Wooden Boats

Penguin Books

Chapter One

Boatstruck: there could be no other explanation for the impulsetoward Rebecca. The man was boatstruck. Some people becomeboat smart; others are simply struck. Something happensto certain men when they see a boat, and they become crazy. A man,or the occasional woman (women seem to be less frequently disturbed),who is boatstruck shows no easily discernible outward signs of the illness.On the contrary, the boatstruck look more than reasonable. Theyare successful people. They are not easily carried away. They have accumulatedif not substantial wealth, then at least significant disposableincome. They are smart, cool, self-possessed, and they are pretty goodon the water. They brim with a free and adventurous spirit. You tendto like these people?they can be inexplicably magnetic. But a manwho is boatstruck often has an unrealistic understanding of his cashsituation. And cash is the fulcrum on which a boatstruck life teetersbetween bliss and ruin. Boats require plenty of cash.

    And yet there is something exquisite about the condition of beingboatstruck. An ecstasy runs through it, compulsive and contagious.You can see it, sense this delight, even if you happen to be free of theaffliction yourself or don't sail or even if you don't particularly care forboats. Sometimes a beautiful boat is simply worthy of devotion, reverence,and awe, and no one doubts it. A beautiful boat is as obviouslyinvaluable as a Leonardo sketch or Monet's water lilies. The boat canbe a magnificent structure. And the boat most likely to be deemed so issurely the wooden boat. Many groan at the thought of such boats, recallingsome youthful foolishness that resulted in much maintenanceand repair and not a single second of actual sailing. That's a woodenboat, all right, but that boat is not magnificent. We are not talking hereabout the wreck, that piece of shit on the farthest mooring, built in thefifties and uncared for almost from its launching; we are talking ratherabout the well-built, meticulously crafted, lovingly cared for, continuallysailed, plank-on-frame, gaff-rigged vessel. That boat inspires. It canbe 20 feet or 80, and it is the same thing?it's a form that you know atyour core. The perfect wooden sailboat. Such a product of man's mindand labor?a series of pieces of wood bent around frames?is worthyof even the most peculiar fetish of man, of adoration, is worthy perhapseven of lunacy.

    In 1995, in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, a boatstruck man answereda question posed by a boatbuilder. It may have been one of themost common of all dialogues between the boatstruck and the boatbuilder,but on this occasion something substantial would be born fromit, born of all this, all that wooden boats were and are, all that theyattract?this adoration, this reverence, this innate sense of truth, thiswant, this insanity, this intelligence, this capacity to imagine beauty anddraw its design so that it will move through water with grace andpower, be drawn through it by wind?a boat born ultimately of a deepknowledge of how wood on water works, knowledge earned overmany thousands of miles on the earth's oceans, many decades buildingboats, and long study of a five-thousand-year-old practice, and born,too, of a sense of all that the boat might be, simply for the boat: whatmight be. Out of all this came Rebecca. It floated out of a collective unconsciouslike a ghost ship materializing out of a fog.

    It was to be the last great plank-on-frame schooner built in thetwentieth century: Rebecca. This wooden yacht may have been sparkedby a particular form of ecstatic insanity?that of a man boatstruck?butthe thing itself was as solid and durable as the hardwoods that wouldcompose its backbone, a deep-water sailing vessel powerful enough tocruise any of the earth's oceans, a beautiful boat, a mighty ship, onethat would exalt all who beheld her. If she could be built.

* * *

    Rebecca's precarious history began, ironically, in Fort Lauderdale,Florida?one of the plastic-boat meccas of the world, with its blacktop,heat, traffic, and fiberglass?where a boat called Jane Dore III was tiedup. She had been purchased by a man in Massachusetts. The seller inFort Lauderdale had called a friend, one Ross Gannon, and asked himto deliver Jane Dore III, sail her up to her new owner, who lived onCape Cod. It was to be a routine delivery for a routine owner.

