The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  Paul Gartside, a British-born Canadian boatbuilder, encapsulated it with a commendable twinkle of wit in his essay “A Designer Goes Small”:. . . Boats are more than a means of transport. They are also expressions of ourselves, our dreams and our fantasies. For many of us boats are symptomatic of a desire to escape the burdensome routine of the everyday, to find the life of romance and adventure we were destined for before it all went terribly wrong. For some people, cars perform the same function but boats have always been the stronger metaphor for me. For one thing, a boat will cut you a lot more slack than a car. It doesn’t have to get you to work and back each day. In fact, it can serve much of its purpose simply by sitting half finished in the backyard. I can show you several in my neighborhood that have been doing yeoman service for their owners in just this fashion for many years. Even unfinished, these boats are still representative of dreams.

  If Far From Perfect was representative of a dream, it was one of those strange and unnerving ones that seems to tumble into infinity, no conclusion in sight. It was now a month away from my self-imposed September 26 deadline, one year from the start date, and I was not going to make it. The earth had whisked 535,000,000 miles through space while I had built two-thirds of a 13½-foot sailing dinghy—not a stellar performance down here.

  My excuse was that real life had intruded on the dream: the entangled logistics of my father’s decline, article deadlines, irritating but essential domestic chores, and just feeling too tired on too many afternoons to go out to the garage to work. Chaos was decidedly the default mode of most days. One thing I’d learned was that I shouldn’t attempt boatbuilding on those increasingly common days when I’d gotten up at 4 a.m., mind buzzing with the day’s to-do list, and logged onto the laptop. Twelve hours later I would be too fatigued to muster much enthusiasm, or clearheaded thinking, for solving boat problems. That was fertile loam for sloppy work and stupid mistakes.

  So I shifted strategy. I abandoned the boat deadline, gave up trying to work on her every day, and set miniature goals for those days I did work—something ridiculously small but achievable in an hour or two. In Wooden Boats Michael Ruhlman noted that one of the palpable joys in the traditional Massachusetts shop where he hung out was that “such boats were gratifying to make; you could run your hand over your progress at the end of the workday.” That would be true for me even if “progress” were nothing more than a simple cedar brace for the thwart or a little fairer line on the sheer.

  Ah, yes, the sheer: the sweeping line on each side of the boat where the hull joins the deck. Aesthetically, it’s the most important line on any boat. Its arc establishes the character of the whole design, like the clarinet glissando that opens Rhapsody in Blue. A sharply upturned sheer on a small sailboat gives it a look of saucy impertinence. A long, gentle sweep, which is what the Zephyr had, suggests a dignity that makes the boat seem much larger than it actually is. Most contemporary sport boats—the fiberglass bombs that scorch across lakes at 50 miles an hour—exhibit a reverse sheer, in which the arc turns downward at the ends of the boat, particularly the stern. Although it echoes the shape of a dolphin, sailboat people almost universally find it vulgar. I suspect it’s not the pure form we’re seeing, but the culture of speed and commotion it represents.

  I was concerned about my sheer not because of its curve, which I liked very much, but because it was time to make the deck and screw it down. The Zephyr has an unusually complete deck and correspondingly small cockpit for a small sailboat, but this would make it seaworthy, stiffening the structure and shedding waves that might clamber over the bow. Attaching the deck might be the most critical operation to date, at least in terms of the boat’s appearance. If the sheer were misshapen or the two sides were even slightly out of tune, my boat would look like a baked potato. This was an operation that I didn’t dare hurry.

  My first miniature goal was to make and attach one of the sheer clamps—a simple 14-foot-long cedar strip that goes on the outside of the hull to provide a meaty platform for the deck screws to sink into. I figured I could do it in an hour. I didn’t have any boards that long, so I cut two pieces that added up to 14 feet. I could massage the joint between them with epoxy to hide it reasonably well.

