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.

One crucial difference between pro and amateur boatbuilders:

The Winter Wren's skeg with helpful boulder

A pro would not wander out and harvest a handy boulder to weight down a glued piece where a clamp wouldn’t fit. Or if he did, he wouldn’t post a picture of it on his website.

An amateur will improvise recklessly, even proudly, and admit to it all. In lieu of clamps I’ve deployed bungee cords, rubber bands, springy sticks propped against walls and ceilings, Zip-loc baggies of lead shot, and of course, boulders.

My operational philosophy,

A pro-built Winter Wren by designer/builder Sam Devlin

in life and in boatbuilding: Whatever works is good.

This last month the big job was attaching the shoe keel and external stem, which together form an impact-absorbing strip along the centerline of the boat. The keel grows into a finlike skeg near the stern, which assists tracking. The boulder and clamps in the photo secured a quarter-inch-thick oak strip intended to be replaceable after it gets scraped and battered.

The stem is also decorative, as it defines the cut of the bow above the waterline. Since it had to be laminated in order to follow the bow’s curvature, I slipped in a couple of layers of pinkish khala mahogany among the white oak. It turned out nicely, although I’m a little worried about the fragility of the skinny part at the top end of the bow. It will eventually plug into a bowsprit, which may protect it from crunches.

The terrible problem was cutting and trimming the pieces to adjust to the continually changing curvature of the hull. I’ll spare the intimate details, but it required many cardboard templates, router, chisel, and three kinds of sanders.

I made it more, not less, difficult with what turned out to be a dumb idea. To increase the lever arm of the ballast, I wanted to get as much of the specified 685 pounds of lead ballast outside the hull, hanging below like in a full-keel sailboat. I drilled 30 one-inch holes in the 1.75-inch-deep shoe keel and poured them full of lead shot and epoxy. The holes accommodated a total of 7.5 pounds of lead—1.1% of the ballast. Very impressive effort.

Professional boatbuilders, of course, execute dumb ideas, too, and they charge real money for them. Twice this summer I sailed a $200,000 French yacht that had the engine controls—throttle and shift—way down on the cockpit floor. You’re nervously guiding this costly monster into a crowded slip, and you have to keep looking away from where it’s going while you bend down to adjust the power.

During August I also finished fairing the outside of the hull—smoothing the surface in preparation for painting—and engaged another bout against that old latent demon, perfectionism.

The Winter Wren, ready to have her bottom painted

Professional boatbuilders need to finish every visible square inch of a boat to a high standard; it’s evidence of a deeper attention to detail. And they know how to do it efficiently.

I know some amateurs who, though less efficient, hold themselves to the same standard. A mediocre square inch, even in a place that won’t ever be seen by anyone except mussels and salmon—the bottom of the hull—is a testament to their failed dedication. It’s practically a moral issue.

I was working long and hard, grinding away with sandpaper on the Winter Wren’s bottom, carefully surveying each section with fingertips, and despairing of ever finishing the damn boat, when I suddenly straightened up and said (almost out loud) “Hey! Do I want a usable sailboat or a bloody moral testament?”

At that, I gave myself permission to sand the bottom to a lousier level of imperfection than the topsides.

I explored this issue in The Year of the Boat, where among other reflections on perfectionism I quoted designer/builder Sam Devlin: “As you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever. There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place where we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”

This makes perfect sense for pro or amateur. And yes, this boat is—so far—better than the daysailer that came before it (named, affectionately, Far From Perfect).

For an amateur, whose time and boatbuilding chops are necessarily limited, a boat should not be seen as an avatar of one’s moral character, but simply a chart of personal growth in skill and values. For me, at least, that seems more realistic and manageable.

And it sure as hell relieves the pressure.

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.

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.

  

The daggerboard slot in the Winter Wren

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.

daggerboard trunk, floor timber, and cabin bulkhead

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. 

Larry, Rick, Brian and Bruce

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.

The hull, awaiting its glass dress

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.

Interior of daggerboard case with epoxy coves

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.

Boatbuilder on deck beam

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.

Not many ballasted sailboats have positive flotation. It takes a lot of foam or sealed air chambers to overcome the ballast if a sailboat is totally swamped. Lacking them, in this worst-case scenario, it’s going down.

As a certified chicken sailor, I’m not eager to explore the worst case.

Winter Wren

So after much contemplation, and a somewhat painful revisit to high-school geometry and physics, I decided to build positive flotation into my Winter Wren. At this point in my life, peace of mind seems more valuable than storage space on the boat.