    Ross Gannon could hardly have imagined the course of events thathe was setting in motion when he, Suzy Zell, their son, Lyle, and twoother crew flew down to Fort Lauderdale to sail the 53-foot center-cockpityawl to Vineyard Haven Harbor on behalf of the buyer, DanielAdams. Boat deliveries are always dicey?you never know what you'rein for, particularly when it comes to wooden boats, which, whenthey're being sold, are invariably old and tired and leak like hell. That'swhy they're being sold! No one sells a beautiful wooden boat in excellentcondition that's great to sail?he'd be a fool. Boats like that, peoplekeep: that's why they have them in the first place. What happens is thatsomeone neglects a great wooden boat for many years, and when itgets to be too expensive and too much of a headache to repair, then hesells it. He simply waits for a boatstruck man to come along, andwatches as the man signs over a large check without so much as a marinesurvey, just scratching his name across the check.

    A man who is boatstruck does not realize that good used woodenboats are not available, nor can he differentiate between the gorgeousfantasy in his head and the floating piece of rot in front of him: he simplycan't see it. Which helps to explain why Dan Adams would havebought a boat without a marine survey?a matter of paying someoneknowledgeable a small fee to look the boat over for any significantproblems. No, Dan simply saw the boat and wrote out a check for halfthe price right there, and in May 1995 four crew led by Ross Gannonflew to Fort Lauderdale, spent a week readying the boat for its voyagenorth, and then set sail.

    If you had to deliver a tired wooden sailboat, one that hadn't beensurveyed, up the entire East Coast of the United States to Massachusetts,you wouldn't be unhappy to have Ross Gannon aboard. He is anable captain and an ingenious mechanic, and he knows how to get yousafely where you need to go. At the time of the delivery, in 1995, Rosswas forty-eight; he was strong as a draft horse from his work and haddecades of experience in deepwater sailing. Moreover, he could fixabsolutely anything?the engine, a hull leak, broken wood, a rippedsail, snapped rigging, a busted tiller. If the electronic GPS (global positioningsystem) went on the fritz, he could surely fix it, too, but heprobably wouldn't, since he doesn't like to rely on electronic gadgets totell him where he is; they fail too often to be relied on. Eighteenth-centurynavigation techniques work fine, are more reliable, and aremore interesting besides. Before he and his partner started their boatyard,the Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway, Ross tore down old,unwanted houses on the Vineyard and used the material to build beautifulbrand-new ones. He was and is an amazing scavenger. If he needsan expensive tool, he usually finds a broken version that someone hasthrown away and fixes it according to the job he needs it for. Sometimeshe simply builds the tool himself with a blowtorch and scrapsfrom around the yard. He used to move whole houses hundreds of feetwhen beach erosion threatened them. It was the work of a morningfor Ross to jack up an entire house so he could put in a foundation.Ask anybody at the boatyard: there isn't anything Ross can't do when itcomes to fixing, building, or moving, not anything.

    Three weeks after leaving Fort Lauderdale, Jane Dore III reachedVineyard Haven Harbor, its crew safe but sodden (the decks leaked likethe devil; foul-weather gear was eventually renamed Jane Dore pajamas).The wind was out of the north, blowing straight in the faceof the harbor, and Jane Dore III came screeching toward the towndock. Ross waved to Nat as he passed Venture, Nat's 37-foot sloop, onher mooring near the breakwater, and Nat smiled and waved back, alwayshappy to see another wooden boat arrive in this harbor that wasfilling up with wooden boats, their masts of varnished spruce glowingin the sun. As Ross approached the town dock, he was forced bythe windy conditions and the speed of the boat to throw a line to astranger for assistance?a big fella in a black leather jacket?and hopethat the man would know what to do. He called to him, "Can you tiea bowline?" A bowline, of course, is one of the first sailing knotseveryone learns as a kid and may be the most often used knot on aboat. For a sailor, it's like tying his or her shoe. Ross just wanted someoneto tie a bowline and throw the line over a piling till he could attendto it.

