Wooden Boats

The loft floor upon which Elisa’s backbone is being set up drops off to sand, but this winter a small shelter of 2-by-4’s and translucent plastic has been extended off the shop’s frame (it’s a constant irritation to Ginny, since her view of the great boats is cut off ). The fourth Bella, to be named Isabella, is under Duane’s hand. Planks are positioned around her a couple of feet in the air so he can climb in and out easily, and they buckle steeply when he does.

The Bella is just over 21 feet, a comely little daysailer but also big enough for a summer weekend trip to Naushon or one of the other Elizabeth Islands off the Vineyard. It’s arguably Nat’s most successful design, at least if judged on the quantity of orders. Everyone seems simply to like the look and feel of these sweet little gaff sloops, and Duane is content in his solitary work on this one.

Not only must this piece of wood bend considerably, but it must be spiled, because there are all kinds of curves going on here—“Nothing’s square or straight on a boat,” Duane says. The cabin top that will fit over it will have a convex curve, called camber, and the deck to which it will be bolted is also a convex curve; this means that the very center of the U will be the narrowest point, gradually widening out to the ends. To make this pattern, Duane held a piece of thin, flexible plywood along the curve of the deck and dragged his pencil along the bottom edge of the plywood where the finished piece will fasten to the deck. For the top edge of the trunk, he made measurements of its intended height at various points, taken from Nat’s drawing, and connected the dots.

Duane sawed the piece out—slightly S-shaped, planed to a thickness of ¾ inch—and cooked it for an hour in the steam box. Meanwhile, on the spot where Ross lofted the little rowboat that Robert Bennett, who does much of the yard’s brightwork, now has on sawhorses on the dock to paint, Duane nailed a series of plywood triangles, or gussets, into the floor in the arc he required. When the oak was hot and saturated, he carried it into the shop to the gusset frame he’d built and, beginning at the middle and working quickly outward toward each end, clamped the oak to the gussets, pulling that board as hard as he dared. In twenty minutes the entire piece was clamped in place, bent slightly beyond 180 degrees, both ends pointing at the table saw. This work was more fun to have finished than to actually do—he’d had a hard time finding a decent piece of oak for this important and visible piece of the boat, plus it had that terrific bend in it. But it seemed to take hold nicely.

On the day of the beautiful fog, Ross arrives shortly after eight, and Duane calls to him as soon as he enters the outer shop. Duane has begun to mark the position of the port and starboard port lights on either side of the cabin trunk, and the end of the oval that will be cut for the starboard one runs directly through a knot. He saw the knot earlier but hoped it would fall right in the center of where the port light would be cut out. No such luck.

Ross stares for a moment. Knots are no good. You never know how they’ll behave under stress. Ross says, “Let’s move it here, back to a flatter side of the cabin trunk.” He reaches for the pencil at his ear, but he has just arrived, and there is no pencil there yet. Duane hands him his, and Ross sketches in an oval where he thinks the port light should go. It will be mirrored on the port side. It is a situation in which a particular piece of wood has made its own design change. Duane agrees, and he and Ross head into the shop to look for the right oval pattern for the port lights.

Duane is thirty-nine years old and lives on a 32-foot double-ended ketch, tied up at the dock behind Maciel Marine, with his wife, Myrtle, a Scot twenty-three years his senior. Duane is of average height and build, skinny, as are most here due to a spare diet (Duane and Myrtle are fond of beans and cornbread). His straight auburn hair is thick as wool and seems less brushed than pushed or maybe even shoved into place. He wears baggy jeans, sometimes denim overalls, flannel shirts, and old, brown, hard-soled lace-up shoes. In very cold weather he’ll put something on his head, though the hair goes a long way toward providing insulation, as does his shaggy beard. Duane is unique in the boatyard, in this work that requires so much visual judgment, in that he was born blind in his right eye, and now his one useful eye is vastly enlarged behind the thick, often foggy, lens of his glasses. His voice, a deep, somewhat nasal tenor, is resonant when he speaks. Because he works alone, though, this voice is rarely heard in the shop—unlike those of Bruce and Bob, who bicker all day long, Bruce continually baiting the earnest Bob. When asked a question, though, Duane will answer with articulate thoroughness. The Bella is now planked, caulked, and faired, her deck and rails fastened, and once the cabin trunk is complete, he begins work on the interior, currently putting in cedar cabin and cockpit soles. When I ask why he’s using cedar for the boat’s flooring, he pushes his glasses up on his nose and says with little thought, “It’s the least expensive good-quality wood you can buy. It’s light, durable, rot resistant. You don’t necessarily have to keep a coat of paint on it. It’s good for the same reasons it’s good to put on the side of your house.”

