’s a life-changing project, it will require at least as much perseverance as the building of a wooden boat. In the end you are likely to emerge with more humility than pride (unless you can name your boat/cabin/band Perfection, with justification), and that is a good thing. You are also likely to have created something that adds a speck of joy or beauty to the world.
I’d like to take a couple of final pages here to lay out the most useful principles I learned, practical and philosophical, from my work on Far From Perfect. They aren’t only about boatbuilding. Apply that flexibility of mind, and you may see how they can affect any endeavor for the better. Of course they don’t guarantee success. But they are at least the building blocks of a more fulfilling adventure.
When contemplating this adventure, take a sheet of paper and draw a couple of bars, or goal markers, on opposite sides. The left bar represents something you know you can do successfully. In my case, I could have easily built a small sailboat from a kit. The right bar is an accomplishment that would be phenomenal, Herculean, the all-but-impossible forty-foot schooner. A minuscule minority of the highly gifted and driven should rightly aim for that goal on the right. For the rest of us, the reasonable
route is something in between.
Buy the best tools or instruments you can find, even when they seem like an extravagance at the point of purchase. Cheap tools are short-lived, frustrating, often incompetent, and occasionally even dangerous. They do not inspire respect, and a craftsperson who does not respect his or her tools is not on the way to creating durable and beautiful things with them. Good tools form an investment of belief in yourself, and while you’re learning a craft, they will be more forgiving of poor technique. A tool that is better than you are will encourage you to grow into it and will absorb a shared history of craftsmanship with you as the years and decades pass.
Train yourself to anticipate problems and devise solutions before they occur, like the little mast-securing line Joel Bergen installed on Quality Time. This isn’t the same thing as expecting the worst; it’s visualizing how events might unfold and being prepared to deal with all the possibilities.
At the end of today’s work, stop at a point where you know what the next step will be when you resume tomorrow. If you don’t know where you’re going next, you’re liable to wake up at 3 a.m. and worry about it, or resist resuming at all. Knowing where you’re going and being primed to tackle the first ten minutes of the job preserves momentum, which is precious capital. Writer Annie Dillard describes her relationship with a book-in-progress as like keeping a barely domesticated beast in the study that can turn feral overnight. “You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.” So it is with a boat, a painting, your tax return, or any other creative endeavor.
Despite the value of momentum, there are times when you just shouldn’t work on anything you seriously care about. These conditions may differ for you, but for me the no-work emotional zones are times when I’m angry, resentful, frustrated, fatigued, or impatient. During these cycles I can either perform a half hour of token work on the boat, something like sanding or paint masking that requires no great skill, or go rake leaves. If I approach my boat with a drill in my hand and resentment in my head, I’m going to build that temper into the boat—and then have to spend hours undoing the damage, which will only stoke more resentment. Thus, what should be a fulfilling experience turns into a miserable one, and an unfinished boat gets chainsawed into firewood.
There is a substantial difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection, and much of the struggle involved in your endeavor will be to understand and come to terms with that difference. It will help to remember that if you’re doing it for yourself, you alone are entitled to define “excellence.”
Don’t be too proud to ask for help. In the boatbuilding world there is almost no problem that someone hasn’t faced and licked before, and Internet forums have made it easy to connect with expertise worldwide. In my experience, it’s always given gracefully and respectfully if requested in like manner. Through such connections we create community, an endlessly widening ripple out of the personal act of creation.
Ultimately, however, you have to do what feels right to you, even if an expert advises against it. In most cases you will simply learn the reason why the expert pointed another way, and toss your mistake in the sprawling pile of junk under the boat. But occasionally you will discover something, perhaps something useful or beautiful, something never seen or done before on earth.
GLOSSARY
I loathe jargon, and the boat world employs more of it than any other field I can think of, including law. But much of it is unavoidable—there are innumerable specialized parts and functions on a boat, and they all need names. I tried to define uncommon words whenever they spilled into the story, but for easy reference, here’s an orderly (though informal) glossary.
Bowsprit A spar projecting forward off the bow of a sailboat, providing an attachment point for a larger jib than could be attached at the bow.
Chine The intersection of a hull where the sides meet the bottom pieces.
Coaming A raised wooden framework around a cockpit.
Dinghy A small boat usually powered by sails or oars.
Dory A small, flat-bottomed rowboat.
