March 2010

Nil Desperandum on March 1, 2010

When you’re building a boat, preserving momentum is vital. I mean personal momentum, the grit or gumption that keeps you going out to the boat shop every day to work on the beast. Novelist Annie Dillard says that

The Devlin Winter Wren — eventually

writing a book is like keeping a feral beast that must be visited daily if the writer is to preserve her mastery over it. “If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.” A boat is exactly like that.

After several months of slogging through mostly tedious projects on the boat I needed to make something pretty that would add a dramatic touch and pump up my enthusiasm. Decorative sheer strakes, or rails, seemed like the answer. And they’d be simple, just a couple of days’ interlude in the big project of finishing the inside of the hull.

What kind of wood? I did a small test with my stock of khaya mahogany and realized that I’d wipe out a $50 table saw blade slicing the necessary 40 feet of planks into the 1/8” thickness I needed. So I settled on vertical-grain fir, softer and with a resplendent sunlit-honey glow that contrasts nicely with the rich Interlux Lauderdale Blue color of the hull.

I’ll forego the excruciating details and just report that the two-day project stretched into three weeks. I ruined several pieces of VG fir before I got the hang of resawing it into the thin planks. I botched half a dozen strips of the same precious wood while making the moldings with the router. Somewhere in the middle of varnishing, which I decided to do before installation so as not to dribble varnish on the nice paint, I knocked one of the strakes over and put a three-foot-long rupture in it. (Rather than lose momentum making a new piece I closed the wound with epoxy.)

Even after all that effort, the finished pieces were far from perfect. I was half tempted to throw them out and start over when supportive neighbor Brian Kansky delicately reminded me that once Nil Desperandum visits a marina, these pieces are going to take a beating anyway. He’s right, of course, and it was a relief to abandon the prospect of building the damn things again.

Another kind neighbor, Ken Leisher, came over on a Sunday morning

The port strake with clamps

and helped me epoxy the strakes in place. It wasn’t difficult, but it’s one of those jobs that unquestionably demands four hands. And a mountain of clamps. After the requisite amount of fussing and jiggling we had 35 on the port side alone, and had to delay the starboard installation a day.

Sheer strake at bow, before trimming

Almost nothing else got done on the boat in February, but the varnished strakes have made a difference in my mood. It’s rewarding just to stand in the shop and stare at the boat now. The craftsmanship may be questionable, but it represents personal progress—three years ago I wouldn’t have attempted anything like this.

That’s a component of momentum, too.

I have about 1,020 hours in the boat so far, with at least that many more to go. Any time you take on a 2,000-hour project you’re going to have to devise ways to trick yourself into keeping enthusiasm and effort alive—the normal human brain just isn’t programmed for that kind of sustained momentum. Rewards must be woven into the grind.

That’s one more lesson that could transfer seamlessly from boatbuilding to life.

February 2010

I’m a fan of non-glossy varnish. Call it ignorance, call it chicken, call it the path of least resistance, but it’s working for me. I’m brushing all of Nil Desperandum’s brightwork with Epifanes Woodfinish Matte. You can assess the results from a couple of photos.

Here’s the mast tabernacle, which turned out to be January’s main project—a really strong, heavy chingadero made of khaya mahogany. (It’ll bolt to a reinforced cabin front and 3-inch-thick laminated deck beam with six 6-inch stainless steel carriage bolts).

And here are some of the cabin hull ceiling planks, ¼-inch vertical-grain fir, removed for their varnishing:

Why a matte finish? It’s vastly more forgiving than glossy varnish. Doesn’t show bubbles, waves, ridges, dips, chicken pox, or any other embarrassing surface geography. Yes, it’s much less showy than a flawlessly reflective varnish job. But we nonprofessionals have so little hope of pulling off the latter. My philosophy is to cultivate the art of the possible—and to let the natural beauty of the wood’s grain and color make its own statement, unadorned.

Or, as a Charles Schulz Peanuts cartoon from ‘way back in the ‘60s said (through a sick-grinning Charlie Brown): “I feel much better now that I’ve given up all hope.”

I didn’t make great progress on the boat in January due to heavy teaching duties. But I did complete the tabernacle, the hull ceiling, and passed an important milestone: the boat is now guaranteed to float. By that I mean I’ve now completed more than enough watertight flotation compartments and foam installations to counter Nil Desperandum’s 700 pounds of lead ballast and batteries.

