Patty is taking pictures from shore. I’m a couple hundred yards away now, beyond effective range of her small digital camera. It’s time to turn around—to see if Far From Perfect will tack. Small, lightweight sailboats sometimes have trouble mustering enough momentum to turn the bow through the eye of the wind.
I push the tiller hard to starboard, and the boat obediently curls to port. The boom slowly drifts at me, lower than head level. It’s at my shoulders. I practically lie down to let it pass overhead. When I pull myself up, we’re on a beam reach again, but sailing in the opposite direction. A successful tack!
I sail the boat back to shore to collect Patty, and I realize I never lowered the centerboard to counteract the lateral force of the wind. In such a light breeze, it wasn’t even needed. I’ve got to try it next to see if I can strike another item from the worry catalog: whether it’ll pivot freely in its watertight sandwich. Patty boards, we shove off again, and as soon as we’re in deep water I uncleat the lanyard that secures the centerboard. It’s a three-foot length of polyester line.
The centerboard pivots exactly as it’s supposed to.
I sputter an expletive that is grossly out of context on this lovely, tranquil lake.
“What happened?”
“I forgot to tie a figure-eight knot at the end of the lanyard. We’ve just lost it.”
When the centerboard pivoted to its full “down” position, which is what we’d be using in a stiff wind, it pulled the lanyard with it, right through the hole in the cedar plank atop the centerboard trunk. The knot, had one existed, would have stopped it. Now the lanyard is jammed inside the narrow trunk, and the centerboard is stuck with it.
“Do you have anything in your toolbox to fish it out with?” Patty asks.
“I left my toolbox in the car.”
I’m grateful for one thing: the churlish wisdom of not inviting any friends to witness this. It’s not a disaster, but we’re well into the fiasco spectrum. How can someone invest so much intimacy in a boat as I have with this one, then commit such a sequence of screwups in the first quarter-hour of actual operation? The only answer—and it has the tinny ring of an excuse—is that sailing is complicated, even on a dinghy, and newbies usually flounder until the moves become instinctive. Still, I built this thing.
“I guess we should go ahead and sail her for awhile, see if everything else works, then go ashore and try to retrieve the lanyard,” I say. Patty agrees.
The wind doesn’t cooperate. It dies, then resumes, then starts shifting direction every minute or two. This must be why I haven’t seen anyone sailing on Beaver Lake: it’s in a topographic bowl, and increasingly ringed with looming McMansions, so a light breeze encounters so many impediments that it’s too shifty for good sailing. But Far From Perfect responds willingly, seems credibly stable, demonstrates no obvious vices except for the nuisance of the extremely low boom coming about. Joel Bergen told me he just catches his and lifts it over his head, so we’ll try that.
After an hour, we sail and paddle her back to the launch, slowly grounding the centerboard on what I pray is a soft mud lakebed. There’s a sickening gggrrnnch! that suggests it isn’t. We crawl off the boat, getting immersed up to thighs—no great concern to Patty, since she’s in her wetsuit—and I slog, dripping, a hundred yards to the car. There’s nothing in my tool kit that can retrieve the centerboard lanyard, so I drive home for a coat hanger—this is growing more ignominious by the moment—while she waits with the boat.
The coat hanger doesn’t work. The lanyard has somehow wedged itself very tightly beside the centerboard, which is thoroughly stuck.
We wrestle the boat halfway out of the water. I take the thin blade of the paddle and guide it into the trunk, then pound the paddle’s other end with a hammer to try to unstick the centerboard. A fisherman on the shore twenty feet away glowers but doesn’t say anything. I keep hammering and eventually move the board about six inches, but it’s starting to splinter and the lanyard is still jammed. The final option appears to be to plunge under the boat and try to jerk the lanyard free from below. Which I would have done at the beginning if I’d been wearing my goddamn wetsuit.
From underneath, the lanyard pulls free surprisingly easily. Then I duct-tape it to a stiff wire, thread it back through its hole above, and tie the simple figure eight that it needed at the outset.
