The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  Or, in dry-land numbers, 5.4 miles an hour. That’s it. Slower than Patty’s kayak, Sea Major. Slower than a patheticclass weekend jogger. More evidence that what was painstakingly evolving under my sandpaper truly would be a toy, not a device useful for any practical or explicable function. But I recall kayaking in the San Juans a few years ago on a calm morning—the wind couldn’t have been more than a 5-knot whisper—and overtaking a solo sailor lazing on the deck of a little sloop.

  “Great day, isn’t it,” he called out as I passed.

  “Great for paddling,” I replied. “Maybe not so much for sailing.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re not going to go anywhere fast.”

  “Why would I want to go anywhere fast?”

  I was recalling this as I began to sand the epoxy-crusted hull, also not fast. I probably could have done the entire hull in one day if I had put my regular life aside and worked all that day, relentlessly, on the boat. That’s what a real boatbuilder would do. But I couldn’t carve out the time, and I wasn’t sure I’d want to even if I could have. My attitude seemed best if I could address six to eight square feet a day, about 10 percent of the hull area. I could manage that much in an hour, starting with the orbital and finishing by hand.

  Attitude, I was finding, was at least as critical to the boat work as technique. Possibly more so. In my work life on the other side of the garage door, I’d gotten involved in an intense book-editing job, piecing together contributions from a dozen different writers, and it was tough, tiring work. Some afternoons I didn’t trudge out to the Zephyr until 4:30—already dark in the vicinity of the winter solstice in Seattle—and I was so fatigued, mentally and physically, that the boat couldn’t give me a lift. On those days I tried to do only a short, menial job, something that would be definable progress but so undemanding that not even a distracted simpleton could mess it up. Another morale booster, I found, was to intersperse small, creative jobs into the drudge work of sanding epoxy. This may run counter to Zen principles, but anyone smoothing out the hull of a boat, as far as I’m concerned, wins an automatic exemption from all conventional measurements of moral and spiritual character. Whatever you’ve got to do to retain sanity, you do it.

  I was consistently failing at my resolution, though, to spend ten minutes at the end of the Zephyr work session cleaning up and putting away. The garage was looking more and more like the definition of entropy; the clutter and disorder were beginning to gnaw at the edges of my good attitude—on the days when I had one—and yet I still couldn’t discipline myself to clean up regularly. It was too much effort, piled onto the end of a too-complicated day. My project seemed to be proving that chaos is in fact the default mode of contemporary life. The only people who seem to be able to keep a lid on it are the obsessive-compulsives. If there were a sane middle ground, you’d think the building of a sailboat could find the way to it.

  Making the rudder looked like a pleasantly undemanding afternoon job, so I shut down my writing and editing early on a rainy January day to do it. Devlin had drawn a rudder that resembles a smoothed-out, upside-down Italy, and its curves seemed almost sensuous. A straight-sided, angular rudder would do its job just as well, but a great deal of the beauty of any boat is invested in its curves: the gradual upturned sweep of the sheer, a bow that either thrusts forward in pride or tucks its chin under in humility. (The Zephyr is very humble, as small boats are wise to be.) Devlin provided grid lines on the plan that I simply scaled up on a sheet of plywood, and that made it easy to rough out the rudder’s outline. When it came to the curves, though, I realized I didn’t have to follow his plan precisely. I drew them freehand, using my wrist and elbow as a compass point. The ends of the curves looked a little jerky where they elided into the straight lines, so I erased and redrew several times until I was satisfied with the rudder’s shape.

  My rudder’s shape.

  I’d just customized my boat. Not by installing accessories or choosing a color out of a catalog, but by designing a handful of curves into it that seemed uniquely pleasing to my eye, that related to the radii suggested by my particular forearm and wrist. How many of us get to place such a personal imprint on the devices we depend on? We can customize some of the functions and ergonomics of our cars, but only from limited menus provided by the manufacturers. The personalized curves in the rudder were meaningless as a practical issue, and they were such trivial deviations from the plans that Devlin himself would never notice, but they meant something to me. They formed a quiet declaration of independence, a sign that I was beginning to feel a particle of confidence as a boatbuilder.

