Nil 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.

More evidence that boatbuilding is a mirror  of life:

Think of all the things you’ve done where midway through the appalling process you sputtered, “If I’d realized how much trouble this was going to be, I never would have started it.” And then when you’re done, all the frustration and doubt evaporates, and now you’re thrilled that you had the initiative and courage.

For Nil Desperandum’s cockpit sole (floor), Sam Devlin specified a simple ½-inch plywood sheet with a drainage hole so water could run into the bilge (and then get pumped out, either electrically or with a hand pump). Probably because he’s a builder as well as a designer, Devlin has a fine instinct for making things no more difficult than they need to be.

A completed Devlin Winter Wren

I’ve seen some classic wooden boats, though, with lattice-like hardwood soles, and the rich visual texture they add to the cockpit—which is where the crew of this small boat will spend 90 percent of our sailing time—is wonderful. How hard can it be? It’s just crisscrossed sticks.

Looking back, it’s still difficult to understand where the time went. The fancy sole sucked up about 60 hours over the last five weeks.

A lot of it went into the 270 notches I had to cut (bandsaw, chisel) in the frames and crosspieces that 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,

Dry-fitting the pieces

which I worried could eventually lead to breakiness.

And finally when I had it all ready to go, it seemed like the floor was too high, so I spent another couple of hours moving the mounting brackets down an inch.

If I value my labor at $25 an hour, and factor in $50 for wood and finishing materials, I now have a $1,550 cockpit sole. This is beyond ridiculous.

All the pieces ...

But in the illogical calculus of emotion, the result seems worth it. It’s a handsome and distinctive

Opening for bilge pump hose

sole, and an amateur-built boat needs a few fetching details like this to draw attention away from the galaxy of other issues that didn’t work out so well. Like life itself: a stellar deed here and there will rightly be remembered apart from a long run of pale mediocrity.

A couple of technical notes:

Teak is typical for lattice-type cockpit soles, but I didn’t have any on hand, and I’m trying to avoid introducing too many kinds of wood, so I used the same khaya mahogany that went into the cabin sole and companionway trim. It’s  beautiful wood: heavy, strong, a rich chocolate-with-a-whisper-of-red when varnished.

And on varnish, I agree with my Canadian friend Peter Gron, who’s almost completed his Devlin Arctic Tern (a 23’ sloop that looks like a big brother to the Winter Wren. ((Peter’s blog) is here.) Both of us have eschewed high-gloss varnish in

The sole in place

favor of a matte or rubbed-effect finish. I’m using Epiphanes Woodfinish Matte on all Nil Desperandum’s brightwork, outside and in, and I’m happy. It makes an amateur’s effort look professional, whereas high-gloss varnish amplifies and broadcasts every minuscule imperfection.

The cockpit is now almost complete. June’s work will be to build the seats and finish out the lazarette astern of the cockpit. Still looking at a prospective launch of summer ‘11—unless I get sucked into more bottomless pits like the cockpit sole.

Nil Desperandum to date

Building a boat is not an endless surge of pleasure and excitement. It’s more like a surf—crests of elation followed by troughs of tedium. And sometimes a rogue wave of terror.

I experienced one of those 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.

Each of four teeth took a bite of thumb. There was much blood and pain. I declined the ER option because last time Patty visited for a broken finger, the bill was $2,000 and she didn’t even see an actual physician, just an assistant. And our health insurance is pretty sketchy. Gamely, nurse Patty cleaned the wounds and bandaged me up.

Three weeks later the thumb is more or less intact and healing, and I have a profoundly renovated respect for the tools in my boat shop—all of them, from quarter-inch chisel to two-horsepower table saw. The principle to remember: It takes only one second of wandering attention to ruin a five-year-long perfect safety record—and potentially lose an important body part.

Progress on Nil Desperandum over the last six weeks has been slow, much of it consisting of epoxy sealing and painting bilge parts and fabricating cockpit chingaderos yet to be installed. This qualifies as one of those troughs of tedium.

To break it up, I started making the cockpit sole. The simple way would have been a removable plywood floor with drainage holes into the bilge. But I’m trying to create a few fine details on the boat to draw attention away from the overall amateur ambiance, and I figured that a classic lattice-type sole would be interesting.