  I bent, glued, and screwed the strip to the hull. It added a three-dimensional definition to the sheer line, instantly making the boat look more authentic. And indeed, it took just an hour and didn’t strain my mental reserves. It wasn’t until the next afternoon, when my mini-goal was to plane the top of the strip perfectly even with the top of the hull, that I saw the mistake. A one-piece strip, following the curvature of the hull, would have applied uniform bending force to it. My two-piece job failed to exert force where the joint occurred, so there was now a slight kink in the curvature of the hull. It was irritating and well deserving of a dope-slap, but the kink was so slight that I quickly judged it not worth the grief of chiseling off the entire sheer clamp and doing it over. In fact, I proceeded to make the other clamp the same wrong way so the two sides would enjoy the same kink.

  I wondered if Far From Perfect was becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  The next job was to lay out the two mirror-image pieces of the deck on six-millimeter okoume plywood like I had used for the hull and cut them out. This was easy because imprecision was more than welcome; I cut out vague shapes at least an inch wider than they needed to be so I would have plenty of margin for error.

  I temporarily attached the vague deck to the hull with C-clamps and backed away to admire. Far From Perfect was looking both more like a boat and more like her name all the time. But for the first time I could actually envision her as a real sailboat, heeling and bobbing and making that soft, seductive sibilance as her bow carved the water apart. That was something else I was learning about sailing: it’s not silent. Your ears are giving you just as much information as your eyes: the progress of the boat through water and wind, the creak of mast and other boat parts, the commentaries of cormorants, sea lions, and other marine traffic. It’s all important, and one more reason to prefer sailing and paddling to motoring, where the clatter of the engine overwhelms everything else.

  Enough daydreaming. There was still a lot to be done before the deck could be permanently attached.

  On a September Saturday afternoon I rounded up three neighbors to help cart the boat out the sidewalk again, where I leveled it with foam blocks to try fitting the mast with the deck temporarily in place. Yet another amateur’s error: Last time I worked on the mast placement I got it canted back at the requisite five degrees, but I didn’t consider how I would make sure it wasn’t leaning to port or starboard. The mast needed to drop through a square hole in the deck to another square hole in a reinforced plate deep in the hull called the mast step. If the two squares happened to be even slightly out of alignment I would have a cockeyed mast.

  They were and I did.

  A knot of neighbors clustered around, watching this operation. I had the feeling they expected me to know what to do, which I didn’t. I had no idea how a real boatbuilder makes sure the mast is pointing straight up, and I couldn’t recall any helpful passage in any of the books or articles I’d read. Was it too obvious to mention? As I contemplated, my suburb came through for me: There was a streetlight two doors north of mine. I walked down to it with my spirit level and checked it for verticality. It was right on. All I had to do was adjust the holes in my deck and step until my mast lined up with the streetlight.

  “That’s how boatbuilders do it,” I told the crowd.

  Aligning the holes took three hours of chiseling, sawing, sanding, and filling, and by the time I was done both holes were too wide and the mast was poking through the deck about half an inch to the left of the boat’s centerline. But it was vertical. The off-center hole seemed like a lesser sin than a listing mast.

  A man driving a black Nissan swerved to the curb next to the boat. He had an Australian accent, and I remembered him dropping by last fall to observe the Zephyr’s birth. “It�
��s been a year,” he said, remembering with remarkable accuracy. “She’s really coming along. She’s beautiful. But she really looks like one hell of a lot of work.”

  He drove off. I rounded up another three neighbors, who affably helped cart the boat back inside. I was vaguely troubled by the Australian’s last comment. Not that it was at all rude or derisive, but I began imagining what was unsaid: . . . and hardly worth it.

  A few days after I dropped my card in Greta’s cockpit came an e-mail from her owner, who introduced himself as an accountant named Mike Murray. He didn’t think my note was bizarre or a breach of etiquette, and he invited me over to Vashon to take a closer look. A few e-mails later, we concurred on a Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks out, which would be his last sail of the season. He’d haul Greta out at the island’s marina and truck her to his house for dry storage and renovations over the winter. I’d be welcome to come along.

