“Finished” is not “perfect”
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Nil Desperandum’s cockpit is finished! (At least in the sense that Creation was finished upon the successful emergence of the coelacanth.)

The seats, lazarette lid, and deck bridge are implanted and have a couple of coats of epoxy on them for waterproofing. They’ll be varnished, of course, but I’ll wait until it’s time to varnish all the other exterior brightwork.
The seats, like the lattice cockpit sole, are more complicated than necessary. I cut out and test-fitted a 1/4” plywood base for each side, then laminated planks of vertical-grain fir separated by mahogany strips to the top side.
Under each seat is an open storage bin
for miscellaneous daysailing debris such as water bottles, binocs, camera, docklines, etc. The clear plastic screw-down deck plate provides topside access to a locker under the bridge deck. It’s amazing how many “big” production boats (25- to 30-footers) don’t have easily accessed compartments, so all this stuff slides around the cockpit with no easily accessible home.
Also under each seat is a watertight—hopefully—flotation chamber of about 1.6 cubic feet. There is now 13.8 cubic feet of air or foam flotation scattered about the hull, enough to float 200 pounds more ballast than N.D. will carry. Puget Sound is deep and cold; it’ll feel good to sail a boat that will keep its head above water no matter what terrible thing happens.
Since the last report I’ve also built the deck supports
that cantilever from the sheer clamp. They need to be strong since the narrow side decks have to support the weight of a crew member walking forward to retrieve an anchor or untangle a halyard.
I think I can cautiously report that Nil Desperandum is as over-engineered as Far From Perfect was under. (See The Year of the Boat, chapters 9, 10, 11—well, really, all of them.) Our neighbor Ian, a Boeing engineer and experienced sailor, dropped by the other day and offered approving compliments. On the earlier boat at about this stage, a different Boeing engineer was darkly issuing misgivings.
I’m not an engineer, of course, and most of what I’m doing is intuitive. But experience does solidify intuition. It’s not difficult to visualize where tension, compression, and shear loads are going, and in a wooden boat, building in more structure basically means just building in more wood.
In a design like this—Sam Devlin’s Winter Wren II—practically every piece becomes an integral part of the structure. The cockpit seats, for example, actually stiffen the hull and help distribute the transom rudder loads. The disadvantage is that all these components are locked in forever. If I ever decide I don’t like the seats, the only way to liberate them will be a Sawzall.
So how “finished” is the cockpit? If I were inclined to perfectionism—a monster I wrestled with in The Year of the Boat—I can see a good 50 hours of detail work left to do in the cockpit:
paint touch-up, improving the scraggly marine adhesive sealant line where the seats meet the hull, and much more. I could even drill out and replace the bungs (left) where I didn’t exactly succeed at aligning the wood grain.
I probably won’t do most of this. I’ve come to believe that craftsmanship is not a pure objective reality, but a relativist quantity that ought to take into account the function of the object that’s being created. If someone wants to build a sailboat intended for museum exhibition, I won’t argue with that objective—but it’s not my objective.
I just want to go sailing. Next summer.

Want to see a completed Winter Wren? A Polish builder, Mateusz Masior, has completed one, and photos are posted on Devlin’s builder page. It’s a beautiful boat.

made up the lattice. More hours in filling the small gaps that resulted from small imprecisions. Several more in sanding. Many more in epoxy-sealing and varnishing (five coats). A couple more in implanting three hidden braces underneath—when I stood on the sole in the test fitting, I felt a slight springiness,





rogues on an up-till-then calm Saturday in April. I had taken the blade guard off the table saw to cut a rabbet—a shallow L-shaped recess on a board’s edge—and had a momentary flicker of impatience. Or complacency, or carelessness. My memory of the exact instant of contact is a little imprecise. But I reached for the board just before the blade stopped turning, and my grab was also imprecise.
a boatbuilder would have a couple of centuries back: mallet, chisel, and file, fitting each piece individually into its handmade groove. It’s slow work, and it asks for patience and an alarming degree of precision. All of these are contrary to my nature, so this is valuable discipline. Boatbuilding as character-building.
the normal course of a life that offers as many different character challenges as building a boat. Courage, ego, judgement, moral responsibility, patience, grappling with the perfectionist demon—all these forces come into play in some way or another. The most important one: when one of those waves smacks you, come up and keep going.

1½” from the cabin front piece and made the aft bulkhead exactly to plan. And sitting bolt upright on a cushion in the mockup, I still had ½” of headroom. Good enough; I’m expecting no more growth spurts.
would be taking care to set the table saw for precise cuts. Not difficult; just requires patience.
was one of the latter. But what I’m finally learning is that there’s more to craftsmanship than coordination, and that an innate deficit in eye-hand skill can be compensated elsewhere. A great part of craftsmanship is patience, and that can be learned. Another part is in what we can simply call “opening up”—contemplating the nature of the material, the job to be done, and the resources available to do it.





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.



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.







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 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.




stripe, and finally rolled on three base coats of topside paint.
now have a name: Nil Desperandum.