We cart the boat home. I scribble a list of eleven items that need attention, from a few spots of touch-up paint to a whole new arrangement for the seating. It’s probably a good two weeks’ worth of work. At that point, I’m scheduled to have a slightly more formal launch—in the bay behind Sam Devlin’s shop.
“Can you save money by building a boat yourself, or is it actually more expensive this way?”
Far From Perfect is parked in the driveway, enjoying a day of welcome April sun while I reposition some of her hardware, and Ava, the precocious ten-year-old Bulgarian from across the street, is asking questions.
“That’s kind of a devastating question, Ava,” I say, hoping to derail the inquiry with a big word. It doesn’t work—a hint of a knowing smile crosses her pixie face, and she just stands there, waiting. I stumble through a convoluted exposition that I end up not even understanding myself, and finally she wanders away. It occurs to me that she’s been observing my minuscule boat under construction from her upstairs bedroom window for oneseventh of her life, so it must seem to her that there’s been some considerable expenditure here—in some form or another.
I’ve been keeping a ledger of both the money and hours I’ve spent on construction, so maybe this is the time to tally them and attempt a real answer to Ava’s question. In the grownup world, of course, the part about “is it more expensive this way?” involves more than cash outlay, and I’ll have to deal with some deeper issues. But first, let’s just add numbers. I haven’t checked myself, until now.
I seem to have spent a total of $4,175.73 on materials and supplies, including expendables such as sandpaper and solvents. This is 278 percent of my original wild-guess budget of $1,500, a costoverrun proportion that’s right up there in defense-contractor leagues. I spent another $966.32 on tools specifically for use on this project, and $108.55 getting the gift trailer licensed. So the total boat-related outlay so far has reached $5,250.60.
I’ve logged 419 hours of work spread across eighteen months. In his catalog blurb for the Zephyr plan, Sam Devlin breezily claims that “she can be built in just over 100 hours time.” I’m at 400 percent of Sam’s estimate, which is precisely in line with Mark Coté’s “project rule.”
I can see several ways to address Ava’s question. We can strictly line up my $4,175 material costs with the most directly comparable production boat, the Crawford Melonseed, which at this writing lists for $8,900 plus shipping from New England. In this matchup, I save money.
But last September, prowling around Port Townsend’s Wooden Boat Festival, Patty and I spotted a very pretty, fourteen-foot wooden daysailer in decent condition—she could have used some modest cosmetic improvements, but nothing major appeared amiss—for sale for $1,100. By that benchmark, my cash outlay alone on Far From Perfect looks idiotic.
If I value my time at $25 an hour, which I can manage writing and teaching when all the stars are aligned, I’ve invested $10,475 in labor. Adding the materials to that, I have, in theory, generated a pipsqueak boat of suspicious quality for $15,725. This is beyond absurd. Devlin himself would build it for less than that—I know; I asked. Around $11,000, he said. And Devlin’s craftsmanship would be virtually perfect.
I’m having a hard time thinking of an honest answer to offer Ava, or any adult who’s half as perceptive as she is, that isn’t conflicted and overcomplicated. It would be terrific if I could claim that I’ve grown some useful skills or discipline from the work, but it’s not clear that I have. My new abilities with a bandsaw would be useful only for building another, larger boat, which by definition would be more irrational than this one. The project has been fulf
illing, but only in counterpoint with waves of doubt and discouragement.
From five yards away, or better yet, fifty, Far From Perfect is a heartbreakingly beautiful boat. The oak veneer on her deck catches the sun, strains it through an amber-and-chocolate sieve of wood grain, and rebroadcasts it as a soft, warm, organic glow. The sheer sweeps upward with a touch of insouciance, confidently proclaiming that her 1880 design is more than capable in 2010. (As if to confirm it, Joel Bergen just told me he’d taken his Zephyr out for a sail on Puget Sound, where a moderate breeze whipped her to a GPS-verified 5.5 knots—20 percent beyond what the physics textbook insists is her top speed.) The tanbark sail and varnished spruce mast sing tight, elegant harmonies with the cherry-red hull. Of course, when I get closer than five yards—as I must every morning when I squeeze by her starboard beam in the garage to deposit paper and plastic in the recycling bins—I’m irritated and disappointed. The failures are painfully apparent, especially the too-far-from-perfect epoxy finish on the deck. Up close, its waves and dimples scatter the garage light like a funhouse mirror.
