Wooden Boats

The young Frenchman, Jim Bresson, has been given the stem, the foremost edge of the boat, to construct. Although serious and focused on the wood and tools at hand, Jim is the most jovial spirit in the shop. His short, dark hair stands on end first thing in the morning, as if his mattress were somewhere in the shop. He scratches his scalp, clamping one eye and smiling groggily, a dustpan in his hand. “Heh-looow,” he says as his colleagues arrive one by one. He’s tall and slender (not one of these boatbuilder-sailors carries excess weight) and is among the first to turn up in the morning. Jim wears a brown winter vest over a hooded blue sweatshirt over a green turtle-neck, with brown work pants and brown laceless workboots. He sweeps the shavings off the benches as Duane stokes wood shavings to start the fire; then he sweeps the floor, organizes the tools that were left strewn around the shop the night before, and gets to work.

Six years ago, about to graduate from a wooden boat school in Marseilles, Jim asked a friend to keep a lookout for wooden boat yards as he traveled around the East Coast of the United States. This friend happened to spend a few days on the Vineyard, where he wandered into G&B, met Nat, and told him about Jim. A few overseas faxes were exchanged, and Jim appeared at G&B not long after. A year later the death of his father forced him to return to France, where he bummed around until his money ran out, then developed a wooden boat project with a friend—the building of a racing boat designed in the late 1800s by the French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, who some claim revolutionized French racing yacht design. Not long after that project ended, Jim returned to Martha’s Vineyard, now age twenty-seven, eager for more work at Gannon & Benjamin.

When Jim isn’t thinking about boats, he’s thinking about food. Apparently deep in concentrated work, he will stop, lift his head, and announce to anyone present, “I think this weekend I will make a couscous. With lamb sausage.” He will describe the kind of sausage he would buy were he in Paris. Then he will grin at the thought, and then laugh. He is fond of rum, and he is fond of women (whom he is inclined to date in an overlapping manner, with the inevitable consequences). He is seemingly never without a smile, and laughs and jokes continually through the workday. Soon he will begin arriving two hours early at the boatyard to get in some extra work on his own boat, which he bought with the help of Brad Ives: a 25-foot Folkboat built in Hong Kong called Tomahawk, the slender, teak-hulled bullet sits on jackstands beside the shop, a tarp hiding the extraordinary amount of work that must be done before the vessel will even float, let alone carry Jim to the coast of France, his ultimate goal. At night he reads a book Ginny has loaned him called The Atlantic Crossing Guide.

The three pieces that will form the new boat’s bow—a stem and forekeel connected by a long triangular knee—are all clearly drawn on the lofting floor. Jim slides to his knees with a hammer, nails, jogged fingers, and some large pieces of quarter-inch plywood and begins pounding in the jogged fingers pointing to the line of the stem. He slides plywood beneath them, positions a batten, and marks the first edge of the piece. When he has the piece’s complete outline on plywood, he cuts it out on the band saw. It’s nearly five feet long and has just a slight bend, since Nat has designed this boat with a nearly plumb stem.

Two parallel lines run nearly the entire length of the drawing of the keel. The most important lines on the lofting floor, they represent the rabbet, the V-shaped groove into which the planks will fit, joining the planks to the backbone. All other lines are relative to them. Jim must now mark the rabbet on his pattern, which he again does by using the jogged fingers, positioning their ends above the rabbet line and sliding the plywood pattern underneath to re-create the lines.

As Jim finishes the pattern, Ross hauls a big block of angelique into the dark shop, 4 or 5 inches thick, a foot wide, and more than 5 feet long, a timber that Ross thinks will make a nice stem. He maneuvers it onto sawhorses and stares at the wood. He stares some more. He borrows Jim’s pattern and lays it on the wood. He stares, adjusts the pattern, takes the pattern off, stares, returns the pattern, and eventually retrieves the pencil from behind his ear and, his long, knotty, black-creased fingers spread out on the plywood to hold it still, outlines the bow-stem pattern, having, he thinks, made optimal use of the wood and its grain for the gentle sweep of this stem.

The two men push the pencil line on the angelique through the whirring blade of the ship’s saw. Jim hefts the pieces to the bench, secures the stem in a vise, and begins to take strong sweeps with his plane across the surface that will be bolted to the knee—it must be perfectly smooth, must fit like onionskin. Jim checks his progress with squinting eyes and a carpenter’s square.