  I cut out the rudder on the bandsaw and smoothed its curves and straights with 60-grit sandpaper. I sealed one side with fiberglass and epoxy; I would do the other side in a couple of days. The okoume literally gleamed under the sheen of the wet epoxy, and I knew from my kayak experience that after some fine-grit sanding and a few coats of varnish it could look almost like a piece of fine furniture. I might have been lurching into a three-or-more-yard boat, but it would have a rudder that would stand up to a three-inch inspection.

  After two weeks of bone-wearying sanding I had smoothed every square inch of the hull. It looked good but felt like hell. Les Wallach, an architect friend who cares so much about craftsmanship that he acts as the general contractor for most of the buildings he designs, once told me: “It’s good enough when it feels good under your hand.” I could run my fingers over the Zephyr’s hull and detect miniature craters, epoxy leprosy, every few inches. I consulted my file of boatbuilding articles and learned what I needed to do: more glop, more sanding. Except for the next round, instead of thickening the epoxy with wood flour, which cures into a rock-hard shell, I could stir in something called microballoons, microscopic air-filled spheres, which makes a glop paste that’s said to be easier to sand.

  On my next weekly run to Fisheries Supply, the prime boatbuilders’ emporium in Seattle, I bought a tub of the superfine, almost weightless, auburn-colored powder. It was Saturday, and I literally waited in line for a chance to ask Fisheries’ resident boatbuilding expert whether the microballoon mixture really would be more manageable.

  “It’s much easier,” he confirmed. “The only thing is, it’s not waterproof, so if you use it on the outside of the hull, you’ll need to brush on more plain epoxy over it.”

  In other words: A bare plywood hull is too soft and porous to survive the sea, so I needed to sheathe it in fiberglass and epoxy. This hard layer of epoxy is too rough to paint, so I needed to apply a softer layer over it and sand it smooth. Then, because this soft layer is so porous it could absorb water, I had to brush another hard layer over that. And then sand again. And then, maybe, finally, paint it?

  I left the store dazed and wondering: Is it possible that building a boat to a three-yard standard really is an exercise in pointless vanity? Or was I squandering much more time than necessary on this phase of construction because I didn’t know any better? Both answers seemed completely plausible.

  On that very afternoon the newest bimonthly issue of WoodenBoat arrived in the mail, and on the regular “Launchings” page was a photo of a lovely amateur-built thirty-foot cutter based on Long Island, New York. The caption reported that the owner-builder started her in 1985 and launched her in 2005 after 30,000 hours of work. I roughed the math in my head: thirty hours a week for twenty years. The only thing that could lead a person to sustain that much energy and determination for so long a time would be the craving for ravishing, ineffable beauty. Deep beauty, a quality that transcends all the ordinary measurements of time, effort, and human sanity.

  A magazine assignment for a piece on art in the San Juans came up, and Patty carved out a couple of days off to join me for a long weekend in the islands. We do this at least once a year—I devise some kind of story, schedule a few interviews, and build enough free time around the “work” that we can throw our kayaks into what may be the most beautiful and intriguing paddling environm
ent in North America. The San Juans have become a spendy place to visit, but the magazines pay most of the expenses. To an objective onlooker, this probably doesn’t look like hard labor.

  I’d been so squeezed for time over the past several weeks that I’d laid almost no groundwork for this trip. I knew people in the San Juans, though, and figured they could point me in the right directions. Winging it is an acceptable, if not exactly noble, tradition in journalism. On a Thursday evening we lashed Sea Major and Plankton to the Subaru and headed out for the San Juan ferry. Thanks to the expense account, we’d booked a rustic waterfront resort cabin in a quiet, great blue heron–infested bay on San Juan Island’s west side. The resort is so accommodating that it even provides miniature thirty-inch-wide boat slips where we can park our kayaks—no tedious trundling between car and water every time we want to go out.

