The Year of the Boat

by Lawrence W. Cheek

  We seem to be confronting a perfect dilemma. For the individual, striving for perfection, or even objective excellence, is often personally destructive. But for the sake of humanity, it’s essential. Without this drive, we don’t enrich the quality of life on earth.

  The answer must be to find a balance, but I’m stymied. I’ve become too emotionally entangled in the boat, and it’s blackening my mood almost every day because the quality isn’t there. I want to pull back, disengage my emotions and self-esteem from the project, but I don’t know how. The entanglement of boat and mind—this would not surprise Steinbeck or E. B. White—has assumed a life of its own that isn’t under control.

  Relief, at least temporary, appears in the form of a Mort Gerberg cartoon, of all things. I’m avoiding work on the boat one afternoon by reading The New Yorker, and here’s this boredlooking cubicle drudge talking to another: “I say, if at first you don’t succeed, redefine success.” That might be the solution. Maybe Far From Perfect is just a rehearsal, a way station on the road to building a real boat. Would that be so bad?

  There’s enough daylight and initiative left today for one of my little jobs: another coat of varnish on the mast. First, I have to sand off the blob-like dribbles from the preceding coat that accumulated because I let the mast dry lying horizontally instead of vertically. After brushing on a better, but still imperfect, coat, I prop it up outside against the garage eaves, taking care to tape a scrap of wax paper where it makes contact. And I feel like I’ve arrived at a crossroads. It’s time to sprint to the end—to just finish the boat. To quit grieving, quit worrying, quit yearning for an alternate universe where amateurs enjoy an infinite span of time to blossom with professional skills. The deck is just going to have to brace itself. The varnish will have to do for now; it can be improved later—if it seems worth the effort.

  This is the thought that lifts me over the wall: the one thing that’s more irrational than building your own boat is becoming so obsessive that you fail at building it.

  I can’t remember the last time I followed the troubleshooting instructions that came with a product and they actually worked, promptly and perfectly. If the instructions actually address the problem at hand, a rare enough occurrence, then the recommended solution is either ambiguous, incomprehensible, or impossible.

  I’m pondering the oak veneer Patty helped me glue to the deck last night, and it’s heartbreaking. On the forward deck erupt eight or ten veneer tumors, swollen ovoid bumps where stowaway air bubbles slipped underneath and we didn’t see them in the crummy night lighting. I can’t ignore them because the forward deck already has that master bulge from being forced down onto bulkheads that weren’t shaped right, and the effect of all these additional baby bulges is like Quasimodo breaking out in measles—surely the last thing the poor schmuck needs. I’ve got to get rid of them, and the obvious solution, ripping up seventy-five bucks’ worth of veneer fastened down with contact cement, is not appealing.

  A miniature booklet that came from Virginia with the veneer, however, suggests: “Deflate the air bubbles by slitting them in the direction of the grain and pressing toward the slit. In a circular motion, work around the bubbled area with a warm, dry iron until the blisters are firmly set.”

  It adds that one should inspect for bubbles and commence treatment within two hours after laying down the veneer. It’s now been ten. The chance that this is going to work seems vanishingly small. But I don’t have a Plan B, so I fetch the iron from the laundry room.

  I circle all the malignancies with a pencil, slit them, fire up the iron, and attack the smallest one, taking care to place a kitchen towel between the iron and wood so I don’t scorch it. After working the iron around in the prescribed circular motion, I leave its point resting over the bubble for a few seconds to hopefully reactivate the contact cement underneath. I remove the iron, and I’m astonished: the bubble has vanished. Unfortunately, there’s also the amber outline of a Presto steam iron where I last parked it. But the veneer isn’t scorched, just slightly discolored, and a few passes with sandpaper erase the problem. I attack the rest of the bumps, following the instructions exactly—it takes conscious effort to avoid introducing personal innovations like parking the iron—and in twenty minutes the deck is in remission. No tumors (except for Big Mama), no visible slits, no iron-shaped discolorations. A little touch-up sanding of the seams and edges, and the deck will be ready for its clear protective layer of glass and glop.

