The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  Inside the office, the sloping ceiling is encrusted with photographs of Devlin boats, several of them gracing magazine covers. Devlin is a celebrity in the scattered universe of wooden watercraft. There’s a computer, a brass nautical clock, a bookcase stuffed mostly with books about boat design, and two beautiful varnished chart drawers stacked with plans.

  Devlin was fifty-three, tall, big-boned, and ruggedly built, sporting a compactly trimmed beard and mustache and a blown-out knee that at the time of my visit was facing surgery the next week. It was an old injury; more than three decades ago it provided him with a pass out of the Vietnam draft. He was in obvious pain when I arrived, but as soon as we started talking boats, the tension visibly drained out of his facial muscles and his eyes lit up. The phone interrupted every five minutes with a customer or supplier asking a question. But I had the impression that I wasn’t imposing on his time, that he would gladly talk boats all afternoon and through the night. It’s his anesthetic, his spiritual center, his life.

  I asked why he became a boatbuilder. He said there’s no simple answer, that the only way he could explain it was by sharing a series of mental “snapshots” in his history. The first is from age four or five. He’s playing in a landlocked skiff in his father’s marine store in Eugene, Oregon. The second is a pivotal moment near the end of his senior year in high school. “I was out by a lake near Eugene with my first girlfriend—I was a late bloomer—and this little sailboat came up and beached right beside us. The guy jumped out and asks, ‘Can you hang onto my boat?’ He had to run into the woods to take a leak. When he finished, he invited us to go sailing with him. I’d never sailed before, and it opened my eyes. I had no idea there was any feeling on earth like that.”

  The third snapshot is a sensual daydream that sounds too contrived even for bad fiction, but Devlin described it without a trace of embarrassment. “It was 1974, and I was working in Alaska. I was sitting on an 1898 tug reading issue number one of WoodenBoat magazine, drinking strong coffee around a smelly diesel oil heater, and I got this picture in my mind: a long workshop, not too much daylight in it, wood shavings on the floor, a fire in a wood-burning stove. There was no phone. It felt calm, peaceful, contemplative. And I saw myself building wooden boats.”

  He knew as much about wooden boats then as I know now. He had a double degree in biology and geology from the University of Oregon, which wasn’t much foundation. He’d built a fiberglass kayak in high school and had once helped a builder in Eugene plank a fishing boat in traditional plank-on-frame construction. What he did know, or at least believe, was that plank-on-frame made little sense in the twentieth century. Instead of trying to update or refine that ancient technology, he looked directly into the problem: how to make strong, leakproof, lightweight, beautiful watercraft with the least investment of labor and materials. Nothing in that equation argued for screwing boards onto oak skeletons. Without knowing that anyone else in the world was already doing anything similar, he devised his stitch-and-glue technique.

  He learned later that there were other pioneers around the same time and even earlier, stitching and gluing dinghies together. “Since I didn’t know anything about what anybody else had done, I just blundered in,” he said. “I had no idea it was considered only suitable for dinghies, and as it turns out that isn’t a limitation. We’ve built boats up to forty-five feet, and I think we could go up to 150 feet now if we wanted to. This just reminds me that having too much knowledge of an existing technology can be more of a burden than a help.”

  As we talked, I watched him become increasingly animated—eyes flashing, hands sculpting boat parts in the air for illustration. “Being a boatbuilder and designer is so integral to me that if you took a fire hose and blew that part of me out, there’d be a little bone and rigging left, but not much flesh. It’s such an amazing thing to build boats—to take this pile of materials and breathe life into it. It’s the most amazing act of creation I can imagine. These things have a spirit. Sometimes it’s a malevolent one, but each one is a unique character.”

  That was my opening. I told him, “I wouldn’t say my Zephyr has a malevolent spirit, at least not yet. But I’ve had a few problems building it.”

  “I’m not surprised,” he said. “My plans are not terrifically documented on how to build these boats. They’re not paint-bynumbers. For one thing, there’s no way I can address every issue that’s going to come up during construction because I can’t anticipate them. But the other thing, I want people to become boatbuilders themselves. My life is not enhanced by seeing more Zephyrs sailing in the world. It’s enhanced by seeing the light dance in the eyes of my customers when they see that they can create these things.”