I expect Sam will wince visibly—quiver and shake, even—when he inspects the deck. I’ll promise him that I’ll keep working on it.
But then there is deep beauty, the quality I’ve been contemplating for years, ever since that first wooden boat show. Regardless of her surface blemishes and imprecise fittings, there is an inner universe of beauty wrapped up in this little boat, not only in her physical essence but also in the process of her creation. And it isn’t mystical or spiritual or theoretical, as I vaguely thought at the outset of The Year (and a Half) of the Boat. It’s become real and tangible.
A few chapters back, I wrote that a sailboat—any sailboat—serves as a symbol of liberation. I still see it that way, but in a different and deeper sense. It isn’t just about escaping the bonds of cell phones and Palm datebooks. It isn’t about escape at all. It’s a move toward finding a comfortable place at the intersection of technology and nature, one that’s neither completely dependent on nor independent of the other.
The way I chose to build this boat doesn’t repudiate technology. The bandsaw, random orbital sander, fiberglass and epoxy, and advice and commiseration via the Internet all contributed to making it a better boat than would have been possible at the time of the original nineteenth-century melonseeds. I’m almost certain I would have abandoned the project in midstream if I’d imposed an artificial historic overlay on it, eschewing electric tools and modern chemicals. But the end product, a simple sailboat that once underway uses no basic technology that wasn’t available to Thoreau, embraces nature in a way that I think is profoundly beautiful.
Embracing nature isn’t something out at the crackpot extreme of environmentalism. Think of it as a carpenter taking into account the grain of the wood, the way the fibers were naturally aligned as the tree grew, and fashioning an object so that the grain strengthens the piece instead of weakening it. If I had made the tiller so that the grain ran crosswise to the axis of stress, even someone with no experience in woodworking could see instinctively that it was wrong, and soon would come a disastrous crack to prove it. Like this, our web of ecological relationships can be realigned with the grain of the natural world, but it won’t be easy: we’ll be turning away from the dominion-over-all ethic that has its roots deep in the Old Testament. In the design and building of sailboats I discern a sweeping metaphor for cooperation with nature, and learning to sail has shown me that it need not feel like deprivation.
Another facet of deep beauty is the back story of the object at hand. The deeper the story, the richer the beauty. A factory-built sailboat slowly acquires a history of its owners’ dreams, fears, and experiences—most good, a few terrifying—but it can hardly compare with a boat that starts its life on the water already full of its maker. Any handmade boat is an essay in values, and based on my experience, I would suspect that it had helped its builder to sort out and clarify those values in him- or herself. At best, it’s a liberating experience, and Far From Perfect has been one. I think I’m significantly more patient, measurably more methodical, and slightly more courageous than I was on the day when Sam’s plans arrived in the mail. I might be a little better at feeling at peace when I fall short of my own expectations; I’ve accepted that calibrated excellence is the best most of us can do. All these qualities are in the boat in approximate parallel with my character. Maybe others can’t see them there, but I can, and they form a chart of how far I’ve come and how far I have to go.
On the surface, the reason for taking Far From Perfect to Olympia to show Sam is simply that he invited me to, almost a year back. But realistically, I doubt he remembers. He obviously has more businesslike things to do than entertain a stream of amateur builders trundling their imperfect efforts to his shop like sick puppies to a vet. At his expense, I seem to be answering some undefined internal need, something that won’t accept validation without pushing against one last bit of resistance.
As the appointment approaches, I start to regret making it, and the anxiety mounts every day. The distraction of worry is contaminating the work I do on the boat in the meantime. On a couple of successive afternoons I take out one of the two crosswise thwarts and replace it with wider side-mounted seats that follow the curve of the hull sides. The new pieces end up with gaps between their ends and the hull ranging from zero to more than ⅛ of an inch. The chasms make no difference in terms of comfort or strength, but the work looks sloppy and I can’t find the energy or even the desire to try to make it better. I’m in that zone Sam described with pinprick accuracy as “wanting the boat out of your life.”