  At this not-quite-final stage, Far From Perfect looks superficially impressive. The richly grained white oak veneer, which I chose to match the solid oak of the stem and tiller, provides a beautiful visual counterpoint to the hull’s deep bing-cherry paint. It would have been less trouble, and much less expensive, just to paint the deck a contrasting white, as Joel did with his Zephyr, but I wanted to broadcast some unmistakable evidence that this is a wooden boat. Of course my effort won’t hold up under philosophical attack: the veneer is a costume, not representative of the plywood underneath and playing no part in the structure of the boat. In a philosophically and aesthetically perfect world, natural materials would always express themselves honestly, never needing dress or decoration. But the world isn’t perfect, and I’m far from the accomplished level of boatbuilding at which I could indulge the luxury of philosophical integrity. I still have to cover some things up.

  I dress the deck in fiberglass cloth and brush a coat of epoxy glop over it. As always, the cloth turns transparent and invisible, and the glop forms a glistening though wavy and dimpled shell over it. My epoxy technique doesn’t seem to be improving. It’s good enough for some deceptively pretty photos, though, so I shoot a few and e-mail them to select friends.

  The next step is to make and install the coaming, the three-inch-high frame around the cockpit that will double as backrest and last-ditch levee to keep the water out when the boat heels. It would be an easy job except that the cockpit isn’t a pure rectangle—its sides curve in a concave arc to echo the contours of the deck, and when the coaming is installed its sides will cant outward a few degrees off the vertical to reflect the slope of the deck. So the ends of the cedar pieces have to mate at about ninety-four degrees instead of the right angles of a nice box, they have to join at a slight slope, and they have to be coaxed to bend in the middle: all this at once. I actually measure all these perverse angles with a protractor and pretend to cut out the pieces as precision components—spare parts for the Hubbell space telescope, I tell myself, trying to get into the mood of exacting craftsmanship—but the results are laughably inexact and I throw the first three efforts away. Then it’s back to the cut-and-try method: I cut each of the four sides slightly too long, wedge them in place, squint, scratch on some vague pencil marks, and cut again. And again. After about three hours of this, I have an acceptable coaming, ready to render permanent with bronze screws and glue. I’m fatigued from the tedious fitting process, so I just eyeball the screw positions—I think I’m getting pretty good at this—and drill holes for them without bothering to measure. My line of screws looks like a herd of cats. I conduct a brief internal skirmish of conscience and decide I just can’t let them go. I fill the holes and re-drill.

  With the coaming in place, the boat suddenly seems substantially more real, more three-dimensional. And now I’m energized. For a couple of months I’ve been incubating an idea to extend the visual line of the coaming out behind the cockpit, with a pair of flying buttresses three inches high and two feet long, tapering like swoops into the aft deck. I don’t know of any sailboat that has such a thing, but I’m recalling the roofline of the late ’70s Ferrari 308GTB, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful cars ever designed. Making the cedar swoops takes just a few minutes with the bandsaw, and I lay them in place on the aft deck just behind the coaming. They look great, but I’m suddenly throttled by nagging doubts. Are they appropriate? What about Peter Gron’s belief that a sailboat’s innate beauty is a direct consequence of functionality? Do my flying buttresses
sabotage the spiritual integrity of the boat? They have no function except to remind me of a dream car, but is that so bad?

  After twenty minutes of studying the swoops from every possible angle I take them off and throw them away, and I feel a flood of instant relief. It’s like I just decided to not commit a sin.

  The last major step is the rigging, setting up the mast, boom, sprit pole, sail, and sail controls. All this has to be temporary, easily installed and removed, since Far From Perfect will reside in the garage and ride to her launch sites on a trailer—far from practical if there’s a twelve-foot mast permanently planted in her deck.