  The appointed Sunday was overcast but calm, and Patty and I paddled over to Greta’s mooring to wait for Mike. The little sailboat was resplendent—I scribbled the word in a waterproof notebook and gave thanks that English is so rich as to provide such a perfect descriptor. Its Latin root splendere means “to glitter,” which is exactly what Greta was doing, even on this gray day: gathering all the natural light available, processing it through the honeyed varnish of her African mahogany planking, and rebroadcasting it as a lantern-like glow. Greta was practically a floating lighthouse. I also noticed, appreciatively, how her thoroughly traditional construction revealed exactly what’s inside her, structurally. All along the hull were rows of circular wooden plugs called “bungs” to cover the screw heads where the planks were attached to the frame members. The bungs literally outlined the bones of the boat. The rows were close together, which told me the bones were substantial. I like things that openly express their structure; it helps me to trust them.

  Mike paddled up in a plastic kayak. “You must be Larry and Patty,” he said. “You can tie your kayaks to her and we’ll sail over to the marina.”

  We clambered aboard. Mike was a big-boned man with a square-cut face, creased with rugged furrows, hair silvering at the temples. He looked like a professor of sailing. He hoisted the main and then the jib, and gave me the tiller—remarkably gracious, since this would be his last date with this beauty for half a year. The sails filled with a light beam breeze, and he began to tell Greta’s story. He said he had been looking for a Lightning-class sailboat—a sporty, race-bred centerboard sloop—six years ago when he stumbled onto Greta in the San Juan Islands. She was in storage, under canvas, for sale for $1,200. “I pulled up the cover, took one look, and I was totally hooked,” he said. “She had the most beautiful butt of any boat I’d ever seen.”

  Every story too good to be true, of course, is. This wasn’t quite like uncovering a pristine ’62 Corvette in a clueless farmer’s barn. Greta was a great buy only for a person with the nerve and resources of Mike Murray. He’d been sailing for decades, had owned a couple of wooden boats before, and wasn’t afraid to perform major surgery on them. Greta’s deck was thoroughly rotted from water invasion, and he would have to replace it. He also was fortunate enough to live in a waterfront house with a calm summer moorage. Greta has a full keel, which makes her impossible to keep in a garage and trailer-launch for a day’s sailing. Mike said he always scoops her out of the water for the winter, but it’s a once-a-year adventure that requires the help of high tide and the only boat haul-out hoist on Vashon Island.

  During Puget Sound’s five-month window of generally fine sailing weather, though, he told me he manages quality time with her. “I have a pretty stressful life. I’m working with a partner on a start-up company, so I go into the city and work that job for a couple of hours every morning. Then I spend the rest of the day on a contract job that’s been going on for two years now. When I get home on summer evenings, though, there’s time for what I call a ‘two-tack’ or ‘four-tack’ sail before dinner. I usually go by myself. Some people go for a martini, I go for a sail. The beauty of this boat is that I can have her rigged and ready to sail in ten minutes. I subscribe to a formula I once heard that the time you actually spend sailing is inversely proportional to the size of the boat. This one is perfect for me. When I want to go for a more ambitious sail, I have friends who have bigger boats. That provides all the access I need.”

  Mike said he was still just as transfixed by her looks as on the day he uncovered her. In fact, he’d lately been leaving the canvas off just so he could stare at her from his living room window. Yes, there was a trace of ego gratification involved, a pinch of impure thought. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “sailing her feels like you’re arriving at the dance with the prettiest girl in school.”

  There was just a light breeze from the north off our starboard beam, but Greta responded as effortlessly as a wisp of smoke. I steered with a fingertip. Compared to Greta, the other small boats I’d sailed were hippos wading through a bog. Clearly, she was more than just a pretty butt.

