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.

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.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

Tags: Aldo Leopold, boatbuilder, devlin, The Year of the Boat, winter wren

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