The Winter Wren will carry about 700 pounds of lead and battery ballast in its bilge and daggerboard. Since a cubic foot of salt water weighs about 62 pounds, I figured 700/62 = 11.3 cubic feet of air chambers will balance the sinking effect of the ballast.

This is an oversimplification, of course. A boatload of math would figure into a precise calculation, including the specific gravity and volume of the lead and the wood in the hull. But that’s not really necessary. Since almost everything on the boat except the ballast will be lighter than water, I can just consider all the wood as a modest extra margin of flotation.

I crawled around the hull for several hours with tape measure, bevel gauge, scratch pad and calculator, drawing lines and figuring where to rob storage space for air or foam flotation compartments. (I’ll use foam in places like the bilge, where an encounter with an evil rock could possibly gash the hull.) I appropriated two-thirds of the anchor locker in the bow, for example, and half the space under the seats in the cockpit. In the end I came up with 11.5 cubic feet, or 713 pounds of peace of mind.

Cockpit with flotation

It’ll take considerable time to build all these cubbies. Here you can see the dividers for the pair under the cockpit seats. (The rest of the space, the two inboard compartments about 7 inches wide by 14 inches high by 35 inches long, will provide storage for fenders and other cockpit accoutrements.)

My flotation project demonstrates both the beauty and curse of building one’s own boat. You’re free to modify and customize it in any way you like—nothing is impossible if it doesn’t violate the laws of physics. But you have to figure it all out for yourself, and as an amateur builder, I can’t confidently predict how everything will work out.

A true obsessive/perfectionist would build a precise scale model and try sinking it in the bathtub. But I think I worked out an emotionally healthy level of imperfectionism in building my first boat, Far From Perfect (see The Year of the Boat, chapters 2, 5, and 16). Yes, FFP has positive flotation, but no, it hasn’t been put to the ultimate test.

Clamping the sheer clamps

March’s other major project was building the sheer clamps. This took almost two weeks, one more illustration of the deceptive complexity of building devices without right angles and straight lines. There’s a reason more of us build doghouses than boats.

You may recall in January I blew $90 on red cedar for sheer clamp material before a smarter boatbuilding friend advised that red cedar is too weak and brittle for such an important structural part. This time I spent $125 on eight 1”x4”x10’ lengths of vertical-grain fir. I glued them into 20-foot lengths using 10:1 scarf joints, nervously bent them around the interior perimeter at the sheer, and finally glued and screwed them into place.

This provided gainful employment for every motley clamp in the neighborhood, about 40 in all. It seemed like a good idea to install both sides at the same time to equalize the bending torque on both sides. As in the flotation project above, my understanding of physics is more instinctive than academic. But since nothing warped or flew apart, I guess I did it right.

The Winter Wren on 3.31.09

One unrelated boat project is occupying space and time in the shop this spring. It’s been five years since Sea Major, the cedar strip sea kayak I built for Patty in a class with Joe Greenley, has enjoyed a complete refurbishing, so it’s time.

Sea Major, benched

I’ve stripped off the old varnish, filled the worst of the beach dings, added a reinforcing fiberglass strip to the keel line, and am now about to begin revarnishing. I’ll also try to improve the hatch sealing and replace all the deck rigging. 

There’ll be a good 40 hours of labor in it, much of it truly laborious hand sanding, by the time I finish. That’s a lot to put into maintaining a kayak. But like any good wooden boat, it feels deeply satisfying to own one that’s worth the effort.

Yesterday I gave a luncheon talk for a Seattle yacht club on “Imperfectionism and the Wooden Boat,” a topic I know a great deal about.

I wrestled with it throughout The Year of the Boat, but the issue doesn’t go away when you embark on a second boat. If anything, it gets worse because the second boat is always more complicated and you are now more demanding of yourself. When the demands outpace the boatbuilding skills, you feel dumb and inept.

 And they always do.

 Throughout February I worked on taping my hull and bulkhead seams.

Taped seams at the forward bulkhead

This means laying down three overlapping layers of glass cloth and wetting them out with epoxy. There are about 110 feet of seams and junctions in this boat, so it’s not a minor job.

My glasswork will not be confused with Dale Chihuly sculpture. It’s wavy, uneven, ragged at the edges. It has a pre-industrial appearance, like a weekend project by Fred Flintstone. All through the month I kept thinking I ought to be doing better, but I don’t seem to have the chops.

Morale improved slightly when I referred to Peter Gron’s website, where he described his seam-taping woes in 2005. Even meticulous craftsmen like Peter struggle with this step.

