August 2009
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.
