Wooden Boats

Ross Gannon spotted Edna unloading cargo at Tortola’s commercial shipyard when Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway was not quite three years old. Ross was charter captain of a boat called Charlotte Ann, and Edna was then engaged in its lucrative Suriname-Virgin Islands runs with its most efficient cargo, wood. Ross was impressed by the hefty vessel, and by Brad, and he was eager to try the unfamiliar timber Brad was off-loading. “Can you bring some of that wood to Vineyard Haven?” he asked. Brad thought for a moment, then nodded. He seemed so vague about it, Ross didn’t know if he’d see him again, but the following July, 1983, the 100-foot steel-hulled ketch sailed into Vineyard Haven harbor to off-load G&B’s first purchase of Surinamese timbers.

G&B was building at the rate of almost one boat a year then (the catboat would be launched that year, the third Canvasback the next), and because the proprietors of the operation hadn’t developed a fleet to repair and maintain and were largely unknown outside the woodenboat-yard community (on the island, G&B was “that hippie boatyard”), they were at liberty to sail for a good chunk of the winter in a chartering capacity.

In the summer many of the G&B crew lived in the harbor. Gretchen had a boat, Ross had Urchin and then Undina, Jim and Ginny Lobdell lived on their Malabar, and most every night one family or another would invite the others for dinner. Ross and Gretchen rowed to work. Folks sipped coffee on the dock before the day began, waking up there. Gretchen smiles at the horizon when she thinks of those days, when G&B was “just a shack on the beach.” She worked part-time as a hostess at the Black Dog her first summer here, 1980, and so was able to shower there. She was in her midtwenties then, and she loved this spot—the Black Dog, the boatyard, and the P.O. across the street were, she says, “my little world.” Nat was more or less in the process of settling down, with the aid of a nightly six o’clock phone call from Pam to ensure that he was headed home and not to the Ritz, the shabby, comfortable bar where everyone went to drink and draw boats on napkins and tabletops. And the business was if not huge and lucrative, then at least stable. Neither Nat nor Ross could say if they’d have work from one year to the next, but somehow they always did. And Ross was finding that he really enjoyed building boats—they were endlessly fascinating to him. Their beauty gave him pleasure, and at the same time, they satisfied his need to flip, rotate, or transport heavy objects.

Once the boat had been chocked on the railway, Ross Gannon slipped below. He smiled politely, and with hammer in hand immediately began in earnest, standing on the bilge stringer and walking the 30-foot length of the cabin. He stopped at each cracked frame, laid his head against the planking, and tapped his hammer at specific spots. He did not seem to hear my nervous questions. “Too bad they kerfed these frames and did not back-fasten them,” he said softly and with compassion. . . . I suggested meekly that this might be a good opportunity to replace, maybe, all of the buttblocks with oak. His eyes moved to a vulnerable mahogany buttblock next to his hammer, and with the claw he struck, split, and removed the upper edge in one blow. Then with six sharp shots he drove the fastenings outward. No discussion necessary.

. . . Initially it seemed brutal, but Ross’s technique was actually effective and quick. The manner with which he and Nat attack a situation is always expedient, once a course of action has been determined.

Phillipps also described G&B generally: “It’s a family yard, one where local boat owners often stop by and, whether they are dressed for it or not, invariably find themselves unloading a truck of lumber or picking up a sander and slowly fairing someone else’s hull.” (G&B still takes frequent advantage of the boatyard’s Pied Piper effect, amassing hours of free labor from people who can’t quite remember why they stopped by in the first place. It’s how the yard earned its nickname, “Grab ’em & Bend ’em.”)

During those same years, Nat and Ross bought a boat of their own, Zorra, a 72-foot Italian-built yawl that in a way symbolized the propitious fortunes of G&B in the 1980s. They spotted an item in the Boston Globe noting the auction of a big and damaged wooden boat. Neither man had heard of her, but an old-timer who happened to be at the shop when they were discussing her had, and he told them she was a fine vessel.

