The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  “It’s very important to me that the workplace be a pleasant place to spend time,” he said. “I think that a work environment transfers its character to the thing you’re building. I know I’ve done better work here than I would have in a drywalled garage with fluorescent lights. I hate fluorescent lights.”

  He taught himself to sail in his early thirties, and in 1999 bought a scruffy, leaky, thirty-three-foot plank-on-frame sailboat that he renovated and actually sold at a profit after “sailing the paint off her” for two years—a sequence of events probably unprecedented in the annals of wooden boat commerce. I could see that his familiarity with boats had given him a level of confidence that I didn’t have, even though we were both first-time builders. He’d made dozens of departures from Devlin’s plan, most dramatically reshaping the keel into an airfoil that would actually provide lift when the wind was trying to shove the boat sideways. Shortly before my visit, he had built an experimental mock-up of a bowsprit, the pointy spar that some sailboats extend a few feet out in front of the bow. “I love the look,” he said. “It’s like the forward-moving energy of the boat can’t be contained within the confines of the hull; it wants to flow somewhere—and the bowsprit is pointing where you’re going.” There was just one problem. Typically, a bowsprit provides an attachment point for the forestay, which then can fly a larger and more powerful jib than if the sail were pinned to the bow. But Peter didn’t want to trust it for that purpose—bowsprits can break, and if the forestay were depending on it, that could fatally cripple the boat. The mast would be the next component to go. And he didn’t believe in ornamentation. He had constructed a philosophy of boat aesthetics and engineering in which the adjectives “functional,” “simple,” and “beautiful” formed a kind of tripod, and if any one of the legs were removed, then the other two would collapse. If his bowsprit wasn’t functional, then it couldn’t be beautiful, and any superfluous piece would also detract from the essential simplicity of the boat. If an actual bowsprit were to be included, it would have to find something to do.

  “Then I figured it out,” he said, grinning. “It’s a good place to hang an anchor—keeps it from scraping the hull. And on occasion I can use it to fly an asymmetrical spinnaker.” That’s a tricky downwind sail that I was a good five years away from trying on any boat.

  We talked in the boat chapel for a couple of hours, trading ideas on design, woodworking and glop-working techniques, and the nature of the boatbuilding obsession. He told me that he used to be a lot more perfectionistic than he is now, which I told him I found hard to believe. “No, it’s a practical matter,” he said. “I got rid of a lot of it in computer programming. You can work endlessly to perfect a program, but all the time you’re doing it the rest of the world is moving ahead, and then by the time you got it done, it would be obsolete.”

  “That wouldn’t apply to sailboats, especially not one you’re building just for yourself,” I pointed out. “There’s no competition, and nothing on your boat or mine is going to become obsolete.”

  “But you have to decide on a level of imperfection you can live with. If the bar is too high, you’ll never be satisfied with what you’ve done—or never finish it. When I talked to Sam Devlin, he said you have to reach the point where you want the boat out of your life if you’re ever going to finish it. I’ve reached that point. I want to go sailing.”

  “I had that same conversation with Sam,” I said. “Only he said it even more forcefully. He said he has to start hating it.”

  Peter laughed, his eyes roaming over the best thing he’d done in his life. I couldn’t discern any glint of hate, but he did finally admit to some impatience at this point. “When I started, I was telling people it would take two years to build, but I was secretly thinking: I can do this in a year and a half. It’s now been two years and I’m still a good ways off. I’m not telling people for fear of future embarrassment, but I’m definitely shooting for next June.”

  Given his level of obsession and commitment, I thought: I’ll be astonished if he makes it. He wasn’t entirely in control of his own head. I recalled talking with a friendly builder from California at one of the wooden boat shows Patty and I had roamed around. He had a fetching but not perfect seventeenfoot catboat, a broad-beamed design with a single sail on a mast planted close to the bow. It was the sixth boat he’d built, all as an amateur. He said he kept doing it because it provided a respite from stress. “If you go to bed worrying about a problem at work, you’ll still be awake at 3 a.m. If you go to bed thinking about how you’re going to make the breasthook tomorrow, you’ll sleep beautifully all night. Why? Because it’s fun. It’s not rocket science. And you’re not doing it for a living.”