I’ve made use of every possible cranny. There was a ¾-inch space between the inside of the hull and the ceiling planks, so I bought a roll of minicell foam of the same thickness, cut pieces to fit, and installed them behind the ceiling. There’s about 2,500 cubic inches of the stuff, enough to counter 90 pounds of lead.

There are three or four more air or foam compartments to make, and by the time I’m  finished I’ll have flotation exceeding ballast by at least 20 percent—not counting the bouyancy of all the wood. That margin of safety is already making me feel very good about this boat.

There’s one small thing I didn’t feel very good about in January’s work.

Two of the ceiling planks turned out to have some natural discoloration in them—pale brown-green streaks several feet long. The flaw was barely noticeable on the unfinished wood, but the varnish upped the contrast.

I debated it with myself for several days. Why not let the wood be what it is? (Knots never trouble me unless they’re going to weaken a structure.) Is this a resurgence of the old perfectionist impulse?

Finally I asked my wife Patty to come out to the shop and offer her opinion. She said, perceptively, “I think it’s going to bother you every time you go into the cabin and see it.” I knew she was right, and that was really all it took. I unscrewed the offending planks and made replacements. It took about an hour.

How good is good enough? That’s one of life’s central issues, and as with so many others, building a wooden boat is a remarkable instructor.

Ultimately, it comes down to how the issue in question makes you feel. It’s as simple as that. Pride or embarrassment? Pleasure or disgust? Play the movie forward, imagine yourself in the boat (or house, or job, or marriage) a year or two in the future. The emotion that stirs tells you what you should do.

Next month: I really, really need to complete the cabin area from sole to sheer. I’ve been messing with it for too long. Nil Desperandum’s projected launch date is June 2011. Feels like a deadline—and a needed motivational force.

Nil Desperandum at the dawn of 2010.

Wasn’t that long ago in human history that hardware had to be handmade. Nails, door hinges, coathooks—every metal component of every building, buggy, or boat was the product of someone’s individual craftsmanship.

Nobody in right mind craves to go back to the crepuscular days before machine production. Yet, occasionally when we do, by choice, it’s a revelation.

I was having no luck finding chainplates for Nil Desperandum. Chainplates are the bronze or stainless steel straps that bolt to the hull as attachment points for the shrouds, or guy wires, that support the mast. The big Seattle chandlery, Fisheries Supply, had a few, but the version that came closest to the specs for my Devlin Winter Wren were heavy and ugly and $92 apiece. The 21st century’s most dazzling technology—a Google foray in search of used chainplates—failed, for once.

But we have an amazing concentration of  oddball artisans here on Whidbey Island, and this past year a small sign for a business called Renaissance Metal Shop had gone up on a rural road a mile from my house. I made a scale drawing of the chainplates I envisioned and dropped in. “No problem,” said metal artist John Moritz, and later in the week I brought him a scrap of silicon bronze I had picked up in Seattle.

Nil Desperandum decked out in her new jewelry

Two days later my chainplates were ready. They were, in a word, beautiful. “I hope it’s all right that they look handmade.” Moritz said, a tint of worry in his voice. “Of course,” I said. “The whole boat is handmade.”

In a provocative little book titled The Nature and Art of Workmanship published 40 years ago, British industrial designer David Pye laid out a distinction between what he called the “workmanship of  risk” and the “workmanship of certainty.” While not damning mass production, Pye said it is so important to keep the workmanship of risk alive—the crafting of things by hand, where the quality of the production depends on the artisan’s experience, skill, and values—that it goes right to the heart of civilization itself.

I polished and drilled Moritz’s chainplates and installed them on the hull—with bronze bolts, of course, and on the outside, instead of hidden inside like the chainplates on modern production sailboats.

A whole convergence of fine things have happened here. I saved money myself, while contributing to our island economy. Nil Desperandum acquired a bit of functional jewelry that’s entirely in keeping with her character. The structural necessity of chainplates will be outside, in plain view, and it’ll be like seeing physics tangibly at work on the boat, the loads on the mast flowing down into the structure of the hull.

In other December work, I decided that instead of painting the inside of the hull I would finish it with a plank ceiling—which in boatspeak is the hull’s interior walls, not the cabin roof.

It’s painstaking work. I have to resaw vertical-grain fir into ¼-inch-thick planks and fit each one individually, then screw it onto vertical strips I’ve glued inside the hull. All these planks will be removable, of course, in case work on the hull ever becomes necessary (tightening the chainplate bolts, for example).

The starboard fir ceiling with mahogany book rack

The photo here shows the ceiling in place from the deck beam to the aft cabin bulkhead. It’s not finished yet. In January I’ll remove the planks piece by piece for improved fitting, beveling the edges, and varnishing. And then I’ll plank from the deck beam forward to the anchor locker bulkhead.

