Keeping it up
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.
Tags: boatbuilding, devlin, winter wren, wooden boat