They went to have a look. The interior was black from an electrical fire, but when they rubbed away the soot, they found beautiful mahogany, beautiful brass fixtures. She had been well built, they saw. The insurance company was selling her as totaled, but Nat and Ross figured they could repair her within a year. Ross put in a bid of $38,000 at the sealed-bid auction, and they owned a boat. (When they eventually sold her, in the mid-1990s, she went for more than a quarter of a million.)

They had the sexy white-hulled rocket sailing in a year, and she bombed up and down the New England-Bermuda-Caribbean route for the next half-dozen years. Her finest year, though, according to Ross, was her first with them, before an engine was put in. That was his happiest sailing, because it required all kinds of problem solving and expertise to maneuver that big boat in and out of crowded harbors. Zorra determined the shape of those days for G&B because her repair, her maintenance, and the work of chartering her took up a good chunk of each year. And because getting her ready for the charter season always took longer than planned, Zorra often left Martha’s Vineyard in early winter when the weather is unpredictable. A few years after the engine went in, Ross took the boat south in early January with his nephew Antonio, a friend named Malcolm Boyd, and a half-dozen others who came along for the sail. Ross and Antonio had spent two months in Fairhaven fitting her out for the season (she was too big to haul out on the Vineyard). Ross came aboard at the last minute, he and Nat having had second thoughts about the skipper they’d hired. The second day out, a nor’easter struck. The wind built all day, and by evening all sails were down. The seas were short and steep. After sunset it really began to blow, and looking to weather was difficult. They ran downwind, surfing the waves. Antonio was on watch with Malcolm. Waves began to crash over the stern. There was a life raft well lashed to the cockpit sole; a wave ripped it clean off, and they never saw it again.

Antonio had to work hard to steer this big boat. Little was visible now other than white water all around them. Antonio felt the boat suddenly rise, and he turned to see behind him, and ten feet over him, a wall of water just as it crashed over the boat. It sent Malcolm flying across the cockpit sole and Antonio into the binnacle and pedestal steerer, made of cast aluminum and bolted to the deck. It broke off at its base, and Antonio lay in a tangle of lines, one of which was his own lifeline. “We lost steering!” he shouted to Malcolm, who relayed the news to Ross below. Spreader lights flickered on to illuminate the damage.

Ross came up on deck, calmly, and got the binnacle back up, securing it with a triangulation of lines attached to winches. The wheel was still connected to the rudder, but steering was impossible. They could do nothing but wait for this weather to pass—40 hours ahull in 70-knot winds. The hired skipper panicked and, unbeknownst to anyone, sent out a Mayday—something you do only if you are sinking. An angry Ross informed the Coast Guard that Zorra was without steering but did not need assistance. They were blown 150 miles sideways. When the weather abated, a Coast Guard cutter came to check on them. By this time they were securing the binnacle so that the compass would work and they could steer using a fenderboard.

By the fall of 1989 they were at work on a number of boats. They’d just finished a 10-foot sailing dinghy that needed only one more coat of paint before the owners took her to the Caribbean. They had a salvage job on the rails—Java, a 57-foot yawl that had sunk and then been given to them; they’d thought it would be fun to turn her into a boat again, and she was on her way to being a fine schooner. Beneath the overhang was an Ohlsen 35, and also hauled was a small cutter named Corineus, originally built in 1927. But the most dramatic of the works in progress was a 33-foot ketch being built in the outer shop for a man named Al Kent, over on Cape Cod. Nat’s new ketch was coming along beautifully. She was planked and caulked, with deck beams and bulkheads and cabin in place, cabin sole, cockpit sole, interior, and beside her a big pile of teak ready to be sawn and turned into a fine laid deck.

The weather was turning cool in mid-October, but only just, since summers linger here, and this Monday had been a good beginning to the workweek. Ross was living with Suzy then; she was four months pregnant with Lyle, and Ross was determined to make this relationship work. He’d eaten and was so tired he fell asleep on the couch before crawling upstairs to bed. Nat slept, too, having put in a good day on the new boat, but Pam, unusually for her, couldn’t get to sleep. She took a walk down Grove Street to the beach at around midnight and saw there an ominous orange glow. She hurried back home. Vineyard Haven fire alarms had begun sounding. Shortly after she reached the house, an explosion sounded in the distance. The phone rang almost immediately after the boom.