    The man caught the rope and said gravely, "I'm Dan Adams. I cantie a bowline." (Ross smiles today at the recollection, saying, "And Ithink he did. Maybe on the first try!") The guy tying the bowline wasthe new owner, the boatstruck man.

    The inevitable was soon discovered: Jane Dore III was held togetherby paint, Bondo, duct tape, and little else. Nat and Ross looked theboat over and gave Dan the news: it would cost about $250,000 for acomplete restoration, anything short of which would be a waste ofmoney. But they didn't recommend a complete restoration. For thesame price, but probably less, they could get the designs, salvage theballast, engine, spars, and hardware, and build Dan a new boat. Nat andRoss tried to console Dan by saying, Yes, it'll be expensive, but look at itthis way: when we're done, you're gonna have the boat you've always wanted.

    After a troubled moment or two, it occurred to Dan that theyhad a point. Dan Adams had first been boatstruck at the age of five,when his grandfather took him to a dock in Hyannis, on Cape Cod,where a 65-foot Alden was tied up. Since the moment he'd laid eyeson that boat, he said, he had wanted a 65-foot schooner. He wouldtell you he'd grown up in Boston, attended prestigious Roxbury Latin,an independent boys' school, and studied briefly at the Universityof Vermont before dropping out to work in politics and, later, movies.But he'd been boatstruck at age five, and after thirty-three years,the condition, untreated, had evidently become quite serious. And sowhen he heard those words?you're gonna have the boat you've alwayswanted?Dan stopped, thought, and said, That's not the boat I've alwayswanted.

    Nat Benjamin's deep voice and set teeth combine in a charismaticgrin and laughter so natural that he can charm the president, senators,and movie stars as easily as he does the boatyard workers. It's the charmof authenticity?he's a true sailor, a talented builder and craftsman, andyou sense it the moment you lay eyes on him. Here is a man to contendwith, here is a man you want on your side. What comes with thisauthenticity is the ability to be terribly convincing when he talks aboutboats. So when Dan made his statement That's not the boat I've alwayswanted, Nat asked, What is?

    Then Dan uttered a seemingly benign but in fact dangerous, life-alteringphrase. He said, "A sixty-five-foot schooner."

    "We perked up at that!" Nat would later exclaim, laughing his low,easy laugh, unconcerned at the time that this might be just a little tooeasy; Dan did show every outward sign of being able to afford this."Very sensible decision!"

    And thus was the seed planted in the boatstruck Dan. Nat andRoss could build him the very boat that had been in his mind since hewas a boy. She could now be his, and he'd be able to sail her on anyocean on this earth, an amazing plank-on-frame schooner. She was tobe his.

* * *

    This was a heady commission for Nat Benjamin. As those involvedwith boats, and certainly all those involved in designing and buildingboats, will tell you, they're continually thinking about their ideal boat,what it would be, how they would do it. And now, for Nat, an actualcommission for exactly this had walked right onto his and Ross's dock.

    Nat's favorite boats were always in the 60- to 70-foot range. Henow owned, with Ross and another partner, the 63-foot schoonerWhen and If. He and Ross had previously owned a 72-foot yawl namedZorra, which they'd chartered yearly in the Caribbean and Martha'sVineyard. That was the perfect cruising and chartering size, Natthought. Get much bigger and you needed more manpower and sailingexperience aboard to handle the boat properly; smaller than thatand you began to limit the number of people who could cruise comfortablyfor extended periods. And you could sail a boat that size anywherein the world. Dan Adams didn't really need the 65 feet he'dasked for, Nat decided; 60 would do just fine. Nat didn't think Danhad any clear idea of what he really wanted, anyway; he could see theflickery eye and hear the stumbling, vagne speech that marked a boatstruckman, and so he himself would decide what would be best forthe boat, and therefore for Dan.

    More important than the ideal length was the kind of rig Danwanted: a schooner rig, with two masts, like When and If, as opposed toa sloop (with one mast) or a ketch (two masts, the after mast the shorterof the two) or a yawl (a big mainmast and a tiny mast way back aft, likeZorra).