And on the subject of wooden boats he is clear and optimistic: “I think we’re at a remarkable time in traditional wooden boat building. People talk about the golden age of wooden boats as being a hundred, a hundred fifty years ago. But I think we are at a time when, because of the availability of material and demand, which is low, we are in a position to build the finest boats ever.” With neither plentiful wood nor great popular demand for the boats, that is, builders are likely to produce not lots of weak, trashy wooden boats but rather small numbers of well-made ones.

Duane is voluble and outspoken, but on the question of wooden boat practicality, all in this boatyard seemed to join him in disagreeing with the most common, all-but-ubiquitous consensus on them, that insurmountable notion that they require too much maintenance. This is often true, they allow, but not because the boats are wooden. Old wooden boats require continual fixing and work, and poorly constructed ones do, too; if you ever owned a poorly constructed wooden boat that was also old, odds are likely you’re now a fierce defender of fiberglass. But the fact of the matter is that all boats require maintenance, and a new wooden boat doesn’t need any more of it than a new fiberglass boat—different maintenance, yes; more maintenance, no.

Duane first came to boats through reading the book Dove, by Robin Lee Graham, who in 1965, at age sixteen, went to sea in a 24-foot sloop and sailed solo around the world. It ignited Duane’s interest in sailing, which led to this work. Duane was seventeen when his family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. Not fitting in any way at all into the local yachting scene—not “in my thought,” he says, “in my upbringing, in my expectations, in my intercommunicative skills, in my willingness to drink”—he went to the library instead of the club. There he found the boating section and a writer named Howard Chapelle. Most regard Chapelle as a knowledgeable historian with an unbearably convoluted, at times even impenetrable prose style, but his sense and sensibilities spoke to the teenaged Duane. Chapelle wrote widely on boats from the previous century through the 1930s, the era when working sailboats mostly vanished.

“One of the things that Chapelle said on a number of occasions,” Duane recalls, “was that these boats, with a little thoughtful modification, would make excellent low-cost yachts for the modern-day yachtsman who wasn’t determined to look like part of the fashionable set. And I thought that was really interesting. And that’s when I started thinking about doing it. I thought, There are options here. They don’t have to be these glitzy racing things that you see out on the sound with their white-jacket, twelve-crew contingent.”

He moved to Maine as a young adult and found a job at a yard that put out 42-foot lobsterboats for a hundred grand apiece. The builders would climb into the 1-inch-thick hulls, nothing but big bathtubs, and assemble them on the inside. Because Duane worked mainly on the wooden interiors, he enjoyed the work. He’s happy now to have found G&B—“Ten years ago,” he says from the cockpit of the unfinished Bella, “I couldn’t hold a hammer. Now I can build a boat.” And he notes that any of the men here could earn significantly more money working elsewhere, but money isn’t the point. “There are many ways to solve the puzzle,” he says. “It all depends on your preferences.”

And there are many kinds of boats for many different preferences. While Duane believes that wooden boats are good and practical, he doesn’t claim they’re superior to other kinds. Indeed, he’ll bend over backward to argue that fiberglass is ultimately more practical and easier to fix. Put a hole in a plastic boat, he says, and all you need is a grinder and some fiberglass cloth. Of aluminum masts on fiberglass boats, he asks, “What’s more natural than aluminum?” (He’d never dream of having an aluminum mast himself, though—because of the annoying, ringing whap whap whap of the halyards smacking against it all night long.) He’s skeptical about wooden boat loyalists’ holier-than-thou mentality, the attitude that annoys so many. So why does he spend his life building these boats for G&B, and now on the weekends building one of his own, and then returning every single night to sleep on one?