  We got down to my nuts-and-bolts questions. He addressed each one with sketches on the tattered plan I’d brought, or else he drew a detail on a yellow scratch pad, which he ripped off and handed me. He was so patient that I wondered whether building boats, slow classic sailboats in particular, is an occupation that automatically infuses its practitioners with that quality. That could be an auspicious sign for me—wonder how many boats you have to crank out before it takes root? With my final question, he demonstrated his devastating shrewdness as a businessman. I asked where to find the lead shot for weighting my centerboard. “Oh, we’ll just give you some,” he said, and called one of the men in the shop to bring some in a couple of plastic buckets.

  He gave me forty pounds, enough for three Zephyrs.

  “Do you have any pictures of your boat?” he asked.

  “I brought one,” I said. “I have some trepidation about showing it to you.”

  He laughed. “Let me see it.”

  I showed him an eight-by-ten print of the Zephyr on its worktable, taken from the bow looking aft. The digital photo was plenty sharp, and I worried about all the details his professional eye would pick out—the weird fastening of the stem with its mismatched grain, the questionable fit of the bulkheads, the bayous of solidified glop still resisting sanding.

  “It looks like you’re doing great,” Devlin said. “When you’re finished, why don’t you bring her down here for her launch?”

  CHAPTER 10

  THE ZEN OF SCREWING UP

  UNLESS YOU’VE DESIGNED, built, repaired, or bought a sailboat, you’ve never devoted a second’s thought to what one looks like below its waterline. Frankly, it’s not pretty. With rare exceptions, a full-Monty view of a full-keel sailboat out of water ruins the impression of grace that it had exuded afloat. It now looks bloated, bathtubby, heavy in the hips. But sailboat design works exactly like natural selection in nature. Over millennia, sailboats have evolved the shapes and appendages they need to survive and move most efficiently, nothing more or less. This is a prime reason behind our fascination with them: no other human-made device has so closely paralleled Nature’s own process of evolution.

  Until I started studying sailboats and pondering plans, it had never occurred to me that a sailing vessel needs anything other than a sail and a rudder to tack its way around the world. But of course it does. Most of the time a sailboat is not simply running downwind, but is moving at some angle to the breeze—perpendicular or even upwind. If there weren’t some force acting underwater to resist that topside wind, the boat would be a chunk of driftwood sporting a skinny branch and a big leaf, always getting itself blown sideways instead of moving forward. Worse, whenever the wind puffed vigorously enough, the chunk would roll and topple over. To avert these unhappy events, large sailboats have deep keels—lead-weighted fins that extend several feet below the centerline of the hull. The water fiercely resists the slab side of that fin from shoving sideways through it, but offers little resistance to the slim leading edge. Thus the thrust that the wind puts into the sail gets translated into forward motion.

  Until some 2,000 years ago, sails were square and sailboats mostly traveled downwind. When the triangular sail appeared, probably as an Arab invention, upwind sailing finally became possible, although European ships stubbo
rnly continued to use oars for windward thrust for another 1,500 years. Viking ships were as sleek as giant kayaks; they didn’t need keels because the square sail was only hoisted when the wind blew in the direction the captain wanted to go. The ships of the European Renaissance, finally, adopted combinations of sails that allowed better windward mobility, and they necessarily developed deep, heavy keels.