Is the extra cost and labor worth it? I think so. When I sit in what will become the cabin, there’s a tangible sensation of warmth and welcome from the natural wood grain that just wouldn’t be there in a painted enclosure.

It’s just like the slight randomness of the metal artist’s handmade chainplates. I think that in certain contexts—a Boeing 737 at 35,000 feet, for example—we’re reassured by the precision of perfect, machine-made environments. But in others, we have an intrinsic craving for connections to the natural world, which is something we’ve almost lost. Varnished wood, with the infinite variety of grain patterns, establishes one connection. A handmade sailboat, if it works right, is a connection to the full spectrum of nature’s cycles.

In January: Work will alternate between finishing the ceiling and building the mast tabernacle—like the chainplates, a beefy bit of structure. A lesson I’ve learned in boatbuilding is to alternate repetitive tasks like planking the ceiling with something entirely different. When work on one project threatens to stall because it’s tedious work, there’s an alternative that preserves forward progress.

Chingadero. Spanish, a language much richer in maledicta than English, supplies the perfect word for this month. I’ll loosely translate chingadero as “a small, extremely annoying boat part.” Check an online dictionary of Spanish slang for the more universal rendering.

I spent too much of November making chingaderos for Nil Desperandum.

Most of them are minor out-of-sight structural pieces made from scrap wood, such as the bars that lock the lead ballast ingots in place, or the  fir stringers that support the cabin floor (“sole” in boatspeak). These things don’t need to look elegant, but they do have to fit. All have to be rot-proofed with a jacket of epoxy. And be strong enough for whatever work it is they have to do.

Failed chingaderos, destined for scrap.

I first made the four

Bilge with ballast, depth sounder, and bilge pump

ballast-locking bars from scraps of fir. As soon as I split one while screwing it into position, I knew they were all too flimsy. I threw all four away and pawed through the scrap-wood bin for hardwood. The new editions are oak and mahogany, and they seem much more substantial.

You don’t want 60-pound ballast ingots rolling around when the boat heels.

The cabin soles need all kinds of chingaderos underneath and around them for support, and each one needs to be shaved to a precise thickness and bevel angle where it meets the sloping “V” of the hull. Cut and try, cut and try. The curving fir pieces that meet the outside edges of the sole were the most excruciating. I made the one for the port side four times.

Still, there’s character-building value in this work. I’m finding that I feel no anger or frustration, and only moderate impatience, when I throw away another two-hour investment in a misshapen chingadero. What’s the choice? As any Zen cadet knows, get angry and you’ll build that quality into the boat itself. And make your own life miserable besides.

Emotional reactions to misjudgments and mistakes can be a matter of choice, not instinct. And building a boat is terrific training.

November’s rewarding project was making the cabin soles.

I first cut and fit

Cabin sole pieces in bathtub for drying

cardboard templates, then used them to shape ½-inch plywood floors. Then I used the table saw to rip ¼-inch-thick planks of khaya mahogany. I laminated the khaya to the plywood, separated by pencil-thin fir strips. They’re sealed with epoxy and will eventually wear four or five coats of varnish, the top one a non-glossy finish that shouldn’t be too slippery when wet.

They’re not perfect—this was the first time I’ve ever built anything like this—but they’re pretty,

Cabin soles in place, temporarily

and I feel a satisfying rush of accomplishment every time I look at them. They’re serving as the antidote to the slog of all those chingaderos.

This is something I’ve learned about boatbuilding—or writing a book, or taking on any sweeping challenge that’s going to go on for years. It’s not necessarily best to do everything in its logical order. To preserve morale, you’d better create a system of rewards interspersed with the inevitable drudgery.

And creating a thing of beauty is always rewarding. That’s why we go to the great bother of wooden boats.

Nil Desperandum, a Devlin Winter Wren, on 12.1.09

Martha, a 102-year-old schooner based nearby in Port Townsend

If it were all fun, all the time, everybody’d be doing it.

But a lot of the work of building a boat is slow, painstaking, rife with potential for ugly mistakes, and likely to keep you awake at 3 a.m.

Nil Desperandum on Nov. 1, 2009

Most of October’s work falls into that lumpy category. I built the berth flat, flotation compartments, and battery hold in the bilge. I perched on my shop stool for hours staring at the blue beast, trying to figure out a (a) cheap (b) strong (c) decent-looking, and (d) buildable compression post. I spent another Big Gulp of cash on goop, literally: another gallon of epoxy and several tubes of 3M’s 5200 adhesive/sealant, the modern boatbuilder’s salvation unguent.