I’ve now devised two solutions.

Microballooned epoxy after sanding

 The first is to lather the taped seams that are going to show with a microballoon/epoxy mix and sand, sand, sand until the surfaces are finally smooth or the universe explodes, whichever comes first. Microballoons, which are phenolic grains filled with air, at least are easier to sand than pure epoxy.

The second is to let go of those considerable stretches where seams will be under the cockpit sole etc, and quit caring whether they look good. In fact, I’ve decided to build watertight flotation compartments in several crannies of the hull so the boat will float even if capsized. Wouldn’t it take a sick mind to sweat over finely finishing a seam that’ll be locked away in eternal darkness?

A South African friend, Davout Van Zyl, is building the same boat I am (the Winter Wren II by Sam Devlin), and he recently sent photos of wooden boatbuilding he encountered on a beach in Zanzibar.

Ribs and planking of Zanzibar boat

By the standards of a shop equipped with modern machine tools the workmanship seems crude, but what these craftsmen accomplish honors human intelligence and culture. They create boats that fit their needs, and do it well.

 If those needs don’t include building monuments to their egos, then they may be more enlightened as to the spirit of true craftsmanship than those of us who still struggle with perfectionism.

 A German artist named Samuel Buettner said: “The perfectionist gives his best out of fear. Those who strive for excellence do it out of love.”

Completing the boat

And in response to my admission at yesterday’s yacht club talk that my Winter Wren hull is about ¾ of an inch out of symmetry, an old sailor snorted, “So what? You see any people who are exactly the same on port and starboard?”

Increasingly I’m thinking that the most important thing about amateur boatbuilding is not the boat you (maybe) will get out of it, but the character-building opportunities it provides you along the way.

Consider a couple of things that happened in January.

 Even though this is my fourth wood-fiberglass composite boat (two kayaks and a sailing dinghy before), I still struggle to make decent fillets. These are the thickened-epoxy coves in the interior of the hull where any two structural parts meet (e.g., bulkhead-to-hull joints).

Chine fillet

 They’re vitally important structurally, helping to transfer the load wherever one piece is trying to rip itself away from another. And visually: a smooth, uniformly concave fillet has a sculptural quality and gives the boat an air of strength and permanence. In most cases, fiberglass and epoxy are laid down over the fillet to add still more strength.

 I always thicken the epoxy to a peanut-butter consistency with wood flour (fine sawdust), sculpt a beautiful cove with the rounded end of a plastic stirrer, and after I turn off the lights and go inside for dinner, the evil epoxy elves set about their malicious work. They turn up the gravity coils underneath the garage and overnight, the epoxy sags and runs. A grueling hour or two of sanding will fix it, but this is decidedly not fun and it looks lousy.

For years I’ve been repeating this process and expecting different results.

Finally in January I began trying different techniques. Thickening the epoxy further. (Helps a little.) Positioning PVC pipe in the coves as a mold. (OK, but only on straight-line joints, of which there aren’t many.) Laying in the fiberglass immediately on top of the wet-epoxy fillets. (Good on short runs, a nightmare on long ones, like the chines.)

Peeling the tape

Finally, I try tamping down a strip of wide (1½”) masking tape over each fillet, then carefully smoothing it out with a gloved finger. And it works. The tape doesn’t adhere greatly to the epoxy, so the next day it removes easily, leaving a smooth, almost perfectly round form. It still asks for a little sanding and filling, but not much. And it’s ready for ‘glassing.

The lesson for character? Persist doggedly and relentlessly. But don’t persist doing the same thing that’s already failed.

 My other lesson arrives with the sheer clamps, the 20-foot-long planks that run inside the hull along the top edges of the sides. These are structurally critical, too, because they’ll provide the seat for the deck to screw onto and a platform for stress-bearing hardware such as chainplates.

I spot some very nice 10-foot-long clear cedar 1×4 planks at the nearest island lumber emporium, and they seem perfect. I like the idea of using cedar because it’s very light, and being a capsize weenie, I’m trying to minimize my boat weight high above waterline.

 I make the 10-foot planks into 20-footers with simple lap joints. And the first time I try a test bend around the curvature of the hull, the plank creaks ominously at the joint. A quick inspection, and I know I can’t continue. If I bend it another two degrees, it’ll break.

 “You didn’t use red cedar, did you?” My boatbuilding friend Peter Gron diagnoses it head-on from his Canadian island 200 miles away. “Please, please, discard the cedar and use VG fir (is it really worth compromising your boat for $90?).” I hope Peter is just being a worrywart and consult one of my boatbuilding bibles. But no. “Western red cedar … is very weak, soft and brittle,” writes Greg Rössel in The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice. “…It can break like a pencil.”