  But by the time of North American colonization, more evolutionary improvements needed to happen. Deep drafts caused trouble for working boats that had to navigate the shallow bays and estuaries of North America’s East Coast. Keels were obviously impractical as well for small sailboats (like my Zephyr) intended to be launched from a beach. The solution was some kind of retractable keel, either in the form of a centerboard (which pivots down) or a daggerboard (thrusts down). Like many innovations in sailboat design, this idea had a foggy and disjointed provenance. Some ancient Chinese small boats had used centerboard-like devices, as had a form of native South American sailing raft, the jangada. Still, a British naval lieutenant named John Schank claimed to have invented it while stationed in Boston in 1771. The Brits skeptically fussed and tinkered with assorted forms of retractable keels and eventually gave up. Three American brothers, however, patented a “centre-board” in 1811, and the device quickly became popular in the upstart nation. Besides having a convenient shoal draft, centerboard-equipped sloops could sail rings around contemporary British boats. The slim boards created less drag in the water than the thick keels of the time. A classic British history, Henry Coleman Folkard’s The Sailing Boat: A Treatise on Sailing Boats and Small Yachts published in 1906, takes special note of a diminutive American sloop named Truant:The performances of this little vessel in beating to windward and scudding before the wind were astonishing: no English boat of her size could sail so close to the wind, nor run so swiftly before the wind . . . the Truant completely vanquished on the river (as her larger sister the America had done on the sea) every boat that competed with her.

  Most cruising sailboats today use fixed keels, but they are slimmer and more efficient than in the past. Nearly all trailerlaunched daysailers employ centerboards or daggerboards. Devlin designed the Zephyr to have a pivoting centerboard that resides like the meat of a sandwich in a narrow plywood trunk nearly five feet long, planted right in the middle of the boat. I could see its prime drawback from looking at the plan—it was going to be an elephant in the room, blocking the way of anybody trying to move around the boat. I was also advanceworrying the 2½-inch bolt that would pierce the trunk and centerboard, forming the axle on which the board would pivot. No matter how neatly and precisely I made the bolt hole, Lake Washington, three miles wide and nineteen miles long, would relentlessly try to squirm through it and flood my boat. Any kind of hole below a boat’s waterline is a standing invitation to trouble.

  I decided to make the centerboard trunk out of ordinary Home Depot fir plywood, half the cost of the beautiful okoume I used for the hull. It wouldn’t be a stressed member and it would be painted, so quality wasn’t a big issue. The centerboard itself seemed to want to be a piece of solid wood, since it would be shaped to a finlike cross-section that would knife cleanly through water. There’s a lumberyard practically in my own neighborhood that specializes in cedar—it’s the universal siding and fencing material in the Northwest, thanks to its valiant resistance to the nag of precipitation. Pawing through the aromatic stacks, I found a board that was perfect for my needs: no warp, no knots, sixteen inches wide and six feet long. At the checkout counter I babbled to the lumberman about what a beautiful piece of wood it was and what it would become on my boat. I was thinking he’d be impressed because most of the guys who came through here were just building houses.

  “Total comes to $99.01,” he said.

  “Ninety-nine bucks for one board?”

  “It’s ‘a beautiful piece of wood.’ ”

  Well, so it was. I went to work immediately, cutting out the centerboard’s graceful profile on the bandsaw and then planing and sanding its edges into the slippery shape I wanted. Cedar is an elegant wood to work with hand tools and bare hands because it’s so soft and buttery. It willingly accepts any desired curve or form, and feels good under the fingers as it’s taking shape: a wood born to please.

  Then—this created a momentary knot in my gut—I cut a six-by-nine-inch rectangular hole in it, to later fill with Sam Devlin’s lead. Without this weight, the centerboard would float in its trunk, refusing to pivot below the hull. Even with the chunky void in it, though, the piece looked beautiful, as good as an actual boatbuilder might do.

  A day later as I was rummaging through the scrap woodpile underneath my worktable, I jostled the centerboard, which was propped on its end, leaning against a table leg. The beautiful piece of wood fell over, smacking the concrete floor and opening a three-inch-long crack from the weight hole to the nearest edge.

  My “actual boatbuilder” illusion had survived all of twenty-four hours. I’d just made another amateur’s screwup, and not by knocking over the centerboard—all that did was expose its fatal flaws, fortunately on terra firma. First, cedar is too soft and light for a centerboard, which has to endure scrapes and batterings in shallow water. Second, I had cut the sides of the six-by-nine hole perfectly parallel to the grain of the wood, which simply invited the cut to extend itself at the first opportunity. These conclusions occurred as I thought through the problem after the fact, running my fingers over my ruined cedar centerboard. I could repair the crack with epoxy, but that wouldn’t remedy the underlying issue of having used the wrong kind of wood. There really wasn’t any choice but to toss the ninety-nine-buck scrap and make another centerboard.