  Peter, in contrast, confessed that the Arctic Tern had kept him awake at 3 a.m., most memorably when he was working on fairing the hull at the chine—the angle where two pieces join on each side, and the hull shape becomes a sharper V. “The radius and angle are constantly changing as you move forward. It’s dangerous.”

  The afternoon light shaded into evening. Peter closed up the chapel and we adjourned to his house for dinner. It was a small, simple, starkly furnished A-frame. Parts of the kitchen floor were missing. Boat books and magazines were strewn everywhere, like flotsam. He lived alone. It was the domestic arrangement of a meticulous man who had figured out how to compartmentalize and focus his meticulousness on what really mattered to him, which is something that didn’t happen to be inside the house.

  Over broiled chicken, I asked him the baseline question: Why build a boat?

  “I suppose it’s a couple of reasons. First, it’s constant problem solving, which is something I like. And a boat requires elegant solutions to problems, because they’re all out in the open. Second, the problems are always changing, and I like the variety. It was a tough slog on the hull, but now I’m really enjoying mocking up the cabin.”

  I pointed out that these are reasons for enjoying the process, not reasons to build a boat. “It’s an irrational act, as we both know,” I said. “You already had a boat, and you could have enjoyed solving problems on it.”

  “But this is creating something,” he protested. “Adding a special thing to the world.”

  I chewed on that during the daylong trip home down Vancouver Island and the always-lovely ferry run through the San Juans to the Washington mainland. It was almost satisfying, but not quite. If he were creating something original or desperately needed, like a sculpture park or a vaccine for AIDS, I could understand why he’d said it was probably the best thing he’d done in his life. But a little sailboat of thoroughly traditional looks, intended only to be sailed by its owner/builder? I followed up by e-mail, trying to get him to go deeper.

  “What I really should have said is that this is probably the most satisfying, completest thing I’ve done,” he replied. “I feel like this is what I was made to do. It challenges me in so many ways and gives such a great feeling of joy, accomplishment, and satisfaction (and frustration and doubt, etc.). And I just plain love boats and sailing. Like you, I think boats are a thing apart from the rest of man’s creations and to be actually creating one myself is wonderful.”

  That wasn’t much deeper, and I thought I knew why. We were at the doorstep of one of the most profound and frightening questions in life: the search for meaning in what we do, and by extension what we are. How can the building of a boat face the sharp teeth of the existential maw?

  There is an answer, but it would take an awesome leap of faith and then a miraculous transformation in society to get there. If Peter’s boat—and the growing numbers of others like it—could somehow inspire a general revival of appreciation for quality craftsmanship, not just in boats but in everything from television programming to the construction of houses, then it would be a meaningful act indeed: it would improve the quality of life on earth.

  That’s a lot to ask of a boat. But asking it is a lot better than looking at the shabbiness of our cities and the expedient disposability of mos
t of the consumer goods that infest our surroundings and concluding: This is it; this is as good as it’s going to get.

  Far From Perfect was looking ridiculously, pathetically, irredeemably small, like a lasagna you’ve just baked for dinner and you realize that it can’t possibly feed the six guests who are at this moment shuffling up the walk. Part of it was having visited Peter’s Arctic Tern, nine feet longer than my Zephyr and looking one hell of a lot more like a serious boat. Another was having just spent three days on a thirty-four-foot Catalina with Patty and four other members of Windworks, our sailing club, lazily meandering south through Puget Sound and cooking and sleeping aboard. It was our first overnight on a sailboat, and it seemed to beat most of the dry-land weekend alternatives we could think of. The owner had mounted a plaque on a teak bulkhead in the cabin: “The Time a Person Spends Sailing is Not Deducted From His Life Span.” Wandering through marinas, I found I was able to look at increasingly large sailboats without reflexively thinking: pretentious. Patty and I even reopened the distant possibility of living aboard one in a couple of cautiously exploratory dinner conversations.