Bulkhead with sheer clamp slot

 At least three lessons here: Read the damn book before  getting seduced at the lumber yard. (I will.) Don’t retreat  into denial when you hear ominous creaks. (I didn’t.) And  don’t waste psychic energy regretting a dumb mistake. (I’m  not.) Write a few paragraphs to stamp the lesson into your  brain, and move on, poorer but wiser.

 Progress on the boat seems slow, but I now have all four of  the major bulkheads glassed in and most of the hull seams  filleted and glassed. She’s not terrifically pretty at this  point, but she has integrity. You know which kind of boat  you’d rather marry, if you’re smart.

Winter Wren II, 2.5.09

· As an amateur boatbuilder, how do you know when you’ve made it strong enough?

· What’s an acceptable level of imperfection—say, in the symmetry of the hull?

The Winter Wren, 12.1.08

· How do you predict the eventual consequences of construction decisions you’re committing now, some of which will be ferociously hard to undo?

Welcome to the 1001 Sleepless Nights of Boatbuilding. Maybe I’m just an incorrigible worrier, but in building a boat, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s worth keeping in mind that careless work can have real consequences; people will be trusting their lives to this thing.

The answer to question #1 above, fortunately, isn’t too difficult: When in doubt, beef it up. In a wooden boat, strength is basically a matter of building in more wood or epoxy/fiberglass sheathing. This isn’t an airplane; extra weight isn’t an issue, especially below waterline.

 This month’s case in point: the inner stem.

Far From Perfect

When I built Far From Perfect, my 13½-foot sailing dinghy, I made a sort-of inner stem the same way I’d done it in a kayak: by making a temporary cardboard mold in the crook of the bow and pouring in a pint of wood flour-thickened epoxy. This is unspeakably messy and improvisatory, and surely not Authorized Boatbuilding. It seemed to work, but I craved to do something on the Winter Wren that looked more professional and promised more structural integrity.

Why have an inner stem at all? It took terrific force to bend the ½-inch-thick plywood side hull panels around to meet at the bow, and I didn’t want to rely solely on the breasthook and outer stem to hold them together. This may be an amateur’s doubt, but it’s doubt nonetheless, and the solution is more beef.

 So I made an inner stem in five pieces, measuring the changing angles of the “V” at the bow with a bevel gauge and judging the top-to-bottom curvature by eye. I rough-shaped each piece from a fir 2×4 with the bandsaw, then refined its fit with plane and sander. Fun, actually. It’s probably not a widely useful skill to be able to look at a curving hollow and envision the solid form that will nest in it, but I’m getting better at it.

One of the inner stem pieces

The five-piece inner stem in place—before glassing.

I glued the pieces in place with a liberal basting of glop (thickened epoxy), then for insurance screwed them in with stainless-steel screws countersunk into the outside of the bow. Then I faired in the stem’s edges with more glop, and plastered over everything on the inside of the bow with two layers of fiberglass to lock in the structure absolutely, unequivocally, and forever.It was a lot of effort, and it may be structural overkill, but I’m sleeping better.

I wrote extensively about living with imperfectionism in The Year of the Boat (see home page), but this is not something that one settles forever and moves on—it’s a fluid and living thing, constantly changing with life’s circumstances. And with each boat. The Winter Wren is bigger; so are its imperfections.

 When I began making and fitting the bulkheads (there will be five, eventually), I learned that my boat is half an inch longer on its starboard side than its port. There’s also about half an inch of twist in the hull. My friend and boatbuilding colleague Peter Gron, whose craftsmanship is to mine as boeuf bourguinon is to baloney, exhorted me to fix or at least understand the cause of these discrepancies before proceeding. (See Peter’s incredible boatbuilding blog at http://members.shaw.ca/pgron/ArcticTern.htm)

I gave it an honest try but couldn’t figure out where I’d committed the dimensional errors. Finally, I reasoned that ½ inch in a 224-inch-long boat is less than ¼ of 1 percent from perfect, which seems acceptable. Perhaps such error corrupts craftsmanship in its spiritual dimension, but in the realm of the practical, it hardly seems significant.

 So: another night’s (almost) adequate sleep in the bank.

 When I began making the aft cabin bulkhead, I ran up against what is for me the thorniest problem in boatbuilding: envisioning, in action and in three dimensions, the eventual functioning of a critical part.