Nat was already out the door and speeding down Main Street. Gretchen, who at that time lived on Hatch, just down the street, pulled out just as Nat passed and followed him. As soon as Ross was out of the house in West Tisbury, he saw the orange glow in the direction of Vineyard Haven and understood immediately the magnitude of the fire: catastrophic. While he and Suzy barreled down State Road, the flames reached a hundred feet into the sky, the outer shop already gone. They made it in time to see the skeleton of the new boat, black against the orange flame. The planking had already burned away. Then the frames blazed brightly, burned out, and fell to the ground like a stationary fireworks display. The bow and the stern tipped and fell, too. Nat and Pam, Gretchen, Ross and Suzy, Kristi and Gary—they all just stared, lit by the glow, surrounded by the noise of flame and crackling timbers.

Someone noticed that the tenders pulled up on the beach were starting to ignite, and this broke through the shock. They all now ran to the beach to haul the tenders into the water, to save anything in danger that could be saved. The 1927 cutter Corineus, on the rail, seemed safely away from the fire, but suddenly flames simply ignited on her hull from the heat. There was no electricity to run the winch and let her roll away into the water, and everything was powerfully hot, but Nat and Ross were able to get to the winch, and several others heaved on the cable to create enough slack to remove the pawl, and that freed the winch, allowing the boat to slide safely into the water.

Ross’s boat Undina was tied stern to the dock, and he let the line out to put another boat-length between her and the fire. A southwest wind pushed a shower of ash and soot into the harbor. Nat, strangely, didn’t seem much different from his usual self. Not that he wasn’t disoriented, too—nothing was computing; this didn’t make sense to him, wasn’t real—but there was a calmness there that seemed a little odd. He didn’t appear all that concerned about the loss of the new boat he’d designed and had been building for half a year, now turned to ash; or the loss of the shop; or the loss of the business. What truly upset him, what would always remain the greatest loss in his eyes, what wrenched his heart most, he said, was the sight of all those trees burning. Gretchen was in shock and disoriented. She’d been in the process of moving, and most everything she owned was in her loft, including cherished photo albums. Ross felt devastated and blank. Eventually the fire was brought under control, and the man in charge told the group that the fire team would keep an eye on things through the night—he suggested that they go home and get some sleep.

No one slept. Ross lay on his back in bed and stared at nothing, thinking not one coherent thought, stunned by fire. Gretchen could think only about all the things that were gone, running through an inventory in her head. She waited for the sun to come up and then returned to the field of spent, wet embers and ash, a 5,000-pound puddle of lead cooling where Al Kent’s boat had been. It was a rainy, cold day. Nat and Pam came not long after, and then Ross. That was when the pain set in. Sifting through the ashes in the rain, registering the magnitude of the loss piece by piece, their entire business gone. What would happen?

Nat felt in his gut that they’d build a better shop and a better boatyard, but he didn’t know if that was really possible. Ross didn’t know, either. They were not very well insured. Any money they got would go to cover the boat owners’ losses. Gretchen thought maybe it was time for her to leave the island and start something else somewhere new. All around them they saw loss: their old hand tools—special pieces from the early part of the century, designed for specific boatbuilding tasks—as well as the great old nautical hardware scavenged here and there, pieces you just couldn’t find anymore, and of course the heavy machinery.

Then islanders started to show up, too, locals asking to help—ten of them, then twenty, then fifty, all sifting through the ash and the charred scraps of wood and melt for anything salvageable. Ralph Packer had a Dumpster delivered for the garbage. The Black Dog sent over boxes and boxes of doughnuts and an urn of coffee for the volunteers. Gretchen, Ross, and Nat were all grateful, their gazes cast downward.

But the people didn’t stop coming the next day. Messages poured in from all over, the post office box and answering machine filling up and filling up. Money came, too—not fives and tens but checks for $50 and $100 and $500. A friends-of group was quickly formed to organize the work: setting up a bank account for donations and planning benefits to raise money, one at the Black Dog and one at which some of the Taylors—James, Kate, and Huey—would perform. Ham Fish, Nat’s cousin, wrote fund-raising letters and moved the message out into political circles, where there were many prominent lovers of wooden boats.