The Devlin Winter Wren plans call for a raised, ½-inch plywood floor from the anchor locker to the daggerboard case. Eventually outfitted with a custom-made, form-fitted foam cushion (whir of money taking wing), this will form the berth flat, or bed.

I complicated the matter by turning the various spaces under the flat into several of the watertight compartments that will keep Nil Desperandum* afloat despite her 700 pounds of ballast if the worst happens, a capsize and total swamping.

Designer Sam Devlin heard about my idea and strongly suggested I not permanently seal the compartments, but preserve access through watertight screw-in deck plates. I bitched and moaned about the extra cost and work, but seeing as how Sam has built about 350 more boats than I have, I figured I should follow his advice.

Now that I’ve done it, I’m glad. The deck plates, recessed into the plywood with router and chisel and sealed with 5200, actually look cool. And besides providing a way to peer in and check for water penetration, they turn the chambers into storage crannies for items like spare rope and tools.

The biggest chamber won’t be sealed. It’s to hold 240 pounds of lead ballast plus two beefy 100 amp-hour deep-cycle batteries (each weighing another 65 pounds).

Bilge with battery compartment and 200 lb. ballast (not yet locked in).

Why so much juice for a small boat? I detest gasoline outboards—honestly, not as much for environmental reasons as for their noise, vibration and general crankiness—so I’m planning a Torqueedo electric motor for auxiliary drive. Clean, quiet, and more insane extra expense. But one of the few defensible reasons for building your own boat is to be able to build exactly what you want.

The compression post literally led to several October mornings awake at 3 a.m., staring at the predawn ceiling and gnawing at the problem. Devlin’s plans are not rich in detail and do not explain what the compression post is supposed to look like or how it’s to be built, only that there must be one. The post obviously has to be strong, since it has to carry some of the mast’s load off the deck beam and into the bottom of the hull. Since the post bursts up through the middle of the berth to the deck, it should be compact and nicely finished, a piece of the cabin furniture.

A friend helpfully donated a beefy piece of stainless steel pipe. But it was an unusual size and I couldn’t find fittings that would help attach it to the berth flat and beam.

I talked to a bronze supply company in Colorado. They had beautiful bronze pipe, of which they would sell me a six-foot length for $240. But I needed only two feet.

A neighbor was walking his dogs past my garage—a Boeing engineer neighbor—and I invited him in for a consultation. Very helpfully and adeptly, he studied the plans, then  picked up a spare wooden stick and demonstrated how the loads would act on the post. For the first time, it made complete sense. A big thanks, Ian.

The solution I’m now making is one of the two he recommended, and it’s the simplest, cheapest and prettiest: A $7.95 galvanized steel pipe from the neighborhood hardware store, to be cocooned in epoxy inside a mahogany post. Here’s a section

Mockup section of compression post

I cobbled up from scraps as a trial, then the complete post ready for bonding together. It’s fairly easy to make and appears as though it will work perfectly.

As I related in my book The Year of the Boat, there

compression post ready for bonding

are endless lessons with wider life   applications to be learned in building a small sailboat. Here was one: So often we burden our lives with systems of excessive cost and complexity. Sometimes we can’t help it—the burdens are forced onto us—but when we have a choice, the simplest solution is also likely to be the most elegant.

And the most conducive to a good night’s sleep.

* Not to Worry

Sam Devlin nailed it with eerie prescience. He wrote Devlin’s Boat Building, the bible of modern stitch-and-glue construction, almost fifteen years ago, and in it he predicted exactly where I would be on October 3, 2009:

Overwhelmed.

The Winter Wren, post-turnover

“Guard against post-rollover stall-out,” he warns (p. 141). “Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of projects yet to be completed, and resist making a list of them. Just pick them off one by one …”

September had seemed like a good month in the boat shop.

The Winter Wren's bottom

I gave the bottom three coats of antifouling, cut a heart-stopping two-inch hole in the hull and installed the depth sounder, cobbled up a waterline-simulator with a sawhorse and a bunch of clamps and painted a stripe, and finally rolled on three base coats of topside paint.

Usually topside paint waits till near the end of construction. A lot could happen to the sides of the boat over the next year or two, including spills, scrapes and unanticipated holes to be drilled. But it looked easier to put at least the base coats on while the boat was still inverted, so I did. I also craved the selfish pleasure, frankly, of seeing my boat try on her party dress. Nothing makes as big a difference in appearance as quickly as paint.