It took three hours to make and trim a cardboard template to fit the trapezoid-shaped cockpit bottom perfectly. Then two more three-hour afternoon sessions to cut out and fit the four frame pieces for the lattice. The wood is hard khaya mahogany, which should be plenty strong enough to support a couple of people standing on it. It resists easy shaping, though.

The big problem: How to cut dados into the frame pieces to receive the ends of the lattice? The router would make a nice, clean channel but would leave a radius at the end of the channel, forcing me to try to carve each of the lattice bar ends into a matching round. Didn’t sound fun. There would be almost 50 such joints.

So I’m doing it pretty much as 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.

I honestly didn’t know whether I could build one of these fancy soles before I started, but more than halfway through, I’m now cautiously optimistic. It’s looking pretty decent. (There will be a lot of final trimming and sanding when I finally glue it all together; for now, all the pieces are just dry-fitted and numbered for reference.) Of course the whole affair will be epoxy-sealed for waterproofing and then finished with a mottled varnish.

It’s hard to think of anything in 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.

April 2010

I’ve been thinking lately about craftsmanship—what it is, how we cultivate it, how we appraise it.

In the past month several people have complimented me on my “fine craftsmanship” on Nil Desperandum, and as usual, they made me squirm. As I wrote in The Year of the Boat, I’ve always felt that accepting an undeserved compliment is a moral lapse, like pocketing the benefit of a waiter’s mistake on a restaurant check. Still, I’ve finally trained myself not to swat away the compliment, insulting the bearer. I murmur a polite “thanks,” and try to change the subject.

Imperfect and fitful as it still is, though, my craftsmanship is getting better—even I can see that. And it’s not steadier hands at the bandsaw. It’s cultivation of the mental component of craft—thinking through a problem before plunging into it.

Ever since I started the Winter Wren, I’d been planning to build the cabin 1” to 1½” higher than Sam Devlin’s plans, just to scrape out a little more sitting headroom than Sam’s miserly 42 inches. I had made the forward cabin bulkhead taller when I installed it months ago, figuring I could shave it later if necessary.

When it came time for the aft bulkhead this month, though, I had to make a final decision. So I mocked up a cardboard cabin on the port side and studied it for a couple of days—inside and out, aesthetically and practically.

And in the end, I decided Sam’s design was right. Even one extra inch of cabin unbalanced the boat’s profile. It looked cartoonish, like a cow drawn with an oversized head. Sam’s sailboats are remarkably beautiful and based on traditional lines and proportions—you can barely believe they’re plywood. My proposed modification was a crime against nature.

So I sawed off the offending 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.

I then made several mockups of the companionway, studying different widths, shapes, and locations. What I finally decided on was a substantial departure from plan. My doorway is skinnier and offset to the port side, so a person stepping into the cabin won’t have to straddle the daggerboard. And I like the bold stroke of asymmetry—it creates a dynamic visual tension against the pure balance of the rest of the boat.

Uncharacteristically, I plopped onto my shop stool and for a good, long time contemplated making the drop boards and the tracks for them to slide in.

My lifelong nature is to plunge directly into a problem, acting on instinct/impulse. It looks like decisiveness, but really is just impatience, and it leads to good craftsmanship only occasionally, by accident. First impulse was to make the tracks with a router. I’m not very good with it, and this would be a character-building exercise. But it would also be a mahogany-wasting exercise. After considerable thought, I came up with an easier way: use the table saw to make the tracks out of two L-shaped pieces, to be glued to the edges of the companionway.

Now the only crafty skill would be taking care to set the table saw for precise cuts. Not difficult; just requires patience.

It took me about three hours to make all six framing pieces for the companionway, but at the end they all fit almost perfectly and I had to make only one of them twice. With  minor touch-up sanding the boards slid smoothly into place.

Although I’m decidedly no Calvinist, I suppose I’ve always assumed that some souls are born predestined to be good craftsmen and others klutzes, and by lifelong

evidence I 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.

There’s great value in building a boat, and it’s not simply the big floaty thing you enjoy at the end. There are character-building lessons at every turn, and they all have application in the wider sphere of life.

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.