The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  The peapod, which started out as a Maine lobster boat in the nineteenth century, might have been the canoe’s evolutionary offshoot. It had two pointy ends, like a canoe, but it had a far fatter shape for stability and carried a small sail to help get the catch back to market. It was a perfect example of function dictating form, because the lobsterman would typically stand with one foot braced on the gunwale to haul the lobster pot up from the bottom—a trick that would have caused any other fifteen-foot boat to flip like a wooden nickel. It could even be rowed standing up and facing forward, which was what lobstermen needed to do to locate their traps. When commercial lobstering outgrew the peapods, they too morphed into sweet-tempered pleasure boats—“as stable as advertised, and so perfectly balanced you can steer them under sail just by shifting your weight,” reported James Babb in Gray’s Sporting Journal more than a century later.

  My boat, too, had a working-class ancestry, although it’s a little less savory. The original melonseeds that inspired Devlin’s design were used by market hunters in the late 1800s to stalk ducks and other waterfowl around the shallows of the New Jersey coast. Among these hunters’ customers were hat manufacturers, and in the 1880s, the craze for lavish plumage and even entire stuffed birds to adorn women’s headwear was decimating East Coast avian populations. The carnage led to the birth of the Audubon Society in 1896 and the Lacey Act of 1900, which outlawed interstate traffic of protected species.

  More than almost any other implement, boats have always taken specialized forms to fit local needs and conditions. Boats intended for shallow water will have shallow drafts; boats built for rough water will need decks; boats that need speed will carry proportionately more sail—or engine. And boats built for recreation will demand less expert attention than those built for work.

  The first fiberglass boats appeared on the American market in 1947. These were two small sailboats, Carl Beetle’s twelve-foot Beetle Swan and Ray Greene’s sixteen-foot Rebel. It’s no exaggeration to say that they ignited a revolution in boating. For the first time in history, small boats became available that didn’t cost much money to buy and didn’t take much expertise and spare time to maintain. It also marked a pivotal turn away from tradition. After this, innovation in boat design, even sailboats, seemed to occur much more rapidly and with little deference to tradition. A modern trimaran more resembles the starship Enterprise than it does a classic sloop. The first electric guitar appeared in 1949 and the first transistor radio in 1954, and both these developments, very close in time and spirit to the fiberglass boat, also led to revolutions in popular culture. In each case it’s interesting to ponder whether the new technology created the new culture, or whether the culture was already incubating and ready to bust out, just waiting for the right vehicle.

  Eight weeks into the Zephyr, my glop phase—epoxy gluing and reinforcing and fiberglass sheathing—was ready to begin. Any real boatbuilder, even an amateur, would scoff at how slowly I was proceeding on such a small boat. But I was consciously using it to work on one of my prime character defects, impatience, and I was making some progress on that front. I could have started this phase four days earlier, but it was on an afternoon when I had just two hours to devote to the boat, and I didn’t want to feel the pressure of time.

  The glop phase began in my bedroom closet, where I picked out two ensembles of sacrificial clothes. Pants, shirt, jacket, even sneakers—anything the epoxy touched would be instantly ruined, at least for any further role in public appearances. The glop user is also advised to wear nitrile gloves, chemicalhazard safety glasses, and breathe through “a NIOSH-approved organic vapor filter cartridge.” And, of course, don’t drink the stuff. It seemed an uncomfortable irony of our time, deploying such a vile gumbo to create a sailboat, the most environmentally gracious transportation device known to civilization.

  I would be using the epoxy, two to three gallons of it, in two forms. Thickened to a peanut-butter consistency with wood flour (a fine-grained sawdust), it serves as a fiercely tenacious, waterproof glue and filler putty. Later, in the fiberglassing phase, it brushes onto the flexible glass cloth to saturate it and form a very hard, invisible, waterproof skin on the outside of the boat. I had used epoxy and glass cloth to sheathe my wood kayaks inside and out, so I knew what I was in for. It’s hard, tedious, messy work. The real hazard, though, would be mental fatigue—getting so bored or complacent that I would rush the job and louse it up.