  A lot of things, though, were converging here because of her beauty: Mike’s quality of life. Our meeting, which seemed like it would grow into a friendship. The pleasure and perhaps inspiration she continually offered to passersby. And her own survival—there aren’t many homely or indifferently constructed boats that live to keep giving pleasure after half a century. They get cut apart and thrown away, to no one’s great regret.

  The impulse that drives us to bring things of beauty into our lives, often making sacrifices for them, has many facets. It’s ego, instinct, sensual pleasure, a cultural response, even the gratification that comes from knowing that you’re doing good for humanity by being the creator or custodian of something wonderful. I felt all these things sailing Greta, and we’d had just a lunch date.

  CHAPTER 13

  ALULA

  “THIS IS PROBABLY THE best thing I’ve done in my whole life.”

  Peter Gron, forty-two, was talking about his Arctic Tern, a twenty-three-foot full-keel sloop taking elegant shape beside his home on Gabriola Island, British Columbia. There was no trace of irony or self-consciousness in his voice or expression—he meant it.

  If my boat had looked like Peter’s, I could have said it was the best thing I’d ever done, too. His Arctic Tern and my Zephyr are blood relatives, both being stitch-and-glue designs from the pencil of the same Sam Devlin, but they are kin only in the sense that great blue herons and chickadees belong to the same biological class. He had named her Alula, the Arabic name of a star in the constellation Ursa Major that appeared to ancient astronomers as the first leap of a celestial gazelle. Alula would sport a Bermuda rig with a thirty-foot mast, a cabin complete with a propane heater and sleeping berths, and enough design seaworthiness that Peter intended to sail into the open Pacific west of Vancouver Island, out of sight of land.

  Not only that, his workmanship made my boat look like a driftwood raft lashed together with sea urchin sinew.

  Even Alula’s bottom was unbelievable. Peter had wanted a supersmooth skin to make her more slippery in the water, and also to discourage freeloading sea organisms from attaching to her. So he bought ten pounds of fine copper powder to mix with epoxy and applied ten coats of dazzling metallic glop to the bottom of the hull and keel, sanding between each coat. After all that, he undertook six more rounds of sanding, progressing from 120-grit to 1200-grit sandpaper and finally to rubbing-compound polishing. The boat’s bottom looked like a bronze urn. I drew my fingers across it and it felt like the curving cheek of an ebony-finish Bösendorfer grand.

  “This is beyond meticulous,” I told him.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, visibly wincing.

  But his blog, where he’s documented (just as meticulously) his boatbuilding project, did offer a snippet of personal reflection. “There were a few occasions where I had to remind myself, ‘Dude, this part will be under the water.’ ”

  I had met Peter online, following a link from Devlin’s website to
Peter’s, then wrote him an e-note introducing myself and my boat project. He invited me to drop by. It was a complicated drop, involving four hundred road miles, four ferry crossings, and the usual character-building queues at the Canadian border, but it was worth the trouble. Despite his vastly greater ambitions and construction skills, some remarkable similarities in our experiences were helping to explain something about boatbuilding and its effects on a life’s inner direction.

  Alula was the first boat he had built, but he had embarked with a lot more foundational skills than I had. His whole family built houses, and Peter grew up around tools and building. “There are old Super-8 movies of me pounding nails into a piece of scrap when I was barely a year old,” he told me. Although he had a degree in computer science and worked as a freelance programmer, he’d enjoyed wide experience making furniture and houses. Before he started on the Arctic Tern, he built a place to build it—a wood-framed boat shop beside his house in which the ribs curved skyward to meet in a point like a gothic arch, a translucent plastic skin stretched across them. The workspace inside was bathed with diffused sunlight and exuded the serenity of a forest chapel. There was a cast-iron wood stove to transmute scrap wood into heat; no mound of malformed boat parts collected under his workbench as under mine. He had built the chapel in six days. The photos of it on his website, he said, have drawn as many comments and questions as the boat itself.