And pleasure it is. The color is Interlux “Lauderdale blue.” I stirred in a 50 percent mix of flattening agent to leave a satin finish instead of high gloss, which helps mask the many surface imperfections. More credit to Interlux than to me, but it looks stunning.

On the last weekend in September, three neighbors and I rolled her upright again. No mishaps, no 911 calls—and the engineer among us noted that he heard no creaks or groans, aside from those emitted by the crew, and proclaimed that a good sign of  structural integrity.

But now, just as Devlin predicted, I’m suffering post-rollover blues. The work of finishing all the interior structures—cabin sole, cockpit sole, ballast, battery compartments, bilge pump, compression post, storage compartments, on and on and on—looks like it’s stretching into infinity. It’s daunting and discouraging.

Of course Devlin is right in advising to “just pick them off one by one.” But it’s an emotional hurdle I’m not over yet. It’s going to require a few more days of sitting on my shop stool, staring at the great blue thing that is not yet a boat.

The blue thing does now have a name: Nil Desperandum.

I’ve bounced it off several friends, Not all of them have liked it. One cracked, “If you get in trouble out there, better hope the Roman Coast Guard is around.”

I like it very much. It’s a reminder I need constantly, even when sitting on the shop stool, staring and feeling overwhelmed. Advice from the Roman poet Horace, it translates: “Quit worrying, dummy.”

• ·

The second weekend in September I went to the annual Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, which grows more spectacular every year.

Peter Gron and I gave a joint talk on “Perfectionism and the Wooden Boat,” illustrating our differing approaches on how meticulous one should be in building a boat. Peter is vastly more skilled, methodical, and patient than I am, and his Devlin Arctic Tern, now approaching completion, sets standards that will send most other amateurs, and some professionals, into stark raving paroxysms of envy.

Even so, he’s been an inspiration (and a generous source of advice), and I’m a better boatbuilder because of him. Visit his blog here.

The festival is also

Jibsheet led through cam cleat—way cool.

a fountain of practical ideas. As long as they’ve been around, sailboats are still floating galaxies of problems, and amateur and pro builders alike keep devising better ways to deal with them. One revolutionary

idea I may borrow for  Nil Desperandum is builder Barrett Faneuf’s cam cleats for the jibsheets. If the jib isn’t big enough to demand winches, why not use the quickest, easiest way to secure them?

Exquisitely homemade Wiley ports—an inexpensive, lightweight alternative to stainless steel portlights

Finally, the festival is a minefield of lethal boat lust.

In The Year of the Boat I wrote how my normally wise, prudent, and rational wife Patty fell for a colossal wooden boat years ago before we even knew how to sail and was hatching a plan to convert our home equity into it. And also moving aboard. I intervened. In September she did it again—or

"Ripple," a 26' Atkin gaff cutter

more accurately, a festival boat for sale did it to her. It was a 26’ Atkin gaff cutter, beautiful condition, good price. Once again I exercised my veto, but this time it was hard: I had no trouble imagining us sailing the whee off this beauty, and lavishing the care on her that she would demand.

But there’s only so much time and energy in a human life, and dividing it among five wooden boats—two kayaks, one completed daysailer, one cruiser-in-the-making, the Atkin cutter, and, yes, our day jobs—is asking the impossible. That doesn’t always stop wooden boat enthusiasts, but it made us pause. At least till next year’s festival.

Here’s a photographic sprinkling of boats and details from Port Townsend 2009.

A 16'6" Devlin Eider, predecessor to the 18'8" Winter Wren

The shapely rump of Pax, festival director Kaci Cronkhite's lovely 1936 spidsgatter

"Martha," a 102-year-old schooner designed by B.B. Crowninshield, the most beautiful boat on the planet.

One crucial difference between pro and amateur boatbuilders:

The Winter Wren's skeg with helpful boulder

A pro would not wander out and harvest a handy boulder to weight down a glued piece where a clamp wouldn’t fit. Or if he did, he wouldn’t post a picture of it on his website.

An amateur will improvise recklessly, even proudly, and admit to it all. In lieu of clamps I’ve deployed bungee cords, rubber bands, springy sticks propped against walls and ceilings, Zip-loc baggies of lead shot, and of course, boulders.

My operational philosophy,

A pro-built Winter Wren by designer/builder Sam Devlin

in life and in boatbuilding: Whatever works is good.