It’s overcast and breezy when I roll into Sam’s shop yard on a late April afternoon with Far From Perfect in tow. Probably too breezy for sailing, which will be a relief—I won’t have to demonstrate my additional shortcomings on the water. Sam’s in his office on the phone. As soon as he hangs up, he twists his big frame out of his chair. “Let’s see her,” he says, grinning and sounding as eager as a kid who’s just been invited to look at dinosaur bones.
We walk outside. He stares at Far From Perfect’s port side for a long minute, then strides around to starboard. He kneels slightly to survey the hull’s underside and skeg. Then he peers into the cockpit at the centerboard trunk and the mast and boom bungeed down for transport. He feels underneath the deck, finding the lumberyard quarter-round trim I used to brace the coaming, which wasn’t in the plans. I feel an urgent need to fill the silence with something. I have an elaborate apologia that I mentally rehearsed on the drive to Olympia.
“Cool!” he barks, just as I’m about to launch my much less laudatory appraisal. “You made a really nice boat. This is the first Zephyr I’ve seen, and I’ve really been wondering what it would look like.”
“You’ve never built one yourself?” I ask.
“No,” he says, sounding slightly sheepish. “I probably should, though.”
The tension evaporates, and we spend the next hour poking and prodding the details. He doesn’t mind that I left out the deck brace; he thinks the miscellaneous reinforcements I arranged under the deck will cover for it. He tells me to quit worrying about the transom. He likes my improvised seats. He doesn’t mention the mismatched grain of the stem or the little kinks in the hull curvature caused by my two-piece sheer clamps. The one serious shortcoming he finds is the rudder, which I made out of ½-inch okoume. He says the stress of holding the boat on course against weather could break it, which would constitute a real emergency in a big wind. I figure it’s another brain fart on my part, like overlooking the deck brace, but when we check the Zephyr’s materials list it specifies either ¾-inch hardwood or ½-inch plywood. Finally seeing a Zephyr in the flesh, Sam’s eye tells him the plywood is too flimsy. Who am I to argue? I’ll rebuild it—the rudder is one of the few parts I haven’t yet made twice.
“You notice the deck bulge, like there’s a Corvette engine under the hood,” I say.
“It was actually the first
thing I noticed,” he says. “Were the bulkhead dimensions wrong on the plans?”
“No. I just made a bunch of little mistakes, and they compounded into a big one.”
“The best way to deal with a mistake like this is to call attention to it, and then it disappears,” he says. “It’s counterintuitive, but it works.” He takes the boat’s profile rendering on the plan and sketches a wooden cockscomb two or three inches high that would stream back from the bow along the misshapen deck to the mast—an accoutrement so unusual that no one, in theory, would then notice the hump underneath it. It could be made functional with a cleat for tying off the sprit snotter, making it easier to adjust the sprit underway.
“Of course you can see that the epoxy finish on the deck is pretty uneven,” I say. “I can do better, and I’m going to spend the summer on it. It’s just a matter of buckling down to the grind.”
“I wouldn’t bother,” he says. “It’s really not important.”
“I don’t know how you can say that—the brightwork on your boats looks like Scandinavian furniture.”
“Well, as you’ve learned, you can work on these things forever. There’s no end to how far you can take it. The place we stop is the place where it’s better than what we did on the boat just before.”
He asks me if there’s anything in the plans that ought to be changed. I’m surprised by the question—there’s a presumption in it that I actually know something about boatbuilding. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve built one more Zephyr than Sam has. And in fact, I do have a couple of suggestions. I crudely sketch the easier ways I figured out to build the mast step into the hull and attach the coaming to the deck. “What I did wasn’t the way you’d do it, given your boatbuilding skills,” I say. “I just devised things that seemed more accessible to an amateur.”
The Year of the Boat Page 21