When he has finished planing the stem’s flat surfaces—the places where it will connect to the knee and forekeel—he draws and then cuts out a notch in the center of the surface using a Skilsaw and a chisel. He will cut an identical notch in the knee, and when the two parts are fastened together, a piece of wood, called a key, will be slid like a deadbolt into the hole made by the two notches, all surfaces ending up perfectly flush. The key, a simple joint, will help to prevent any shifting between the stem and the knee.

Bob Osleeb is outside the shop, building a frame for the transom. Bob, too, uses a full-sized pattern taken off the lofting floor, and he will do the first bending of wood. The back of the boat will comprise two layers of 8-foot planks of ½-inch-thick wana. It will have some rake—tilt slightly back—and will curve out about 8 inches. Bob builds what looks like a small bridge out of 2-by-8’s and 2-by-4’s; he will bend wana planks over the hump of a bridge that he’s built, clamp them down, and glue them edge-to-edge and back-to-back. This is called a laminated transom, the same kind used for Rebecca, and it’s as close as this yard will get to that epoxy-and-wood hybrid referred to as cold-molding.

Bob is, in fact, a fan and happy advocate of cold-molding, making him a rare soul in this traditional yard whose articulate proprietors dismiss the method with confident laughter; to them the claim that a cold-molded boat is a wooden boat is as valid as a counterfeit sawbuck. Bob built his last boat cold-molded, a 24-foot open boat. He believes that the method of overlapping strips of wood glued together can make for a strong boat, and furthermore, it requires no heavy machinery or enormous timbers.

“I’m an open-boat kinda guy,” says Bob, forty-five years old and a compact five-nine, with a graying beard on his round face and a ball cap covering his wavy brown hair. In open boats Bob, his wife, Marilyn, and often their youngest son, Dylan, now twelve, sailed the waters of Lake Huron and Lake Nipissing, and made the passage from Georgian Bay in the middle of Canada to Martha’s Vineyard, via Lake Ontario, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson River. Their most interesting sailing was in the Strait of Georgia, off British Columbia, when they lived out there. Their worst sailing happened on a trip north from Florida in an 18-footer Bob also built, when they were hammered continuously by heavy winds for two and a half months, their mast breaking three times before Bob finally gave up and hauled out in South Carolina.

It was in 1990 that Bob read an article about Gannon & Benjamin in WoodenBoat and decided to sail over to have a look. G&B offered him a job, and he accepted. After a six-year absence from the yard, having heard about the schooner and the powerboat, Bob returned to the Vineyard with Marilyn last fall.

Nat and Ross conceivably could have specified only steam-bent frames, in which case the powerboat would have been made the way sailboats of the same length are constructed. Interior molds of inexpensive pine would be set up along the keel at each of the ten stations, mimicking interior frames; spruce ribbands would then be bent around the molds where the planking would eventually go, and thick strips of white oak would be cooked and then clamped against the ribbands to form the framework of the hull. But the design calls for frames sawn out of two layers of angelique or locust on each of the nine stations.

Not only are these pieces of the boat—there will be eighteen double-sawn frames, nine identical pairs—time-consuming to construct; they also add considerable weight to the boat, which can affect its performance. Few lobsterboats had double-sawn frames: a yard wouldn’t expend the time and money on a humble workboat and would simply bend in all the frames. But Nat wants the added strength. Sawn frames aren’t necessarily stronger in and of themselves than steam-bent frames; rather, their strength is in a different form. It can be argued that steam-bent frames are superior to sawn frames because their grain is continuous, and a single length of wood with continuous grain is always stronger than a composite one consisting partly of short grain. But the fact of the matter is that bent frames can break (often, Nat explains, because a boat is planked too tightly with mahogany, which won’t compress much; when the planks expand as they absorb water, they put too much stress on the bent frames). Given that, and given that there are some very hard turns in this hull, they have opted to provide it with both types of strength. Furthermore, he likes the fact that in addition to being structural pieces of the boat, the frames serve as molds for the ribbands, obviating the need to construct separate molds.

The patterns for the frames are among the most complex on the project because they must account for a changing bevel, making them in effect patterns in three dimensions rather than two. The actual frames will be constructions: two layers of 1-inch stock, locust or angelique, will be bolted together, the pattern will be traced on them, and they’ll be sawn out. They’ll look a little like gigantic boomerangs with varying degrees of bend. The frames for the first stations, those toward the bow, will have only a gentle sweep to them. That sweep will increase steadily as you move amidships, as in a sailboat, to form the displacement half of the hull. But continuing on, the frames will eventually bend 90 degrees to shape the flat aft section.