As Duane continues work on Isabella, Bob, Bruce, Jim, Ted, and Ross work on the powerboat; Robert Bennett and another G&B regular, Chris Mullen (also a veteran Alaskan fisherman), restore Liberty, the 40-foot sloop built by G&B in 1986; and Nat roams the woods of Cumberland Island, Georgia. Elisa Lee is now upside down and fastened to the shop itself. The crew must begin to fair the frames and the rabbet, put the ribbands across the sawn frames, and bend in the oak frames. The sawn frames that are now bolted on cannot be wavy, rip-ply, or bumpy along their bevels. All use hand planes and, because the wood is hard as concrete, must sharpen them frequently.

And for this purpose there is an electric sharpening stone that spins like a potter’s wheel on the bench next to the vertical grinding stone. A tiny copper tube opens just above it; before using the stone, you turn a handle to allow a thin stream of water to flow onto it. It’s so cold these days in the shop, though, that the stone has frozen solid. Bob is kicking himself because he meant to get some nontoxic antifreeze to put in there to prevent just this situation, but the stone is rock-hard now, and so they must plane with blades that they will allow to become less than very sharp until it warms up a little.

The last week of February continues cold. On Tuesday morning Ted, Bruce, and Jim stand around the stove shivering. When Ross doesn’t show, Jim says, “I guess we should get to work.” The radio in Ginny’s office announces the temperature: 12 degrees. Jim and Bruce leave for the outer shop and climb onto the frames of Elisa to begin fairing the rabbet, making it perfectly smooth, especially at the joints where the keel pieces are scarfed together, a perfect but shifting right angle along its 30-odd feet on either side.

Ross is in a good mood in part because he and his son, Lyle, are heading up to Maine tomorrow, Wednesday, to visit Kirsten for the rest of the week. But he’s also charged by the bright morning and the full day of work ahead. The crew stops to listen as he addresses the day’s tasks: “Let’s fair up this rabbet, fair up the frames.” He walks along the port side of the frames and stops at station five, the one that Bob and Bruce had the most trouble figuring out because the bevel there was so slight. “I don’t understand that bevel,” he says. “The boat’s getting bigger here, but it’s getting smaller here.” He stares at it some more, then continues, “Well, fair everything up, just the first three feet of frames, so we can put the ribbands on them.”

Along the first 3 feet, from the keel out, spruce ribbands will be screwed into the frames. These 2-by-1-inch lengths of soft, light, flexible wood run fore and aft across the frames and will serve as a mold for the bent frames. Ribbands are also used to check the fairness of the frames. Two people typically work in tandem to fair frames, planing them and then holding a ribband across three frames, mimicking a plank; wherever the ribband doesn’t rest flush, wood must be planed off. They hold the ribband against the frames, squint, take the ribband off, eye it some more, and plane some more.

“Three,” Ross answers. “But we’re only going to put one floor timber on.” Ross steps back and looks at the whole boat. He’s thinking about weight. This structure is going to get heavier and heavier, starting right away, when he puts the transom on, and then again as the ribbands are fastened, and steamed frames are bent into place, and floor timbers are bolted, and finally as the planks are hung. “Are we satisfied that this keel is supported well enough?” he asks. His question doesn’t sound rhetorical, but practically speaking, it is. “It’s going to weigh three times this much. More: four or five times. Ten thousand pounds when it’s planked up.” He instructs the crew to get posts under the keel fore and aft and toe-nail them in—final supporting pieces. He wants the plugs made to fill the holes in the keel. “Use teak,” he says. “Teak’s every bit as durable, and it won’t dull the blade as much as angelique.” He tells Ted and Myles—Myles Thurlow, the high school student who’s apprenticing here as part of his studies, recently back from seven weeks’ sailing in the Caribbean—to restack wood in the parking lot, separating out the wood Duane has bought. “Then we’ll get some long planks, and you guys can rip them into ribbands.”

The outer shop is bright; all are industrious after Ross arrives. Ginny is snug in her office; it’s tiny, so a space heater works efficiently. She claims to feel guilty, gazing from her cozy perch at the boys working with frozen hand tools, their breath all but crystallizing in midair and falling to the lofting floor with a shimmer. Her radio hangs against the wall and is tuned to a classical station—Mozart and Haydn all morning long in a toasty office.