  In the tiny, single-room art museum in San Juan Island’s main town, Friday Harbor, I noticed an exquisite alabaster salmon by a local sculptor, William Weissinger. “He’s a lawyer,” the museum director told me. “He took his first stone-carving class from us three years ago.” I didn’t know how he would fit into my story, but I knew I wanted to talk to him.

  It’s seldom hard to locate anyone who lives on an island, and Patty and I tracked down Bill Weissinger the next morning at a regional stone sculptors’ convocation, where he was chiseling a breadbox-sized block of limestone into an Inca god sporting a necktie. It’s an outgrowth, he explained, of a theme he’d lately been exploring—“wereties.” As in werewolves. He showed me a series of pencil sketches. Out-of-control ties slithered out of drawers like snakes, bent on apparent mischief. “You can see I’m a little conflicted about my roles as attorney/ artist,” he said.

  He didn’t look conflicted that morning. He was dressed in black denim and green flannel, and unkempt gray curls of hair wandered out from under his baseball cap. When we shook hands, his palm felt as rough as the limestone he was reshaping. Certainly rougher than mine—I’d hardly found a stray hour to work on the boat in the past week. Weissinger was friendly and articulate, and we talked about his recently blossomed passion for an hour. At fifty-eight—he was a year older than me—he had just realized his ability to create things of beauty.

  I asked if he regretted not uncovering his artistic side sooner. “Oh, sure,” he said. “But had I done this in my twenties, I wouldn’t have been able to bring all the experiences I’ve had into it. I think that counts for something.”

  I noted that the work of sculpting is more than a little like boatbuilding, particularly the sanding phase in which I was then mired: both of us were spending many long, seemingly thankless hours on hard, dirty work before an object of beauty could begin to emerge. “At some point in my life,” Weissinger said, “I learned how to grind. To just bear down, concentrate, and do it. Spending one hundred hours on a sculpture—I can do that. It doesn’t matter that I’m fifty-eight; I’m determined I’m going to make some nice pieces.”

  Whatever conflicts might have been rattling around behind Weissinger’s wereties, he seemed to have resolved the problem of devoting large chunks of his life to creating something that may have no practical significance. Or else he just hadn’t made it a problem. Bringing a thing of beauty or intrigue into the world requires no further explanation. Emerson said simply: “Beauty is its own excuse for being.” This could be as true of a boat as of a sculpture. If it’s beautiful, it leaves ripples of pleasure in its wake, enhancing life on earth in some small way. If it’s ugly—clunkily proportioned, badly finished, pocked with epoxy leprosy—it’s a form of visual pollution, dishonoring human intelligence and squandering the materials that went into it. You can wander the docks at any marina and see examples of both kinds of boats. Or stroll through any city’s downtown and see both kinds of architecture. The presence of beauty makes a difference in the quality of life for all of us, not just for the artist or craftsman or owner.

  So all that sanding wasn’t pointless vanity. Or at least it didn’t have to be, if I chose to look at my little boat as a larger responsibility.

  But the sanding didn’t have to stretch on into infinity, either. This was something else Weissinger’s story suggested. Before he discovered stone sculpture he messed around with clay and decided it wasn’t right for him. “You can stretch and mold the same piece of clay for years and years and never finish anything. You can’t do that with stone. You keep chipping away, it gets smaller and smaller. So you make your decisions and move on.”