This last month the big job was attaching the shoe keel and external stem, which together form an impact-absorbing strip along the centerline of the boat. The keel grows into a finlike skeg near the stern, which assists tracking. The boulder and clamps in the photo secured a quarter-inch-thick oak strip intended to be replaceable after it gets scraped and battered.

The stem is also decorative, as it defines the cut of the bow above the waterline. Since it had to be laminated in order to follow the bow’s curvature, I slipped in a couple of layers of pinkish khala mahogany among the white oak. It turned out nicely, although I’m a little worried about the fragility of the skinny part at the top end of the bow. It will eventually plug into a bowsprit, which may protect it from crunches.

The terrible problem was cutting and trimming the pieces to adjust to the continually changing curvature of the hull. I’ll spare the intimate details, but it required many cardboard templates, router, chisel, and three kinds of sanders.

I made it more, not less, difficult with what turned out to be a dumb idea. To increase the lever arm of the ballast, I wanted to get as much of the specified 685 pounds of lead ballast outside the hull, hanging below like in a full-keel sailboat. I drilled 30 one-inch holes in the 1.75-inch-deep shoe keel and poured them full of lead shot and epoxy. The holes accommodated a total of 7.5 pounds of lead—1.1% of the ballast. Very impressive effort.

Professional boatbuilders, of course, execute dumb ideas, too, and they charge real money for them. Twice this summer I sailed a $200,000 French yacht that had the engine controls—throttle and shift—way down on the cockpit floor. You’re nervously guiding this costly monster into a crowded slip, and you have to keep looking away from where it’s going while you bend down to adjust the power.

During August I also finished fairing the outside of the hull—smoothing the surface in preparation for painting—and engaged another bout against that old latent demon, perfectionism.

The Winter Wren, ready to have her bottom painted

Professional boatbuilders need to finish every visible square inch of a boat to a high standard; it’s evidence of a deeper attention to detail. And they know how to do it efficiently.

I know some amateurs who, though less efficient, hold themselves to the same standard. A mediocre square inch, even in a place that won’t ever be seen by anyone except mussels and salmon—the bottom of the hull—is a testament to their failed dedication. It’s practically a moral issue.

I was working long and hard, grinding away with sandpaper on the Winter Wren’s bottom, carefully surveying each section with fingertips, and despairing of ever finishing the damn boat, when I suddenly straightened up and said (almost out loud) “Hey! Do I want a usable sailboat or a bloody moral testament?”

At that, I gave myself permission to sand the bottom to a lousier level of imperfection than the topsides.

I explored this issue in The Year of the Boat, where among other reflections on perfectionism I quoted designer/builder Sam Devlin: “As you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever. There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place where we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”

This makes perfect sense for pro or amateur. And yes, this boat is—so far—better than the daysailer that came before it (named, affectionately, Far From Perfect).

For an amateur, whose time and boatbuilding chops are necessarily limited, a boat should not be seen as an avatar of one’s moral character, but simply a chart of personal growth in skill and values. For me, at least, that seems more realistic and manageable.

And it sure as hell relieves the pressure.

A Winter Wren from a 1984 magazine cover

Why build a boat?The question pops in warm and lovely July as other sailing enthusiasts are out enjoying Puget Sound, and I’m in the shop day after day, fairing the hull.

“Fairing” is a word with a misleading air. “Fair” conjures mental images of incorruptible justice, the Fifteenth Amendment, a nice base hit for the Mariners, a blond princess on a balcony. But in the boat shop, “fair” means endless hours of sanding to abolish all the bumps, dips, kinks, ridges, undulations, and epoxy acne on the hull in preparation for painting.

I’ve been at it for two weeks, two hours a day, and I’m still not finished. It’s not fun.

It’s not fair.

So why build a boat? I posed the question in e-mails to other amateur builders whom I know to be good thinkers. Mark Nelson, who lives in the unlikely sailboat environment of Las Vegas, replied:

Fairing the hull

“There is nothing quite as satisfying, after eight hours at a keyboard in a conceptual world, as getting out to the garage, in old clothing, making messes and working with wood. Building things, synthesis, seeing things come together by your own hand—all of that is part of it, but could be gained by building most anything, from small bead necklaces to the Empire State building. The undeniable fact that boats take on their own character and personality, much of it infused by the builder himself, is what is so gratifying and rewarding about building a boat.”