Draft The depth of water needed to float a boat or ship.
Forestay A sturdy wire that leads from the top of the mast to the bow, securing the mast and providing an attachment for a jib.
Gunwale The top edge of the side of the hull.
Jib A triangular sail set in front of the main or forward mast.
Jibe To turn a boat running downwind so that the wind drives the sail from the opposite side of the boat (also spelled gybe).
Keel A fin-like projection extending down from the centerline of the hull, essential to prevent sideways drift (leeway) on a sailboat.
Knot One nautical mile per hour, equal to 1.15 miles per hour.
Mast step A sturdy wooden block or framework in the hull that receives the heel of the mast.
Pram A small sailboat or rowboat, usually with a snubnose bow.
Sheer The uppermost line of the hull in profile view.
Sheet A line (rope) that controls the position of a sail.
Skeg A fin attached to the after end of a boat’s hull. In contrast to a keel, a skeg’s main function is to help a boat track in a straight line.
Sloop A sailboat with a single mast and two sails, a mainsail and jib.
Stem The piece of a boat’s frame at the leading edge of the bow; one of the important “bones” of its structure.
Tack To turn the bow of a sailboat through the eye of the wind so that the boat changes heading at least 90 degrees and the wind drives the sail from the opposite side of the boat.
Transom The back, or aft, wall of the hull.
REFERENCES AND RESOURCES
If you’re now thinking you might—just might—want to consider building a boat, there are many easily obtainable resources that will help you get educated and start moving.
Greg Rössel’s The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice offers a clear and comprehensive overview of five distinct methods of building wooden boats. If you already know you want to build a leakproof wood-and-fiberglass composite boat using the stitch-and-glue technique, Samual Devlin’s own book, Devlin’s Boatbuilding, is indispensable. The online WoodenBoat Store at www.woodenboatstore.com carries an enormous selection of books, videos, plans, models, and coffee mugs. It won’t hurt to spend a few bucks on purely inspirational material, so order Benjamin Mendlowitz’s spectacular Calendar of Wooden Boats, which has been coming out annually for more than a quarter-century.
It’s a good idea to buy an inexpensive study plan first for any boat you’re considering, because complete construction plans for small boats typically cost anywhere from $50 to $250. Study plans usually run about $15. Besides the WoodenBoat Store, some of the best sources for plans are Glen-L Marine Designs at www.boatdesigns.com; Selway Fisher Design at www.selwayfisher.com; and Devlin at www.devlinboat.com. (Also check out Sam Devlin’s custom design website at www.samdevlin.com.) Duckworks online magazine has an omnibus link page to dozens of plan suppliers, www.duckworksmagazine.com. A dangerous seduction lurking in all these online plans catalogs is photos of many of the amateur-built boats constructed from them.
These amateur builders themselves form a vast international pool of information. You’ll be able to contact some of them via online links from the plans catalogs or find them through Google. You can also go to one of the many annual wooden boat gatherings and ask questions (and rub up to the lovely boats) in person. Two of the largest are the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend, Washington; and the Wooden Boat Show in Mystic, Connecticut.
There are too many web-based boatbuilders’ forums and blogs to list here, but they’re easy to find with a search engine, and there’s a wealth of information in them. Peter Gron’s meticulously illustrated blog on the building of his Arctic Tern is phenomenal. Its address may have changed by the time this book appears in print, but Peter promised we’ll always be able to locate it by sear
ching his name. There are also several print magazines that are very useful to boaters, builders, and dreamers. WoodenBoat magazine is the best known, but check out Small Craft Advisor as well.
With all the technology and information so easily at hand, there’s never been a better time to build a wooden boat.
APPRECIATION
My first and deepest thanks must go to my wife, Patty Cheek, whose faith and encouragement never wavered. Even when she would accompany me to the marine supply store and watch yet another bill for premium epoxy and arcane boat hardware top $300, she would only flinch—not groan or wail.
Several boatbuilders, amateur and professional, very generously provided time, information, and when I finally forced myself to ask for it, advice. They also became friends, and I’m grateful for that, too: Vicki Altizer, Joel Bergen, Sam Devlin, Joe Greenley, and Peter Gron. Paddling buddy Howard Greene, classic wooden boat maven Mike Murray, Windworks CEO Greg Norwine, and lawyer/artist Bill Weissinger belong here, also.
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