When Ginny does step out, in late morning, I am at the drill press cutting plugs for the keel. I have found some dark scraps of wood, their surface dull, almost waxy, from which to cut the 1-inch-wide plugs, and as I lower the cutter into the wood, aromatic smoke begins to rise. As Ginny passes, she says, “You can tell what kind of wood that is just by smelling it. That’s teak—smells like olive oil, a little bit.”

By late afternoon Bob, Bruce, Jim, and Ross begin concerted work on fairing the frames. The purpose of fairing is twofold: to reduce surface area and therefore the potential for deterioration, and to ready the frames for the planks, which must rest flush against each frame as they bend along the hull from stern to bow. Fairing is long, slow work; the skill and eye for it come only with practice. From one angle a frame can look perfect; from another, ripples and dips are apparent. Ultimately each frame must be close to perfect, not only in itself but also in relation to the frames on either side of it.

All day long, Ross will repeatedly stop working and walk back and forth to survey the others’ progress, once calling Bruce and Jim’s port-side frames “wavy.” And then he makes a guess: “We should be able to roll this thing over in six weeks”—mid-April. “The better we do this job now,” he adds, “the faster the rest of the work will go. We won’t be stopping to pull out a ribband to fair a frame.”

Late in the day, when the sky darkens, overhead lights are switched on. A deep chill returns to the outer shop, and breath appears bright and smoky in the electric illumination. The appearance of Brad Ives gives everyone an excuse to stop fairing and gam awhile. He’s just back from Suriname and has stopped by to pick up a check for the wood that’s been delivered. Ives strolls laconically across the lofting floor. Duane steps off the Bella—he owes Brad money as well.

“Everything you got,” says Ives, dead serious from the look of him. Then he smiles slightly and says, “If you can pay me for the deadwood, three hundred seventy-five, that’ll be fine.” Duane has designed his own 38-foot motorsailer and will start to set it up in the spring. The deadwood is a big chunk of wood bolted directly behind the lead ballast on a sailboat. The balance of Duane’s order will arrive soon in Mystic, Connecticut, at the seaport and museum there. Mystic, currently building a replica of the slave ship Amistad, is another of Brad’s clients.

Whenever Brad returns, the topic of discussion is always Suriname and its wood and what Brad has done and seen. Each one of these boatwrights is a traveler and delights in stories from distant lands. Ross wants to know where this new delivery comes from, how Brad found it, what part of the tree’s been used. Brad talks mainly about curves and sweeps. For these he traveled three hours over deeply rutted rain-forest roads to the Amerindian villages, to explain to those indigenous people exactly what he needed. The Amerindians used to walk through the forest with chain saws in hand, cut down trees, take their stumps for Brad, and leave the rest to rot there. Brad has had to convince them that this is an unnecessary waste and that they need to bring the entire tree out of the forest. The Amerindians have no heavy machinery, so they must drag what they cut out of the forest on foot, over dense, uneven, often swampy terrain. Thus they can carry logs only up to about 8 feet long; beyond that, the trees are too heavy. Brad also talks about angelique, called basra locus in Suriname. These trees grow to about 150 feet, with a 70-foot bowl at the rain-forest canopy. He explains that about midway up their trunk, angeliques curve briefly, then continue straight up. He tries to find these curves, but because such timber is not in high demand at the mills, it’s difficult to find, and it’s also difficult to ship because this shape is inefficient in terms of filling a rectangular container: managers of the shipping concerns want long, straight lengths, and therefore more board feet, to fill their containers, not those inefficient bends and curves.

“Back in the days when we actually sailed occasionally, we planned to do a couple months bopping around the coast of Maine,” Duane says one evening after work, staring out at the Coastwise dock and beyond to an arriving ferry. I’ve asked him for a sailing story, and he’s chosen a trip he and Myrtle made in their 36-foot L. Francis Herreshoff ketch. “We left early in the morning from Vineyard Haven. It was one of those glassy, flat-calm mornings, dead, but by midafternoon there was a pretty good breeze—twelve to fifteen knots, all sails up, easy sailing. None of this hanging from your shrouds with your teeth while trying to reef the unruly main! Just the sound of the water lapping against the hull. Even after the sun set we had the first half of the moon, a perfectly clear sky, reflection of moonshine on the water. Sailing on through the early part of the night, and you could see the Provincetown Light blinking away in the distance and slowly moving astern, and as it goes astern, we’re out into no land visible—far enough where the curve of the earth makes all the land disappear. A perfect evening sail.