Davout Van Zyl of South Africa began by recounting his mixed German, Dutch, English and French ancestry—“four of the most industrious and creative seafaring nations of Europe.” And then he surveyed the existential despair/euphoria cycle that all amateur boatbuilders know only too well:

“You will suffer blisters and other superficial wounds if luck is on your side, and you will maim yourself if it is not. Your progress will be slow, often indiscernible. You will invest huge amounts of time and money, and alienate all but the most devoted of those close to you. You will pass up on numerous jaunts with old friends, until they eventually stop inviting you, and you will rightfully earn the reputation of an obsessed recluse. If you plan carefully, you will occupy only half your double carport for any number of years. You will have sawdust and epoxy in your hair and in your house and ruin countless articles of clothing. You are guaranteed a dreadful fibreglass rash similar to some awful sexually transmitted disease, without the fun of catching it. You will often feel inadequate and view your handiwork with misgiving, muttering dark insults to yourself. You will have to bear increasingly less subtle hints by loved ones to get professional help, and I don’t mean the carpentry kind.

“And yet one day, when there is enough substance to it, you will look at your creation, and suddenly you will be a god. You will experience the deepest joy when you run your hands over the imperfect boat you have created, and the flaws will be of no consequence. It may or may not be beautiful, but it is functional. Previous achievements will pale in comparison. You know your boat will one day float between more flashy yet lesser plastic objects pretending to be boats, and it will be a much, much finer thing. You will discriminate between those that have built a wooden boat and those that haven’t. You will view the latter not with scorn, but with sympathy, for they only exist.”

Beautiful thoughts. We can only pray our boats live up to them. (Mark Nelson, incidentally, has completed a 12’6” Marisol skiff—see photos here. Davout van Zyl is building a Winter Wren II exactly like mine.

To give some relief from the fairing, I’ve been building my stem. Twice.

As I wrote in The Year of the Boat, the secret to building a boat is to be emotionally and financially prepared to make every part twice. Whether through luck or mildly improved competence, I haven’t had to recast many of the Winter Wren’s pieces yet. The stem, which I’m making from about ten laminations of white oak and one of mahogany (for a kind of accent stripe) ruined my streak.

More accurately, I ruined it. After some painstaking template-making, I had a plywood-and-nail form for laminating a stem that would precisely follow the highly imperfect curve of my bow. After three days of bandsawing and gluing up laminations, though, I realized that what I needed was a stem that would help disguise the imperfections in the bow.

Laminating the stem with white oak and mahogany strips

I threw the first effort away and am now eleven laminations into a new, improved, and still imperfect model.

The last weekend in July, I took Far From Perfect, my earlier boat, to the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle for a homebuilt boat show. Most of the boats on display were small (10’ to 20’) sailing craft, and they evinced a great deal of care, skill, and creativity. The best boat name was worn by Vernon Parrett’s Shellback: Row v. Wade. The best boat was James McMullen’s stretched Iain Oughtred Arctic Tern, Rowan. McMullan, who after years as an amateur has turned boatbuilding pro (dba Emerald Marine Carpentry), gave the most practical reason for building your own:

“You can build exactly what you want. Or at least you can build your skills toward eventually building exactly what you want.”

McMullen has just about gotten there; he’s built 51 boats.

If you are building a boat with a centerboard or daggerboard, and most sailboats under about 20 feet have one, there comes a few months into the project a heart-stopping, character-defining, pivotal moment when you have to:

Drill a hole through the hull. Then thrust a jigsaw blade through it and cut a long, narrow slot about two inches wide and 20 or 40 inches long through the bottom of your boat.

  

The daggerboard slot in the Winter Wren

If this slot is even slightly in the wrong place, or it’s the wrong size, or its bevels are bad, or the daggerboard trunk is expoxied over it at an imperfect angle, the mistake may not be redeemable. The boat-in-progress may have no further use except to be chainsawed into next winter’s firewood.

I am not waxing melodramatic. Plywood/fiberglass/epoxy construction has many advantages, which is why I chose, for the second time, to build one of Sam Devlin’s designs. But one of its disadvantages is that it can’t easily be taken apart and repaired, like a traditional plank-on-frame boat. Once the daggerboard trunk is in, it’s in forever. In this boat, in fact, it becomes an integral part of the structure, helping to stiffen and solidify the hull.

daggerboard trunk, floor timber, and cabin bulkhead

I mentioned “character-building.” In The Year of the Boat I mention, and explore it, a lot. Every day you spend building a boat has the potential to change you, for better or not.

You can cultivate patience and build that quality into the boat, or its opposite. You have an opportunity almost daily to choose between hope and despair. When it comes time for the daggerboard slot, you have to exercise immense caution, then somehow flip it and find underneath some reservoir of great courage and abandon.