  I dressed in my finest epoxy duds, checked the alignment of the rickety wired-together hull one last time with my tape measure, and mixed a cup of the miracle potion thickened with wood flour. In one three-hour glopfest, I pressed it into all the hull seams and the joints between the three bulkheads and hull. I was a little neater than I had been with the kayaks, perhaps because I’d been screening a mental movie. A year earlier, gathering material for a book about Frank Lloyd Wright, I interviewed an architect named Arnold Roy who had apprenticed with Wright in the 1950s. Roy recalled the time when he was painting the ceiling of the Garden Room at Taliesin, the Wright compound in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and was splattering enamel all over himself. Wright happened by and was appalled at the sight. He took the paintbrush away and proceeded to demonstrate—“Young man, this is the way you paint!”—even though he was dressed, as usual, in an immaculate suit. No paint dripped or splattered. “From that day on, I learned to be a very clean painter,” Roy told me. Now, working on the Zephyr in throwaway clothes, I was visualizing Wright—not so much his brush technique, which I knew nothing about, but his attitude of care. His mindfulness, to borrow a buzzword that’s maybe slung around too loosely. It seemed to help.

  The next afternoon my epoxy felt hard to the touch, so I took out the wire sutures on the starboard side and the transom. I was anxious for the Zephyr to begin to look like a boat. As ingenious as the stitch-and-glue method is, a boat in the early stage of construction still resembles a plywood cow tangled in a barbed-wire fence. When the wires were all gone, at least on one side, its lines and surfaces suddenly exuded a breathtaking grace, even in this raw, unadorned state. I had given birth to a boat!

  My wrist ached from untwisting and cutting the wires, so I didn’t continue with the port side just then. I went into the kitchen, whipped up a celebratory snack of chips and salsa, and ten minutes later returned to the garage to admire my work again.

  Just aft of the bow, on the starboard chine where I’d removed the wires, there now appeared a yawning chasm, a two-foot-long, quarter-inch wide gash of air and daylight, where the side panel had just torn itself away from the hull bottom.

  It was devastatingly clear what had happened: the glop hadn’t fully cured, and the torsional force of the curved plywood, which ached to return to flatness, had overwhelmed the glue. And it was my fault. It was November and the temperature in the garage was hovering around fifty. I was using the slow-hardening variety of epoxy because it’s more forgiving in its application, but at that chilly temperature it needed two days to fully cure. Intellectually I knew this, but it felt hard enough to my cursory fingertip probe, and emotion dumped reason overboard.

  There’s obviously a place for emotion in building a boat or anything else—if you love what you’re making, revel in its look and feel, you’re of course going to care more deeply about it, and that’s a vital component of quality. But it’s not the foundation. Name any human endeavor that encompasses both craft and art—cooking, playing basketball, composing music, designing bridges, landscaping a garden, or building a boat—and it’s the craft, or technique, that has to come first.

  I had so little foundational technique in boatbuilding that it was scary. The only way I could compensate was to research and think through each episode before doing anything rash, then work carefully and methodically and patiently. That way I had a chance of learning on the job without manufacturing a disaster I couldn’t fix. I didn’t have the luxury of emotion. I already knew I couldn’t afford frustration or anger or impatience, and now I saw that I had t
o stay away from pride as well.

  I avoided the garage for three days. I couldn’t bear to look at my plywood indictment, and more significantly, didn’t know what to do about it. Cutting the entire hull apart, starting over, loomed like an ominous possibility. The new issue of WoodenBoat magazine arrived, and in it was an article titled “Building Nimbus: The lessons of a first-time boatbuilder.” Dan Nielsen, the author, graciously provided a photo of the actual bonfire onto which he tossed many pieces of the Haven 12½ he built in a twenty-eight-month marathon of error and trial. “At times I felt as though I was building two boats,” Nielsen wrote. “I built the centerboard trunk sides twice, built two wooden keels, four garboards, four sheerstrakes . . .”

