The Year of the Boat - [Excerpt]
Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself
Sasquatch Books 2008

It began as a project to build a wooden sailboat in a suburban garage within a self-imposed deadline of one year. But difficulties—both technical and emotional—made a shambles of the deadline, and Lawrence Cheek’s project to build a boat became an inquiry into the nature of beauty, a struggle with obsession and perfectionism, and finally a question of character. The Year of the Boat is the story of how one man built a boat in spite of himself.

Perfectionism and the wooden boat
Published in WoodenBoat magazine #203, July/August 2008

A wooden boat will take every bit of perfectionism you can throw at it,” warned  the owner of a 33-foot sloop. “You’ve got to be very dedicated and very anal,” said a man detailing a classic lobster boat converted to cruising. And there was the skipper of a stunning 78-foot schooner, deflecting questions on how the crew could possibly keep up with her maintenance: “I say, how can you not keep up with it? How can you ignore the responsibility of maintaining a thing of such beauty, 52 tons of the finest wood ever grown?”

I was absorbing all this five years ago, my first time wandering the docks at a wooden boat festival, casually interviewing owners. It wasn’t an auspicious introduction for a recovering perfectionist beginning to consider buying or building a wooden boat. I’d wrestled with the perfectionist demon in my writing for decades, finally realizing that it had led to creative paralysis and chronic dissatisfaction—and alcohol to blunt the pain—and had reached a reasonable balance in most corners of my life. Taking on a wooden boat threatened the peace. [More]