  Most rational considerations argue for smaller boats, not larger ones. As Mike Murray said of his Norwegian beauty Greta, there’s an inverse relationship between the size of a boat and the time one spends actually sailing it. The operating costs of any boat rise exponentially with size rather than arithmetically. This is because the larger the boat, the more complexities will naturally accrue to it. It will acquire plumbing, heating, electronics, more rigging and sail-trimming controls, maneuvering aids, and since a boat must function as a self-contained world, backup systems for everything important. If it’s large enough to have a wheel for steering, for example, it needs an improvisatory tiller stowed someplace near the cockpit in case the steering gears or cables break. At some point the boat becomes a full-time job just to maintain, thus canceling out the main reason many of us have boats, which is to escape the oppression of a full-time job. A couple of years back, Patty and I went sailing with a couple we know who have a nice thirty-seven footer that they live aboard, off and on. I asked about maintenance. “I keep a running list of about five hundred things I’d like to do to her,” said the male half of the couple, who moonlights as a physician.

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  “No, there are really five hundred things,” he said, looking slightly offended that I could have even thought he wasn’t serious.

  I’m sort of an amateur sociobiologist, so I’m always looking for evolutionary clues to explain otherwise irrational human behavior. I suspect that our appetite for ever-larger cars, houses, and boats is a kind of territorial claim, not unrelated to a male cat manufacturing an aromatic fence around his property to warn rivals away. Owning a boat is sort of like having your own island, with the added advantage of being able to move it around for a change of scenery or weather. The larger the island, the more secure and powerful you feel. A boat that really is a self-contained city-state—large enough to live aboard, seaworthy enough to sail anywhere in the world—functions as a declaration of independence.

  Ever since I read in Jonathan Raban’s superb Passage to Juneau that my fellow Seattle writer uses his ketch as a “comfortably down-at-heel floating cottage” to which he flees when a bout of serious reading, writing, or thinking is needed, I’ve had this nagging dream of doing likewise. All I need for my work is a place to park my laptop computer, a sheaf of file folders, and a bookshelf for books of reference and inspiration. (Teak OK, cherry preferred.) All this could easily be accommodated within the cabin of a thirty-foot sailboat. And couldn’t a clever accountant wring a tax deduction out of it?

  The fatal flaw in such reasoning—which almost never prevents anyone from trying it anyway—is that the cost of acquiring and maintaining this floating bubble world will require its owner to work harder and longer hours in support of it. Might those hours be happier, though, because of the boat? That had the ring of another question with existential harmonics, and it’s more than I could deal with at the moment.

  I needed to refocus on the Zephyr. Distracting daydreams and wish lists can do worse than promote procrastination; they can erode your caring about the project at hand. That could be a mortal wound to the building of a boat.

  Modeling my five-hundred-item friend, I made a list and taped it to the door of a storage cabinet in my garage. It started off as six things I needed to do before finally attaching the deck to the hull—a point-of-no-return step that would render some areas of the boat forever inaccessible. One by one, the list ballooned to thirteen things. The more I did, the more I saw there was to do. It reminded me of the three lost years I spent studying Russian, a labyrinth of grammar in which each complexity branches into several new subcomplexities, ad infinitum. I never became fluent, which might have been the ominous prequel to this boatbuilding venture.

  One of the most critical items on the list was to install permanent flotation, something to displace enough water in the hull so that if it got swamped, it would still function enough like a boat to keep its occupants above water. Some builders create watertight air chambers of plywood and fiberglass. Devlin’s construction hints said you could even stuff miscellaneous crannies of the boat with old life jackets. But on one of my earliest round-up expeditions to Fisheries Supply I got intrigued by some flotation-in-a-can magic potion, so I bought it, and it had been waiting on a shelf for six months. What you’re supposed to do, I gathered, was to construct a temporary form in the boat—cardboard would work fine, I thought—and pour equal amounts of the two chemicals into it. They were then supposed to mushroom into a permanent foam block in the shape of the form. Now I read the warning label, and I wasn’t sure it was a great idea:DANGER! VAPOR HARMFUL. OVEREXPOSURE MAY CAUSE ALLERGIC SKIN AND RESPIRATORY REACTION. EFFECTS MAY BE PERMANENT. CAUSES EYE, SKIN, AND THROAT IRRITATION. COMBUSTIBLE LIQUID AND VAPOR. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN.