  Well, the Zephyr wasn’t going to fix itself, and I finally returned to the garage to ponder it. I realized first that maybe I could have closed up the gap if I had worked on it immediately when I discovered it, because the epoxy would still have been slightly pliable. I’d felt too traumatized to deal with it—another textbook illustration of emotion getting in the way of problem solving.

  I finally worked out a plan that would blend brute force with the lavish application of glop. I spent an hour scraping and sanding off the hardened epoxy on the failed seam, then tattooed the hull panels with holes for a fresh round of stitches. I enlisted Patty to push down hard on one of the panels while I laced them with baling wire and tightened each stitch to within a millimeter of its life. It worked, sort of. The gap narrowed from ¼ to ⅛ inch, and I plastered it with petrochemical peanut butter. The boat looked like it had developed a world-class case of acne.

  After waiting a long forty-eight hours for the mess to cure, I tried a little experimental measuring and sanding. My patch seemed to be holding things together adequately, and the boat was still no more than ⅛ inch out of alignment in any measurement. But sanding all the epoxy fillers, reinforcements, and epoxy acne throughout the boat was going to be grueling. Epoxy is much harder than wood. I knew from experience with the kayak projects that the first ten minutes of sanding every day would feel good, in a way, because it’s honest and tangible work, a refreshing break from the slippery word-juggling I perform at the computer keyboard. But then muscles would start to ache and cramp, eyes would clog with grit, the bedlam of motorized screeching and muscle-powered scratching would become excruciating, and progress would seem to advance at the speed of geology. All this would be accompanied by an immense temptation to do it just barely good enough, the minimum acceptable standard.

  Thoreau was dead right about some things, and here is one of them, straight from Walden: “In the long run men hit only what they aim at.”

  CHAPTER 7

  GRIT

  WITH WINTER CAME THE dogged days of sanding. In the last three weeks of December, according to my daily boatbuilding log, I spent twenty hours pawing and scratching inside the Zephyr’s hull with a vast and varied assortment of sandpaper. On past projects I’ve found sanding a fulfilling, even pleasant job: a rough or uneven wooden form would become a smooth, functional shape right underneath my hands, a direct and tactile act of creation. A clever tone painting from Handel’s Messiah (which borrows its text from Isaiah) would spin in my head: “The croo-oo-oo-ked straight, and the rough places plain.” In this verse, God was instructing the people of Jerusalem to smooth out a highway for the coming of the Lord.

  But the Old Testament Jews never had to deal with epoxy, which formed the rough places I had to render plain. It’s not like sanding wood. Epoxy is as tenacious as original sin. It wears like the Rock of Ages. Sanding fillets of wood flour–thickened epoxy—the concave fill joints between adjoining panels of the hull and bulkheads—is like sculpting granite with an emery board.

  I alternated among four different kinds of power sanders, depending on what needed attention in what kind of cranny, and endless hand sanding. I confirmed one morsel of advice that pops up consistently in amateur boatbuilding articles, books, and online forums: Don’t waste your time and valuable electricity with the cheap weekend-handyperson sanders from the neighborhood home-improvement palace. They’re toys. You may be making a toy—what else can anyone honestly call a fourteen-foot sailboat here in the twenty-first century?—but even a little boat demands big sanding. You need adult tools. The most useful weapon in my arsenal was a Porter-Cable random orbital sander that’s about as large, and as unwieldy, as a sixteen-ounce coffee can. Armed with craggy 60-grit sandpaper, it would grind epoxy loudly and aggressively, although it wouldn’t nose into the many concavities on the inside of the hull.

  The crannies, the chines, and the tricky places where glass cloth sections overlapped all clamored for hand sanding. I had various rubber and wood sanding blocks, but the most effective technique seemed to be to double up the sandpaper and wrap it around two or three fingers. I could lean into the work and apply a lot of force, and make my fingers assume a shape to conform to any given curvature of the surface. I could feel what was happening through the paper, where the lumps and bumps remained. This primitive technique also obviated the prime hazard of power sanding, that I’d grind too quickly through a thin layer of epoxy and into the glass fibers, which would weaken the boat’s structure.

  None of this qualified as fun.

