If you are building a boat with a centerboard or daggerboard, and most sailboats under about 20 feet have one, there comes a few months into the project a heart-stopping, character-defining, pivotal moment when you have to:

Drill a hole through the hull. Then thrust a jigsaw blade through it and cut a long, narrow slot about two inches wide and 20 or 40 inches long through the bottom of your boat.

 

If this slot is even slightly in the wrong place, or it’s the wrong size, or its bevels are bad, or the daggerboard trunk is expoxied over it at an imperfect angle, the mistake may not be redeemable. The boat-in-progress may have no further use except to be chainsawed into next winter’s firewood.

I am not waxing melodramatic. Plywood/fiberglass/epoxy construction has many advantages, which is why I chose, for the second time, to build one of Sam Devlin’s designs. But one of its disadvantages is that it can’t easily be taken apart and repaired, like a traditional plank-on-frame boat. Once the daggerboard trunk is in, it’s in forever. In this boat, in fact, it becomes an integral part of the structure, helping to stiffen and solidify the hull.

 

 

I mentioned “character-building.” In The Year of the Boat I mention, and explore it, a lot. Every day you spend building a boat has the potential to change you, for better or not.

You can cultivate patience and build that quality into the boat, or its opposite. You have an opportunity almost daily to choose between hope and despair. When it comes time for the daggerboard slot, you have to exercise immense caution, then somehow flip it and find underneath some reservoir of great courage and abandon.

I sawed out my slot. I taped a couple of small spirit levels to the trunk so I could monitor its axis in the universe, and screwed and epoxied it into place. Forever.

Despite what was at stake, I felt a surprising calm about the whole operation. Most of it seemed to come from trust in myself—if I made all the right measurements mindfully, this operation really would turn out all right. It’s a confidence I didn’t have a few years ago. There was also a healthy sense of perspective. If I made a mistake here, life would not end, the sea would not boil, the earth would not slip out of its orbit and smash into Saturn.

I executed the cut-and-fit correctly. I think.

Last Saturday three good friends converged at my Whidbey Island garage to help me turn  over the hull, now about 350 pounds’ worth of plywood and fiberglass, for exterior fairing and ‘glassing.

It wasn’t difficult; we didn’t use any exotic rollover jigs or hoists.  Three guys pushed up the starboard side while one steadied the port side. When the starboard sheer reached the vertical peak, two of the three starboard guys scurried around to help ease the port side onto the floor. Then we lifted it one end at a time onto two-by-four cradles.

Nothing broke, nobody got hurt. If we’d had one body fewer, it would have been extremely difficult—and dangerous.

Having these remarkably willing friends participate (this wasn’t the first time Rick, Brian and Bruce had been called on) is another of the benefits of building a boat—it generates community, which is a larger arena of character. It was something like an old barn-raising in farm country. We’ve almost lost that spirit of neighborly cooperation in this country, almost forgotten how good it feels. 

 

 

 

 

Over the next three months the boat will get its glass-and-epoxy dress, bottom paint, and appendages such as the stem (the curved oak-mahogany bumper that outlines the bow) and skeg (a fin from the centerboard slot back to the rudder). By then it will have added another 50-odd pounds, and it’ll be time to turn it over again. And we’ll have another opportunity to feel good.

 

 

 

 

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