    "When and If," Nat told me, moving in his mind through theschooners he'd known. "Going back many years ago, sailing Malabar Xin the Caribbean, a fifty-eight-foot gaff-rigged John Alden schooner?sailedher once, but it was a memorable thing. And I sailed a littleBlock Island schooner across the Atlantic. I sailed a great deal with afriend in the West Indies, on a forty-foot Tancook schooner?simple,clean, nice sailing boat. The first charter I ever did, I crewed on aschooner called Madrigal out of Essex, Connecticut, a really nice Aldenschooner. I was nineteen years old. That was the first one I sailed on,and it was just a wonderful boat.

    "So I've always loved the rig. I love how they sail, I love how easythey are to handle. If you take [two boats with] the same huh and youput a sloop rig on one and a schooner rig on the other, the sloop atfirst seems simpler. A schooner, gosh, you got two jibs, a foresail and amainsail, and you may be able to put a fisherman or topsail on top ofthis. But what makes the schooner simpler is that you've got the sameamount of sail area to drive this hull, but you can divide it up into foursails, so each sail is so much easier to handle. It's easier on the boat, andit's a much more versatile rig. Leaving a mooring with a sloop, as soonas you put up a mainsail, that boat is trying to go. The mainsail on aschooner, it's farther aft, so you set that, it acts like a weather vane?itdoesn't make the boat go, it makes it stand still, right into the wind. Ifyou're anchoring, coming to the anchor, drop your headsails, jog it in,you ease the fore off and strap the main in, she's gonna sit there like awell-trained horse. So even though there are a lot more strings to pull,each sail is smaller, easier to manage.

    "There are more things to do. In a sloop, you set the main and thejib up and that's it. That's what you get, and that's OK, but on aschooner, if the wind starts to blow like hell, you can drop the foresailand the jib and go under just the main and the forestaysail. Or you candrop the main and go under fore and forestaysail?there's all sorts ofoptions. And that makes it fun."

    When Nat designed a boat, he thought not only about where andhow her future owner would sail her but also about how he might sailher, what he'd like to do if he was aboard. "It's fun having a bowsprit,"he said, "because it's a great place to sit?you just go out there, climbout, you're away from everyone and you can climb down and put yourfeet in the water, or you can go up the rig and sit on the spreaders.That's what I like about these boats; you don't just have to sit in thecockpit and talk to people, you can say, `Excuse me, I gotta go checksomething,' and, boom, you're up the mast and in another world, andthat to me means a lot.

    "I just think schooners are more fun to sail. And prettier tolook at."

    So on that day in 1995, Nat walked the mile and a half from theboatyard to his home on Grove Street?where he and his wife, Pam,have lived since the mid-1970s, for most of that time with their twodaughters and now a mongrel named Bella?and sat down at the drawingboard in his cramped office, its drawers jammed with drawings, itswalls haphazardly covered with framed pictures of boats he'd sailed orbuilt, a few shelves loaded with dusty issues of WoodenBoat and ClassicBoat. He had, scattered on his drawing board, numerous "ducks," leadweights with L-shaped pins on them that held down long plastic strips,or splines, and many ships' curves for fairing lines. He taped a piece ofvellum to the board, put a mark at one end, and, figuring 3/8 inchper foot, measured 22 1/2 inches toward the opposite side of the paper,then put a mark there. He then struck the load waterline and madea general guess at the draft, how deep the boat would be beneath thewaterline?certainly not more than 9 feet for Rebecca, and probably notless than 8, he figured?8 1/2 feet.

    The width was simple: "Not too wide and not too narrow!" hewould explain later. He wanted a beamy boat for stability, comfort,and deck space. "With a boat that has two masts," he reasoned, "you'vegot a lot of leverage trying to heel it over. So you don't want someskinny, narrow thing. If you do, you have to go way deep with yourballast, and then you've got a quirky, difficult boat." He planned a widthof 14 feet or so.