The sides of these frames will be beveled to accommodate the planks that will bend around them, with the deepest bevel in the forward frames, where the planks will converge hard on the stem. The bevel, furthermore, will roll along each frame, so the top of the station-two frame, for example, may be beveled only 1 degree, whereas at the waterline of that same frame the angle may be as steep as 17 degrees. Each piece will require two people to cut it out on the ship’s saw—one to guide it through the blade along the traced pencil line, the other to read the degree of bevel marked along the wood and to crank the blade to the designated angle as the piece is sawn out.

The width of these frames will vary, too. They’ll be about 3 inches at their heel, where they’ll be bolted to the floor timbers, and will taper to about 1½ inches at the sheer, where less strength will be needed. Each pair of frames will be a kind of abstract sculpture, each completely unique.

Bruce Davies and Ted Okie, one of the few Rebecca crew members brought over to the shop after the shutdown, begin to lift the patterns for the frames and transfer them to plywood. Bruce has the weathered complexion and shaggy gray hair and mustache that make guessing his age with any certainty impossible. He could be a very fit sixty-year-old or a haggard forty-five—he’s simply spent too many years of his life in weather, much of it tropical, and always around boats, to reveal his chronological age on sight. In fact born in Rhode Island in 1950, he joined the Coast Guard after high school in 1967 and spent three years, eight months, and fifteen days in service on Eagle, a 295-foot bark, a square-rigger used as a training boat. After this service he alternated between working on boats (doing repair and construction) and working aboard boats (as captain, pilot, and, for a few years on the Vineyard, able-bodied seaman, deckhand, and quartermaster for the Steamship Authority)—but always on or around them.

Bruce is a puzzle. Part of him is literary and grand, part of him is sloppy and lazy. He’s reluctant to come to work, and quick to depart. He collects first editions of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mark Twain. He is proud to be a part of the powerboat crew and cites it as an example of the superiority of wooden boats. “With this boat,” he says, “all the pieces are gathered from all over the world and put together by artists. With a ’glass boat, it comes in a big barrel from New Jersey. . . . The value of a wooden boat goes up every year like a house’s. The value of a plastic boat goes down every year like a car’s.” As proof of this he notes that his own 40-foot schooner, Estrela, built in Boothbay in 1975 for $16,000, was totaled by Hurricane Hugo in St. Thomas. Bruce bought her, rebuilt her, and believes he could sell her today for as much as $100,000. Another boat similar to his, but made of fiberglass, was likewise damaged in that same storm; it sank and was simply abandoned, remaining visible for years just below the surface.

Nat has returned to the boatyard. It’s been so long since he’s been a daily part of this yard that his presence feels unusual. He begins work on the main keel timber, the biggest single piece of Elisa Lee, now measuring more than 30 feet long, 2 feet wide, and more than 8 inches thick. He lifts a pattern off the lofting floor onto ¼-inch plywood, many pieces of it screwed together end to end. He brings this long, floppy pattern outside to the timber resting on large wooden blocks and lays it on top to trace its outline. He then stands back to think about it.

Several people are marshaled to flip the timber so Nat can work the other side. The piece, weighing more than a couple of thousand pounds, is easily flipped with levers. David Stimson, now at work on his own boat, which he’s hauled out here, has stopped to help. Nat holds his ruler to various parts of the timber, shakes his head, and says to David, “You get these massive pieces of timber, you think you can make anything with ’em. And you still end up juggling quarter inches.”

On clear afternoons the low sun angles into the shop, alighting on wood grain and sawdust. At around three-thirty the shop turns from dark brown to a bright honey-gold. The grain of the angelique Jim is carving lights up as if a switch had been hit on some inner bulb. The old tools and machinery, the chisels and planes, the work surfaces, all covered with wood shavings, golden excelsior, seem to glow. During the hour that this winter sun angles in, the shop appears to be a strange, magical room. Soon after that, dusk seeps in and lightbulbs are switched on. Heat leaves the building with the sun, and breath once again is visible in clouds of exhalation, smoky in the electric light. Work carries on till after six each night. By Friday, the end of the first week of work on the new boat, most of the pieces for her backbone have been cut and are being worked by hand into shape. Patterns for the double-sawn frames have been made, along with patterns for the floor timbers, triangular pieces to which the frames will be bolted, and the first of these have been cut out. The fundamental pieces of the boat—stem, keel, frames, transom—are coming into being.