  As I cursed my ineptitude, Mark Coté, my neighbor from three doors south, walked into the garage, sweaty from his evening run. Mark teaches math at the neighborhood middle school and has become a good friend in the ten years we’ve lived here. I’ve never been to his class but I suspect he’s a respected and well-liked teacher. He has an authoritative but friendly presence, a quick wit, and an optimism that contradicts everything you hear about the sorry state of American public schools—he’s forever talking about the “wonderful kids.”

  I showed him my beautiful centerboard, stupid mistake, and bemoaned the $99 I paid for the useless cedar. “You know the ‘project rule,’ don’t you?” he asked. I didn’t.

  “Work up your best estimate for materials. Multiply by two. Then work up your best estimate for time. Multiply by four.”

  I generally worked with the garage door open for light and ventilation, so one neighbor or another would drop in almost daily to visit and monitor the progress. With the arrival of summer, Elizabeth, the nine-year-old next door, became my most reliable habitué. Each time she saw me using a new tool (or chemical) she would pepper me with questions about it. Whatever I was doing to the boat, she wanted to try, and I would let her, as long as it didn’t involve toxic soup or sharp tools. Her attention span was measured in seconds, so she didn’t prove to be much of an actual helper. She was an endless fountain of provocative suggestions, especially concerning the boat’s eventual color. We had this exact conversation half a dozen times:

  “What color are you going to paint it?”

  “I don’t know yet. What do you think it should be?”

  “Pink.”

  “I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen very many pink boats out there.”

  “Why not?”

  I kept failing to come up with an answer.

  We also talked about the boat’s name. “What are you going to call it?” she asked several times.

  “I don’t know yet. Do you have an idea?”

  “China.”

  “Why would I name it ‘China?’ ”

  “So you can go there on it.”

  Elizabeth’s father, George, is a computer systems analyst whose personal joy is his garden. My front lawn and assorted plantings—I cannot by any stretch call them a “garden”—look ridiculously scrawn
y and desultory next to his, but George has never uttered a word of criticism. He simply accepts that my values and enthusiasms are different, and whenever he buys a truckload of flowering plants at the nursery, he quietly installs two or three extras in my yard. I thank him, water them for a week or two, then forget about them and they die. He buys replacements, experimenting with ever-hardier species, and the cycle goes on. Thus it will be as long as we live here, apparently. I will never have one iota of interest in gardening and George will never give up. Obviously, when the boat is finished I will owe Elizabeth many expeditions on the neighborhood lake.

  Ava, the nine-year-old Bulgarian girl across the street, dropped in to ask if I could help her with a school project. She had volunteered to build a model log cabin for a pioneer diorama, and after she got home a stark realization struck: she had no idea how to build such a thing. I immediately seized on the most authentic (and grandiose) possibility: literally replicate a log cabin with notched and interlocking wooden dowels. I dropped that plan when I realized that I’d be doing most of the work, which I’d enjoy, but it wouldn’t yield much of an educational dividend for her. I then came up with the idea to rip a bunch of dowels in halves lengthwise on the bandsaw, which she could glue onto a simple wooden box to simulate the look of logs. All I had to do was sketch her a plan and saw the logs.

  We spent a productive hour on it, and she trundled back to her garage with an armload of pioneer cabin parts, ready to go to work. I felt a warm glow at having played an avuncular role in the neighborhood, oddly diluted with a vector of guilt. I’d just dropped everything to help a neighbor kid with a project, and yet my track record for procrastinating on projects involving my own house is immaculate. I’d been delaying building a new surround for the kitchen window for a year. I’d put off wallpapering the bathrooms—$600 worth of paper was snoring in a closet upstairs—for three years. This was impossible to explain or justify, other than to say that the latter two projects didn’t sound like “fun.” That is not an adult excuse, but it’s all I’ve got.