    He wanted a powerful bow, and so it would be a little high, andyou always want the stern to be lower than the bow?a couple moreticks of his pencil for the bow and stern heights. Above the waterline,on the freeboard, you want enough height so you don't feel like you'llget soaked every time the boat heels a little bit, but not so much thatyou need a ladder to get in and out of a dinghy.

    Now he had the bow height, the stern height, and the lowest partof the freeboard?roughly 4 feet. He set his ducks to hold the battendown at these points and drew a fair curve.

    This was how Rebecca, a traditional wooden boat, began to takeshape in the summer and fall of 1995. On September 20 Nat finisheda working sketch, and by the following February he'd completed thelines drawing, a presentation of the hull from four perspectives. Theprofile drawing tells you what the boat and the rig will look like;the lines drawing tells you what will make the boat tick.

    Rebecca was, Nat says, the easiest boat he's ever drawn.

* * *

    Two observations by people who know Nat come with enoughregularity to make them seem his dominant attributes, at least in otherpeople's eyes. The first is that he is "deeply spiritual," or "very spiritual,"though no one is ever able to offer any evidence in support; it'sjust a sense, but enough people feel it to give the observation credibility.The second is that nothing fazes him. He's unflappable. He is almostalways happy, and more: he's at peace. Bernie Holzer, a seasonedseaman and a steamship purser who has known Nat for years, says he'snever heard him raise his voice.

    Nat is a Christian Scientist, and while he's not orthodox in his adherenceto the religion, he says he's learned most from its suggestionthat we approach problems from a spiritual rather than a physical ormaterial angle. Pam was raised a Christian Scientist, and while Nat resistedlearning about it for years, ultimately, the more he read andthought about it, the more Christian Science dovetailed with ideas andknowledge already ingrained in his thoughts. "I think everyone goeson their own spiritual path in their own way and observes or findswhat seems to be suitable" he says. "What seems to work for them.I'm a slow learner, but gradually it became clear to me that this wassomething to reckon with?there is some truth here, and it's worthpursuing."

    Nat is so steady that few things seem to impress him overly, andhe's not inclined to overpraise, but neither does he seem to take anythingfor granted. Perhaps he comes by this honestly. At twenty-onehe sailed a small wooden boat, a Block Island schooner, across the Atlanticwith a single, inexperienced crew member?a hard forty-one-daycrossing with a near sinking, a near death, heavy weather. He madelandfall in Newport and within hours called his mom?after six weeksat sea, incommunicado the whole time, since there was no radio on theboat?to tell her that he was all right, they'd made it across the Atlantic.Her first words were "Do you have a summer job yet?" Nat wassilent on the line for a moment; then he chuckled.

    He smiles now and says, "She put me in my place."

    So maybe his incredible steadiness, his even keel, was learned, butit is also linked to that first observation people consistently make abouthim. His steadiness and his spirituality are connected. He is a man whomainly dwells elsewhere?out on the bowsprit or way up the mainmaston a spreader.

* * *

    When Nat says that this 60-foot boat was easy to draw, you have toremember that he's not easily impressed, particularly by himself. So inorder to understand the actual significance of Rebecca, you've got topull back from Nat's house on Grove Street and the earthy island ofMartha's Vineyard and look well beyond, until the boat can be seen inher proper context.

    Not that long ago, sailboats that were made out of wood were notspecial because of what they were made of?they were usually made ofwood. In 1930 you wouldn't have said, "That's a beautiful woodenboat," as you must do today. That would have sounded idiotic backthen, like saying, "This is delicious flour bread." But now, in Americaand the rest of the developed world, almost no boats are made out ofwood. Since the 1960s fiberglass has dominated the field of boat construction.Metal has for more than a century been widely used as well,most notably for big boats (though some sailors do enjoy small steelhulls), but beginning in 1942, the year Ray Greene built the world'sfirst large polyester/fiberglass object (a boat, as it happened), and workingup to apparently unstoppable and permanent predominance in the1960s, fiberglass has been the premier material for building boats. It'scheap and light and can be molded into any imaginable shape?perfectqualities for that complex system of curves and reverse curves thatcomprise a sailboat's hull. And because the glass is shaped using a mold,it's possible to make a lot of boats quickly. Fiberglass also turned outto be a snap to maintain, relative to wood. A wooden hull you haveto haul once a year, blast it clean, then sand and paint it to keepthe growth and barnacles off. Old wooden boats you're forever repairing:broken ribs, water raining through the deck onto the bunks, seepinginexorably through the cracks in the planking or through punkyspots where the iron fastenings have corroded. Fiberglass doesn't leak.Fiberglass doesn't rot.