I sawed out my slot. I taped a couple of small spirit levels to the trunk so I could monitor its axis in the universe, and screwed and epoxied it into place. Forever.

Despite what was at stake, I felt a surprising calm about the whole operation. Most of it seemed to come from trust in myself—if I made all the right measurements mindfully, this operation really would turn out all right. It’s a confidence I didn’t have a few years ago. There was also a healthy sense of perspective. If I made a mistake here, life would not end, the sea would not boil, the earth would not slip out of its orbit and smash into Saturn.

I executed the cut-and-fit correctly. I think.

Last Saturday three good friends converged at my Whidbey Island garage to help me turn  over the hull, now about 350 pounds’ worth of plywood and fiberglass, for exterior fairing and ‘glassing.

It wasn’t difficult; we didn’t use any exotic rollover jigs or hoists.  Three guys pushed up the starboard side while one steadied the port side. When the starboard sheer reached the vertical peak, two of the three starboard guys scurried around to help ease the port side onto the floor. Then we lifted it one end at a time onto two-by-four cradles.

Nothing broke, nobody got hurt. If we’d had one body fewer, it would have been extremely difficult—and dangerous.

Having these remarkably willing friends participate (this wasn’t the first time Rick, Brian and Bruce had been called on) is another of the benefits of building a boat—it generates community, which is a larger arena of character. It was something like an old barn-raising in farm country. We’ve almost lost that spirit of neighborly cooperation in this country, almost forgotten how good it feels. 

Larry, Rick, Brian and Bruce

Over the next three months the boat will get its glass-and-epoxy dress, bottom paint, and appendages such as the stem (the curved oak-mahogany bumper that outlines the bow) and skeg (a fin from the centerboard slot back to the rudder). By then it will have added another 50-odd pounds, and it’ll be time to turn it over again. And we’ll have another opportunity to feel good.

The hull, awaiting its glass dress

Every boatbuilder needs to learn to think like water. This isn’t a metaphysical concept, but rather a practical one. Contemplate every possible way a molecule of wet could squirm past a joint or a screw to reach wood, which it would then rot from the inside, unseen and insidious.

 One reader of The Year of the Boat wrote to say he thought I was artificially posing as a  boatbuilding doofus for effect, “until I saw the cover photo with the exposed screws. Then I knew you were telling the truth. You really didn’t know what you were doing.”

Building the Sam Devlin-designed Winter Wren  now I know a   little more, and one thing is to countersink those screws and   fill the holes with epoxy and wooden plugs called bungs.

Interior of daggerboard case with epoxy coves

And when I built the  daggerboard trunk this last month I lined the inside, which will see constant water, with kitchen countertop laminate. Then I tilted the assembled trunk on each of its four corners and painted a bead of epoxy down each interior seam. Gravity formed a neat little waterproof curve across each seam, sealing it forever. So I trust, anyway.

Learning to “think like water” is one of the spinoff benefits from boatbuilding that may have applications elsewhere in life, leading to better citizenship in the world.

Aldo Leopold, in his rightly celebrated 1949 essay “Thinking Like a Mountain,” advocated that we humans learn to view all nature as an interconnected system, as a mountain supports everything in its ecological niche. Learning to “think like water,” or wind, or a dolphin or a duck, is likewise a key to understanding nature from the broadest perspectives—physical, chemical, biological.

 I don’t intend to  plummet any deeper into lecture mode here, but I think this is what Homo sapiens needs to do if we are to be a sustainable species. Wooden boatbuilding and sailing is showing me, at least, how to move toward that understanding.

My other accomplishment for the month was to engineer and build the deck beam, which also happens to look like a curve we’d find in the natural world. Its form, a low, gentle curve, recalls a hanging bough or the arch of an orca’s spine.

 This piece had to be lightweight (because it’s high in the boat) and monstrously strong (because it has to transfer the moment of the mast into the hull). So I bought a three-inch-thick Sitka spruce beam, ripped it into nine thin planks, and reassembled them into a permanently bent lamination.

I’d never done this before, just read about it. Greg Rössel’s very useful book The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice explained how to go about it. Rössel warns, correctly, that the process of gluing the epoxy-bathed pieces is like “clamping a slithering squid.” But it works, and my deck beam, now implanted securely in the hull, feels like you could park a Buick on it without a quiver of protest.

Boatbuilder on deck beam

Next projects: Implant the daggerboard trunk. Finish off the interior hull seams. Install the plywood triangles that will eventually support the cabin sole. 

And then convene a major neighborhood party to turn the boat over and fiberglass the exterior.