  The sprit rig, which dates from the late nineteenth century, offers the advantage of simplicity. A sail roughly the shape of Virginia is simply laced to the mast with slippery polyester rope (or line, as sailors insist it be called when in use on a boat) and its peak stretched into the sky by a light, skinny pole called the sprit. It provides a lot of sail area for a relatively short mast, which translates directly into power for the boat. Several authoritative books on American sailboat history praise it to the skies: “. . . the most efficient and practical of all small-boat sails”; “one of the handiest and most useful rigs . . .” Its one disadvantage is that it won’t sail upwind as well as today’s triangular rigs. But around Seattle you’re as likely to find a calliope on a sailboat as a sprit rig; almost nobody I’ve talked to knows much about them. The local sail lofts I consulted seemed uninterested in bothering with my pipsqueak sail; the lowest bid was a breathtaking $580. (For perspective, the Zephyr’s spritsail is four square feet larger than a flat king bedsheet.) I finally found a sailmaker in a tiny landlocked east Texas town who crafted a nice Dacron sail to specification for $318, including shipping. I ordered a red one; I’m thinking the distinctive color will invest a small sailboat with an extra ration of drama. The color is actually called “tanbark” because it evokes the ruddy tint of historic sails dipped in tannin derived from tree bark. When sails could only be made of cotton, the tannin solution was the sailmakers’ best shot at retarding rot and mold.

  I don’t actually know how to set up the rig. Devlin’s plan is vague on details. Joel Bergen engineered his rig with a freerange boom, which I don’t understand at all. But between sifting through Googled esoterica on the sprit rig and wandering the docks at the Center for Wooden Boats, studying more conventional sloop-rigged small boats, I figure it out. The boom has to join the mast in a secure but completely flexible T-intersection; the sprit must suspend the sail from its top and angle away from the mast near the bottom with a tension-adjusting line called, no joke, a “snotter.” Then I’ll install a line called the mainsheet at the free end of the boom to control the sail’s movements to port or starboard. Since the Zephyr is so small, there’s no need for the Mr. Wizard array of sail adjustments you find on a modern cruising or racing boat. Still, it takes me a couple of three-hour afternoon sessions to drill all the requisite holes and encrust the mast and boom with their hardware, and bathe the rest of the wood in another coat of varnish to protect it from weather. There’s also a problem with the hole in the deck—it’s called the mast partner—into which the mast fits. For appearance’s sake it needs some kind of ceremonial collar so it doesn’t look like, well, a hole in the deck.

  I cut a basic beveled picture frame out of four strips of oak. But the two cross-pieces won’t lie flat on the deck because of its peaky centerline.

  I run through a mental register of options, all of them groan-inducing: bed the frame on a pond of glop, steam-bend the strips, or attempt a hopelessly precise bevel. After thirty minutes of unconventionally hard thinking I hatch an unconventional idea. It probably won’t work, but all I’m risking is mangling a couple of four-inch oak strips. I mark a couple of crosswise lines on their backs, then use the bandsaw to take slim, V-shaped sections out of them. I saw not quite all the way through the strips, so I can bend them to conform to the deck.

  And it works! The picture frame embraces the hole almost elegantly, and the bend is subtle enough that it’ll only be evident if some Pecksniffian weenie inspects the job. I don’t think this is authorized boatbuilding technique or bandsaw employment, but it might be evidence of an embryonic “flexibility of mind,” as Roger Duncan put it, beginning to limber up and twist a bit. Or it might be an amateur’s expedience.

  Maybe these are the same thing.

  The final Sunday afternoon in March grants us an uncharacteristic blue sky, a few cumulus puffs with nothing to do, and barely a breath of breeze. Not much good for sailing, but it’s perfect for low-stress testing the rig in the driveway. Patty and I wheel Far From Perfect out on her new trailer—a surprise gift from Dr. Doug Lee, one of the oncologists in the clinic where Patty works—and rig the sail flat on the lawn. Then together we lift the mast, boom, sprit, and sail assembly and drop it into the step.

  We haven’t noticed, but several neighbors have been watching all this from their windows. As a wisp of wind catches the red sail and tailors it into the curving airfoil shape it will need to sail close-hauled into the wind, swinging the boom gently to port, the street breaks out in applause.

  CHAPTER 17

  BIRTH DAY

  APRIL 8, EASTER SUNDAY. Far From Perfect is “finished,” at least to the extent that we can put her in the water and learn how, or whether, she sails; and develop a punch list of things that need to be changed or improved. I make a smoked salmon omelet for breakfast, spend a little more time than usual with the Sunday paper, and finally call up the hour-by-hour weather forecast on my laptop. It looks like our best window for sailing will lie between eleven and two, when the predicted wind is southwest at eight miles an hour and the chance of rain is only 40 percent. Later promises wetter.