  The power sanders screamed and fogged the air with unwholesome particulates. I knew it couldn’t be good to breathe powdered epoxy, considering the dire warnings about letting the glop touch skin. I wore a respirator that made me resemble a dung beetle outfitted for a burglary. The hand sanding mutilated my fingers; they would ache and tingle and even seep blood at the edges of the nails a day later. I had to program a day of rest between hand-sanding sessions to let my skin and muscles recover. Every surface and object in the garage was flocked with a velvet flour that resisted sweeping or dusting because it was so fine—it wafted into the air at even the approach of a broom or brush.

  Northwest Indian tribes built wonderful seagoing canoes out of solid cedar logs before white men appeared in the eighteenth century. The native sandpaper was scraps of shark skin. Supplies might have been a little tricky to obtain, but at this stage of my project I envied the Indian boatwrights: no epoxy.

  For those three weeks I mostly worked the inside of the boat. On New Year’s Day, a double milestone, I started preparing the outside of the hull for its sheath of fiberglass and epoxy (which would be followed by much more sanding). I wavered between conflicting philosophies, which would have a great deal to do with how the boat eventually looked. One school maintains that an infinite amount of sanding is just barely enough. In my bulging folder of boatbuilding articles was a WoodenBoat piece by Aimé Fraser that resonated like a sermon on morality: The Hull Must Be Smooth, Fair, and Clean

  That simple statement contains no hint of the hours of dirty, dusty work with filler and sandpaper that will abrade away your fingerprints and leave you unable to raise your arms above your head. Don’t give up; keep your eye on the prize. The time and attention you give to fairing will have a profound effect on the boat’s looks.... Take the effort to make the hull smooth and fair, and even the simplest boat becomes lovely.

  Joel White chimed in with a practical consideration: goodlooking wooden boats, he maintained, last longer than homely ones:The boat that gives one pleasure to look at is a great joy, evoking favorable comment from others. This fills the owner with pride, causing him to take extra care with the boat’s appearance. More attention is paid to a handsome craft by everyone involved in her care, whether owner or paid professional; her paint and varnish are better kept, dirt and grime are washed away, problems are dealt with as soon as they appear.

  But then I happened onto this contrary piece in Boatbuilder magazine by Renn Tolman that recommended just “knocking off the high spots” with a power sander, then priming and painting. Tolman wasn’t advocating sloppy workmanship simply to get the drudgery over with. He thought it made more sense to leave the excess epoxy on the boat, where it would help hold all the pieces together, rather than g
rinding half of it into powder to sweep up off the garage floor.The result is what I call a “five-yard boat”—it looks as good as any molded fiberglass boat from about five yards away.

  I thought both arguments were convincing, so I decided on a compromise: I would try for a three-yard boat. I knew I didn’t want a watercraft so pristine and perfect that it would vicariously wound me every time the hull got dinged on a rock or a dock, but I also didn’t want to sail a boat that I’d be embarrassed to claim as my own work. I was beginning to notice that this problem of finding a middle ground between the ideal and the possible, and learning to live happily with it, was arising at every stage of the process. It was starting to look like a core teaching of boatbuilding.

  Many of the Zephyr’s inside surfaces would be out of sight underneath the deck or seats, or hidden by the foam flotation I was planning to pack in at the bow and stern. The outside obviously asked for more care, at least for the area visible above the waterline. If I were building a fast boat I’d want the surfaces below water to be as smooth as possible, too, but the Zephyr would barely outrun an anemone no matter what I might do, so it seemed to be silly to spend days slaving over the bottom of the hull. This seems counterintuitive, but small sailboats are generally slower than large ones. The following is the only morsel of serious sailboat physics you’re going to get between these covers, but it’s fundamental to boat design and the transcendentalism of sailing, so listen: The top speed (in knots) of a displacement-hull boat—meaning one that has to push the water out of its way rather than climbing onto a plane and skimming over the surface—is equal to the square root of the waterline (in feet) times 1.34. The Zephyr’s waterline is only about 12½ feet long. So no matter how much wind might be blowing, water resistance would limit this boat to: = 4.74 knots