  CHAPTER 8

  WIND WORK

  WHEN THE THOUGHT FIRST dawned that I might build a boat, I programmed Google to flash me a daily alert to every news story arising in the English-speaking world that contained the keyword sailboat. This had proven to be both enlightening and unnerving. Although Google’s tireless sweep raked up only a handful of stories involving boatbuilding, it delivered a vast and astonishing catalog of things that happen to sailboats and the people aboard them. By my tally of the first six months, three out of every four were not good. Of course this statistic was skewed, because a pleasant day’s sail doesn’t generate a headline. Trouble does. But look at Google’s catch from just two typical days:Man, dog rescued from sailboat stuck off VA beach

  Man’s body found on burning sailboat

  Coast Guard searches for man after empty sailboat found

  Vintage wooden sailboat sinks in slip

  Warships sail to aid sailboat under attack by pirates

  Patty and I had taken a beginning sailing course at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats, a nonprofit boat preservation society, the year before I started the Zephyr. But we hadn’t sailed since we completed the course, more or less successfully. The waffly qualifier in that sentence explains our conspicuous inactivity. We didn’t feel terrifically confident, so we scrounged reasons over the weekends following the course not to take one of the Center’s wooden daysailers out. Then came winter and three months of lousy weather, and by spring we knew that our questionable skills had lapsed into near-oblivion. While there aren’t many catastrophic things that can befall a simple daysailer on an urban lake in good weather—fire and pirate attacks seemed remote—there were endless opportunities for embarrassment. What if we couldn’t get the sails up? Or down? Docking seemed especially intimidating. The Center’s sailboats have no auxiliary engines, so we’d learned, more or less, to dock them under sail. Depending on wind direction and the positions of other boats at the dock, this can be a lot like parallel parking—on a hill, without brakes. We could probably handle it in a light 5-knot breeze, but suppose the wind chose to blow at fifteen when it was time to come in. What would we do then? Careen past the boathouse and yell for a valet?

  We’d felt like agonizingly slow and bungling learners, and what we needed to learn about sailing seemed mountainous. For each of the six lessons we had been assigned a different instructor. They were all volunteers, and all were competent, dedicated, and remarkably patient, but they often had different ways of explaining or doing things—for example, how to coil and stow the halyards, the lines that raise the sails. Even with exacting repetition I would have had to coil a halyard fifty times over the six-week course to imprint it in memory. Leaving a spaghetti sprawl of line in the cockpit doesn’t necessarily invite disaster, but any competent sailor will tell you that it’s an indicator of a deeper problem: a careless attitude or multidisciplinary ineptitude. Either ’tude could, and frequently does, trigger one of those headlines.

  With the Zephyr taking shape in the garage, we knew we needed another sailing course. Another beginning course, since without any sailing practice in more than a year we could hardly pronounce ourselves ready for the next level. We also wanted to qualify for chartering bigger boats.

  About two dozen sailing schools are sprinkled around Puget Sound. Some offer their instruction over several successive weekends; some compress an entire course into a weekend on board—like foreign language study by immersion, though for obvious reasons sailing s
chools avoid using that term. On a blustery winter weekend we visited the annual Seattle Boat Show, where several hundred boats and even more vendors fill the vast Qwest Event Center downtown. The hot trend this year appeared to be ski boats with 600-watt subwoofers. Several of the sailing schools had information booths in the show, so it was a good opportunity for us to browse the programs and ask questions.

  Greg Norwine, the owner of Windworks, was manning his company’s booth. He made a good impression when I asked him what he thought was the key to good sailing instruction. “The first word that comes to mind is ‘management,’ ” he said. “You should have a concise and consistent product for the students as they go along. There are many different ways to do things on a sailboat, and no single one may be the best. By nature, sailing instructors are independent and spirited, and they may differ in what they think is right and wrong. So we spend a lot of time arguing among ourselves, but in the end we come up with one way to teach people to do something.”

  Patty and I also liked Windworks’ setup as a one-stop emporium for sailing. It’s a school, a club, a charter outfit, and a yacht brokerage rolled into one. It doesn’t have any wooden boats in its fleet, but no commercial charterers do—too much maintenance. But if we could pass the Basic Keelboat course, twenty-four hours of instruction split between classroom and water, we’d be able to charter the club’s twenty-five-foot Catalinas for daysailing on our own. Three courses further on, we would qualify to sail the luxurious thirty-four-foot Frenchbuilt Dufour Frog Prints for a week.