  I’m perturbed by the midday window. I’d hoped to put the launch off till late afternoon, spend most of the day doing something fun. I’m not looking forward to the launch. I feel like I’m anticipating some medical procedure where the doctor keeps dodging questions about whether it’s supposed to hurt. These emotions are strange and disconcerting and not under control. It’s not at all like I had envisioned this day eighteen months back, nothing like a triumphant christening for a microyacht. At least twenty friends have asked to come to the launch, and I waved each one off with whatever vague excuse I could devise for the moment. Partly it’s that I just don’t feel triumphant or deserving of a ceremony: the boat is too far from perfect. The other issue is that I’m worried about embarrassment. Today is a convergence of two things I still know too little about: boatbuilding and sailing.

  At least we have a forgiving venue at hand. We’ll launch at Beaver Lake, a pretty half-mile-long lake less than a mile from our house. Powerboats are prohibited, so the only traffic there is other slow-moving boats: kayaks, canoes, fishing dinghies with electric trolling motors. Patty and I have often taken friends over there to introduce them to kayaking in the safest possible environment. Oddly, I’ve never seen a sailboat actually sailing.

  I start assembling turkey sandwiches and a tool kit for onsite modifications. Patty says she’s going to wear her wetsuit. At first I think she’s joking, but she’s serious.

  “It kind of hurts my feelings that you’re expecting a capsize,” I tell her.

  “I’m not,” she protests. “It’s just for wading in to launch the boat.”

  I don’t think I believe her. We’ve never seen anyone wearing a wetsuit to sail except for the Laser and Sunfish racers, who expect to get dunked. Somewhere under my irritation, I know she’s just smart to be prepared. I’d wear my wetsuit too, but it would feel like I’m jinxing my boat.

  At 10:30 a.m. we stash the sail rig in the cockpit, hook up the trailer, and trundle it to the lake. The fishermen are out in droves—a couple of them at the crowded launch site, at least a dozen on the lake. I’d like to wait till Monday for more privacy, but it’s supposed to rain all day.

  I back the trailer inexpertly to the edge of the lake, and we lift the mast and sail into its step.
I thread the mainsheet through a miniature block and a plastic jam cleat mounted on the tiller, and she’s ready to go—this is the simplest rigging of any sailboat in existence. I back the trailer another twenty feet, and we gingerly roll Far From Perfect off into the water. With her centerboard up she floats in six inches. I stare at the rubber washers where the centerboard axle bursts through the trunk and see no trace of Beaver Lake dribbling into my boat. Scratch one worry: if it were going to leak, this would be the place.

  Patty restrains Far From Perfect by her bowline, like a dog on a leash, while I park the car and trailer. I’m beginning to feel slightly optimistic. No leaks, and the wind is so light that it can’t possibly capsize us. I wade into the water, pants rolled above knee-high rubber boots, and climb aboard alone. I want Patty to stay on shore while I get the feel of the boat. I suddenly realize, absurdly: I’ve never sailed a boat with a centerboard instead of a ballasted keel. I barely know how to do this even in theory. I’ll probably capsize it without any wind.

  A feathery breeze politely abducts the sail, swings it to starboard. I paddle a couple of strokes to bring the bow around so the wind is perpendicular to the boat—a beam reach in sailing parlance, the easiest point of sail to manage. Far From Perfect begins to move under wind power. Slowly, no more than a casual strolling pace on land, but moving, wholly under the borrowed power of the wind. I suddenly feel a joy as deep and almost as ineffable as my earlier dread and depression.

  Where’s it coming from? It’s not so much about accomplishment, but rather authenticity, engaging in something that is real, that obeys comprehensible laws of the universe, that is anchored thousands of years deep in human culture. The shape of the sail, the grain of the wooden form around me, speak to an integrity that exists only in nature. And I’ve become part of it. There’s a wonderful epigram in Ray Grigg’s The Tao of Sailing: “The wing of sail divides wind and then joins it together again. Nothing is used, so nothing is wasted. Nothing is taken, so nothing is returned. Nothing is done, yet things are not the same.” I’ve never experienced quite this feeling on a rented sailboat, so indeed, things are not the same. Something has changed.