    If you neglect wood, the wood resents it. Fiberglass couldn't careless. Wood is humanities and the arts, fiberglass is science. Wood isemotion, fiberglass is reason.

    And yet a few people kept building boats out of wood in the modern1960s and even in the 1970s?oddballs, back-to-nature hippies,and eccentrics who just happened to like them. Wooden boats oftenstick around for a long time, and those tired old wooden boats werecheap for impecunious yachties willing to do a whole lot of workon them, willing to spend more time working than sailing, if theywere lucky enough to do any sailing at all (often, floating was as far asthey got).

    But everyone liked the looks of a well-maintained wooden boat?noone who spent time on the water denied that these vessels could betruly beautiful, and there wasn't a boater alive who wasn't openlygrateful to those few poor souls, God bless 'em, who couldn't helpthemselves and owned wooden boats. But that didn't mean you had toown one yourself! No, thanks very much for the offer, but I'll justenjoy the looks of your lovely wooden boat from my no-leak, low-maintenancefiberglass boat! Hee hee hee.

    Indeed, an obscure magazine idea, a magazine devoted to woodenboats, became a resounding success precisely because readers didn'thave to own wood to love it, admire it, or even dream about it.

    No firm numbers are available, but industry experts guess thatfewer than 10,000 wooden boats exist in America, not includingdinghies, canoes, kayaks, homemade plywood skiffs, and the like; morelikely they number in the mid-four-figure range (6,307 boats are listedin the 1999-2000 edition of the Register of Wooden Yachts). There arefewer than 750 boatyards in the country that in some way work withwooden boats. Yet this minuscule industry?several thousand boatowners, roughly 750 shops?generates a subscription base for WoodenBoatof more than 100,000, making it one of the biggest boatingmagazines out there.

    So clearly, plenty of people loved and cared about wooden boats allalong, even if they didn't own them, and for others wooden boats werethe only kind they could afford and maintain. For these reasons, a fewpeople continued to build them, though in almost immeasurably smallnumbers, and a few apprentices learned the trade from them even duringthe wooden boat nadir of the mid-1970s, when fiberglass and plasticswere the rage.

    But as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, so many things were beingmade of plastic?it had become so pervasive in industrialized culture?that"plastic" turned into a metaphor for cheapness, impermanence,being fake, phony, imitation, not the real thing. Wood was the opposite.People returned to wood in their furniture, in their children's toys;they yanked up that ridiculous shag carpeting and sanded and varnishedthe tongue-and-groove oak boards beneath. They returned to alot of natural things, as could be witnessed in the trend toward organicfarming and eating unprocessed foods, for example, or the preferencefor wearing cotton clothing after the fads of synthetic fabrics. And theybought wooden boats. Contemporary culture was getting a little toofast and?in this great capitalist economy that heaped riches on whoevercould sell the same item for the least amount of money?a littletoo cheap. Furthermore, fiberglass, it turned out, wasn't a miracle materialafter all. You did have to take care of it. It blistered and cracked;it didn't much like salt water or sun. And if you hit a rock hardenough, or heavy seas pushed you into the shore, that light, inexpensive,easy-to-maintain fiberglass hull could shatter like an eggshell. Atsea it bent and buckled and fell apart.