Sailing in fog can be more dangerous than sailing in bad weather and is more nerve-racking. Great, crashing waves provide their own tension release: you’re actively sailing, or actively hove to and hanging on, and you know where the danger lies. Storms aren’t easy, and they can be terrifying, but fog is something different. The danger is in its stillness, in its blinding you: small boats, too tiny to register on a freighter’s radar, can be run down, or you can collide with a floating object or a landmass. But fog also turns ordinary sounds into signals that can seem at times supernatural. It’s impossible to gauge how far off that foghorn is, or that ringing buoy, or the water pounding against those jagged cliffs; it’s difficult even to discern which direction a sound is coming from.

“We’re dead reckoning,” Duane says. “The last time we had a fix was when we left the Cape Cod Canal. The fog is coming down, and it’s getting darker because the moon is going down. Fog descending, and everything starts to get damp. A little after midnight the wind starts to die, so, not being too proud, we decide to start up the engine, just chug along slowly through the night. By now we’re in a cocoon. The fog isn’t superthick because you can see from one end of the boat to the other. We weren’t really concerned about running into anything because it would only be another boat and they’d have their lights on. We did this for the rest of the night.

“Now it’s getting to be ten o’clock, and from my dead reckoning I’m saying we’re within a few miles of Portland. Tension was starting to build up, because as you approach Portland, the land is starting to close in on you from either side, this big scoop of land: the southern part of Maine is curving in from the west, and whereas it has been sandy up till now, it’s starting to get rocky. Portland is the beginning of what you think of as classic Maine coast. It’s also a busy harbor, not only for small boats but for tankers. Anybody going in or out of Portland is converging on this same spot. We’re now back with engine off, ghosting along. But if my dead reckoning is right, we’re only four or five miles from the big buoy at the entrance to Portland, and all around us we hear different kinds of sounds.

“There’s a beep here and honk honk over there. There’s stuff going on. We can’t see any of it. Sound travels tremendously in fog—it can be very deceiving. I’ve been in places where a lighthouse has been several miles away, and a thick fog rolls in, and it sounds like it’s right there, though you know very well it’s six miles down the coast. Once in a while we hear a motor, we hear an AM radio blaring out. We listen to the news for a few minutes and a couple of dumb songs and then that drifts away—some fisherman tending his traps.”

And then a voice came over their VHF radio, Duane remembers. The voice sounded Norwegian or Swedish as it announced the name of the vessel, a 500-foot tanker, and its specific course into Portland. This was interesting, Duane says, because according to his chart, and his dead reckoning, the course that the tanker captain had named should be right about where they were. In fact, maybe that was what those horns were that they kept hearing. Duane and Myrtle now became hyperalert in the enveloping fog, listening and watching for anything, but especially a 500-foot iron box plowing west. A tanker wouldn’t necessarily see them if they were in its way, and even if the crew did spot them, they wouldn’t be able to alter course fast enough to avoid destroying them. Nor would Duane and Myrtle have enough speed, either by sail or by motor, to get out of the ship’s way once they saw it. They were blind, did not know where they were or if they were on course or how long this might go on. It felt as if they were under some kind of spell, in a disturbing dream. The eerie noises continued, and they remained perfectly motionless, waiting, all senses pricked up.

Ten yards away, a whale surfaced. They didn’t hear a thing; suddenly the form was just there, and it paused so its blowhole was just out of the water. The whale breathed loudly, the air rushing in, then rushing out again. They were close enough to see the blowhole expand with the rush of air, in and out for a few breaths. And then the whale rolled back down into the sea, its entire length curving through the air beside them. Duane and Myrtle were transfixed. The whale’s body kept going and going. It had to be a hundred feet of dark, shining, curving whale back. It seemed endless to them. Duane had never seen a whale so close, never shared the same spot of sea with one. It was an awesome sight, and for minutes neither Duane nor Myrtle thought of anything—not the fog, not the tanker, not landfall, not where they were—but this magnificent creature that had risen to save them.