 Patty and I expect to use the Winter Wren for overnight cruising, so a compact marine porta-potty has to reside somewhere. The logical place is under the bridge deck, just aft of the cabin. This seemed to require that the storage compartment be divided in two, so food and spare clothing can stay away from the toilet. There would then need to be two doors in the bulkhead, one for extracting the potty and the other accessing the more agreeable stuff. I spent four hours over two days juggling the positions and dimensions of these openings so I could jigsaw them into the bulkhead before locking it into the hull. I could see it would be difficult or impossible to maneuver the jigsaw in the boat’s tight confines.

 The aft cabin bulkhead is now in place with two nice openings prepared for access doors. The larger

Aft cabin bulkhead in place in the hull

one’s 17” width appears more than adequate for the 13 1/8” potty I’ve scoped out in the catalog. And I’ve just realized that extracting the potty will require a door opening of 13 1/8” plus the width of the two human wrists that will be snaking through the door with it, which are about 2½” each. So: 18 1/8” worth of flesh and plastic must go through a 17” opening. 

Something will have to give, and it’ll be the bulkhead opening—to be enlarged later, at considerable pain, with an agonizingly slow coping saw.

But this is what boatbuilding is about: training oneself to analyze problems, cook up advance solutions, and when something goes wrong, fix the damage without letting pointless emotion—regret, frustration, self-dopeslapping—get in the way.

Boatbuilding is excellent rehearsal for life; wish I’d discovered it sooner.

A BSO — Boat-Shaped Object—has now taken residence in the shop:

The wire stitches are still holding the panels together, awaiting epoxy (the next step). The four planks spanning the hull are temporary spreaders, necessary to force the hull sides to the correct span apart. They’ll be taken out when the bulkheads go in.

Alert readers may note that the stitches were supposed to be removed and the epoxy/fiberglassing done in November. But as usual—no, always—when an amateur builds a boat, seemingly simple steps consume prodigious amounts of time, bungled pieces have to be remanufactured, processes have to be rethought.

Case in point: the transom.

Before sawing into a $110 sheet of marine plywood, I made a trial transom from a sheet of $12 Home Depot pressboard. Of course it didn’t fit: 

I measured the gap and angle of the hull bottom and transferred this information to the marine plywood. By all the laws of physics and mathematics, the resulting piece should have fit perfectly, which it didn’t. But it was at least close, and with a couple of cheating shims epoxied in, I was able to stitch the real transom in place.

Notice in the photo above there’s also yawning daylight between the two-by-four building cradle, which is supposed to be supporting the stern, and the hull.

Back in October I had built four such cradles, extrapolating their height and support angles from the boat plans. None of these fit, either. So I spent a full November week taking them apart, rebuilding them, and leveling the hull. It’s essential that the boat be perfectly level—projected waterline parallel to the shop floor—because the only way to install the bulkheads so they’re precisely vertical is to use gravity as a measuring device, lining each bulkhead up with a plumb bob.

 Here’s one of the remanufactured  cradles. 

 Note that I had to dedicate several of  my c-clamps to the cradles, because  the middle two turned out to be too  cramped to be able to install wood  screws in the triangle supports. A  right-angle drive for the drill would  have solved the problem, but Festool, if I recall, wants a stunning ransom of $115 for that accessory. Eight C-clamps at $5 each were a more palatable investment.

Finally, I also had to do a lot of the stitching over because the first attempt didn’t pull the hull side panels into the correct alignment. I’d imposed on a kind neighbor to torque them into place while I stitched, but I was so concerned about his discomfort that I rushed through a sloppy job. For the second attempt, I cobbled up a ridiculous contraption of stepladder and clamps to simulate a human grip. Although I had to move and adjust it after each stitch, this worked better because it exhibited infinite patience. 

Which is something I don’t have. All through November I felt irritated because of the mistakes and retracing of steps, and the drudge work of rebuilding the cradles. But if your prime character defect is impatience, as mine is, boatbuilding supplies an excellent way to work on it. I can’t think of any other enterprise where patience is so tangibly rewarded, and impatience so directly and forcefully punished. 

One final thought as we enter the season of glad tidings, epoxy and fiberglass: 

In building a boat, as in taking on any big and intimidating project, it’s important to be prepared for the inevitable peaks and troughs of emotion you’ll encounter. If you expect the discouraging times, it’s easier to slog through them, preserving vital momentum. They don’t last forever. I think there is, however, a correlation between the size of the boat and the span of the troughs: the bigger the boat, the more you should plan to endure.

Winter Wren, at a shade under 19 feet, is looking colossal.