  I was kind of worried about this. I didn’t really know what precautions to take, aside from wearing gloves and opening the garage door so the force of the explosion would be ushered into the street instead of the house.

  I mixed a small quantity of the ominous soup in a two-quart plastic bucket. While I stirred it, it started to get warm and expand, like a witches’ soufflé. I poured it into my bow mold. There it rose even more rapidly, a lava dome about to blow out the crater. It foamed over the top of the sheer and congealed into a yellow cumulus cloud clumped around the bow. The instructions had warned: AVOID OVERFOAMING. Apparently that’s what I had just failed to avoid. But the cloud hardened in fifteen minutes and I discovered I could shape it neatly enough with a small saw and rough sandpaper. The pour in the stern went better—I ran out of chemicals and underfoamed the cavity, which would leave an inch-high air gap between the foam and the deck over it, once installed. That didn’t seem like a problem, but what did I know?

  The installation seemed successful, but I was nagged by uncertainties about it. How much toxicity is there in the manufacture of this stuff that nobody knows about? And how reliable is it, in the long run? I hate depending on things I don’t understand. In a lot of areas of modern life, we don’t have a practical choice. I could have built air chambers, which would have taken more time but would maybe provide more of a sense of confidence and accomplishment. On balance, that’s probably a worthy tradeoff.

  The baleful warning label prompted me to do some research, and further thinking, about the possible unintended consequences of my project.

  On the surface, a sailboat appears to be a paragon of environmental virtues, a model of sustainability. But that appearance is more romantic image than fact. Historically, the construction of wooden sailboats gobbled forests at an astounding rate, particularly after they became large and heavy enough to serve as warships and empire builders. Harvey Green, who wrote an exhaustive history of lumber, estimated that a single European warship of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries claimed fifty to sixty acres of trees. Oak
trees, prime material for a wooden ship’s structural bones, take 150 to 200 years to mature. I was throwing away an appalling amount of wood for the dinky boat I was building. I’d already filled three bulging thirty-three-gallon plastic leaf bags with unusable offcuts from sheet plywood, dimensional lumber, veneer, molding, and dowels. I had managed to give token bits away as fireplace kindling, but most of my neighbors have converted their fireplaces to gas, as I have, or they just don’t use them. The rest of my scrap had gone to landfill. As any good carpenter will tell you, waste is a prime hallmark of poor craftsmanship, and I was wasting plenty either from making pieces wrong, or failing to organize my stock so I could find the most efficiently sized piece for each job at hand. As in so many aspects of modern life, technology was abetting my prodigal ways. The bandsaw cuts wood very quickly and easily, so there’s little penalty for failing to think through a problem in advance and measure carefully. If I ruin an entire cedar board, there’s an endless supply of replacements available within a ten-minute drive. There’s an art to overcoming all the technology-powered incentives to disrespect and waste natural resources, and I think that building a wooden boat could be an ideal vehicle to start integrating a new ethic holistically into one’s life. But Far From Perfect was only showing me how far from that ideal I was.

  The fiberglass revolution in boats undoubtedly has spared vast swaths of forest but extracted other environmental prices. If you drive rural roads around the Northwest, particularly on the islands, you’ll see old wooden rowboats cheerfully rotting away on lawns or pastures, looking as organically scenic as biodegrading forest logs or driftwood on the beach. Northwest artists even find them to be appealing subjects; rotting boats regularly appear in sketches and watercolors. It seems like a logical and even spiritually correct part of a wooden boat’s life cycle: when she reaches the end of her useful days, just leave her out in the rain to be dismantled and recycled by the nag of bugs and bacteria. It may take a couple of decades, but it doesn’t register on human senses as junk, like an abandoned mattress or car.