    A sailor named Pete Goss recalls such an experience in a 34-footfiberglass sloop, in a storm in the middle of an Atlantic crossing, in hisbook Close to the Wind:

Poor old Sarie Marais gave her all for the twenty-four hours that the storm blew. However, it was just too much for her and I suspect we pushed her a bit too hard. First, the structural frames in the bow cracked?to such an extent that the bow section flexed so much that the forehatch kept springing open, flooding the boat with gallons of water. Next, cracks appeared in the deck?first by the chainplates, and eventually running aft along the deck for about six feet. By now the hull was flexing so much that gaps of up to an inch were opening and closing near the bulkheads and we had to be careful where we put our fingers. A large split developed in the hull under the engine and the rudder felt loose. It was a hard storm....

As the trip progressed, Chris and I continued to bail, gradually clearing the boat. Then, to our horror, we discovered the source of the leak now seemed to be in the area around the keel fastenings rather than the forehatch, We feared the damn thing was about to fall off....

The boat was flexing so much by this time that if you sat in the companionway with your elbows resting on either side of the hatch, they would go up and down by about an inch with each flex. Our diet was dictated by whichever cupboard or drawer would open?most were jammed shut by the distortion of the hull.

    Goss and his companion finally made landfall in Newport, andwhen they lifted the boat out of the water to check the damage, thekeel fell off.

    This boat, or any other like her, didn't get fixed. You put a hole ina fiberglass boat, you didn't patch it, you didn't try to save the boat, youjust threw her away and got a new one: such boats were disposable.And you never tried to save an old fiberglass boat?what was the point?Broken or old, she was only plastic?dump her. It wasn't like she was agreat old wooden boat, a boat with soul.

    In the boating world, wooden boats, or at least those woodenboats that were properly cared for, became a kind of symbol of thenatural world, of those things that were good and true, an antidote tothe crass, cheap, commercial culture all around us and on sale in stripmalls and Wal-Marts.

    In the 1990s wooden boats likely began to be made in somewhatgreater numbers than in the previous two decades, because of the trendtoward the natural and because of a new process that, though arguablymore than a century old, had only now hit a critical mass in thewooden boat world. Wooden boat builders, thanks to the fiberglass andchemical industries, took advantage of new, highly sophisticated adhesivesand applied them to wood in a method called cold-molding.Boatwrights found that by building up thin layers of wood and glue,they could make hulls that were stronger than fiberglass but lighterthan traditional wooden boats, which tended to be heavy and slow.The process didn't require huge timbers (which were in increasinglyshort supply in this country) or heavy machinery. In short, this methodof building laminated hulls combined the best qualities of fiberglass(workability, lightness of material, and no leaks) with all the advantagesof traditional plank-on-frame construction (durability, beauty, and thesensory pleasures of sailing a wooden vessel?her sound, smell, and feelas she charged through the waves, the solid lap against the hull at anchor,you in your bunk on your way to sleep).

    Within the wooden boat world, there was hot debate over whetherthese new cold-molded boats should be considered wooden at all (thetraditionalists dismissed cold-molded hulls as "wood-reinforced plastic").But the facts were these: one kind of boat was made of woodheld together by metal screws and bolts, and the other of wood heldtogether by glue. Both were, in fact, wood. This position was whollyembraced by the arbiter of this world, WoodenBoat magazine.

    And so with traditional builders still working, and many boatyardspicking up new commissions for cold-molded boats, the wooden boatindustry appeared to be in fine health, chronicled bimonthly in thegorgeous, glossy pages of WoodenBoat. There were nonprofit projectshere and there for which preservation societies built large woodenboats, often replicas of sailing ships of bygone eras?like Pride of Baltimore,for example, or Amistad, a replica of the slave ship recentlylaunched at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. But over and above thisgeneral robust health, three significant projects appeared to give thesense that something more was happening than a little blip of increasedactivity in the wooden boat world.

Continues...
Excerpted from Wooden Boatsby Michael Ruhlman Copyright © 2002 by Michael Ruhlman. Excerpted by permission.
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