Bob Douglas found room in his next-door offices for Ginny to set up a temporary office, plug in a phone, and begin to reorganize the business. Gretchen was given space across from the Steamship Authority that she could use as a temporary loft. Erford Burt, the octogenarian designer of the Vineyard Haven 15s, came by to donate some of his tools, ones he knew Nat and Ross would appreciate—a Nova Scotia adze with a lip on it, a broadax with an offset handle, special hand drills. Bigger tools came over from Maciel Marine. Cheap ship’s saws and planers were offered. The boatyard at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut took up a collection of spare tools from all their boatwrights and shipped them to Vineyard Haven. Letters and condolences and checks, hundreds of them, continued to flood in.

Neither Nat nor Ross had had any idea that so many people were watching them. They had both thought they’d been quietly building all these old-fashioned boats and nobody really cared, or even noticed. And that was OK. This astonishing outpouring from strangers was almost too much to bear. The gratitude was fraught with guilt; it’s not easy to accept such a torrent. When Ross appeared meekly (he didn’t want to go at all) at the Black Dog benefit more than a week after the fire and saw that his mother had flown up from Florida to be there as a surprise, he couldn’t maintain control any longer, and he broke down and wept in front of all those people.

Within a week Ross had a plan in his head for a new shop, wood had been ordered from Jim Aaron, and an island boatshop raising was scheduled. Nat and Ross heard that people were going to show up to help; they expected twenty-five. When Nat arrived at eight, the yard was, he says, “an anthill.” More than a hundred volunteers had appeared. Seven of the island’s contractors showed up to marshal the forces, both their own crews and the scores of others who just wanted to help.

The frame was up before the morning was out—a brilliant, clear November day. “The speed at which this was going on was unbelievable,” Ross explains. “It was sort of like feeding the lions. You’d throw down a board, and in a flurry of activity, sixteen people would nail down a sixteen-foot board in about three seconds. The hammering was deafening. They were still nailing down the boards on the first floor when boards were going down on the second floor.”

A big pot of chili was brought to the beach, and pizzas were sent over. A bonfire was lit and mulled cider served. The work went on through that Saturday—Nat and Ross could see it that day, their new shop, or the island’s new shop, really; it wasn’t theirs anymore—and continued into Sunday. On Sunday Lynn Bouck came by and spoke for himself and his crew: “We’d like to shingle the roof tomorrow. Do you have the shingles?” And that was how the roof got finished. After one long weekend, Gannon and Benjamin were back, stronger than before. And with an enhanced sense of the community in which they found themselves. They’d had no idea of the magnitude. Because of this they felt a greater responsibility. When you understand what you can lose, you get serious. They had to run this less like a shack on the beach and more like a proper boatyard. Or, try to, anyhow. And they had a good structure now, one that wouldn’t shudder when the nor’easters shrieked across the harbor. Now, a decade later, the point that Nat and Ross both stress when recalling the fire is how powerful and important it was for them to know how much a part of Vineyard Haven, of Martha’s Vineyard, they were. Ross says of the fire that far from being unfortunate or devastating, it was in fact one of the best things that had ever happened in his life. A gift.

It wasn’t a gift to Al Kent, of course, whose brand-new, almost finished boat was gone, gone, gone. He was about to retire and had already been sailing his new boat in his mind, dreaming of the coming spring. And now he had no boat. Nat and Ross, for all the speed with which they returned to business in their spanking new shop, had to tell Al they couldn’t begin rebuilding his boat right away, certainly not in time for spring. They would understand if he went looking elsewhere.

Two new boats followed the fire—Encore and then the yawl Candle in the Wind, which Joel White would critique so lovingly in WoodenBoat after her launch in 1991—but after these a scary dry spell hit, four years of repair work and not a single new construction, though the yard was buoyed by the reconstruction of that black-hulled Percheron of a schooner, the 86,000-pound When and If. Then a Columbia University linguistics professor named William Diver commissioned a boat called Tern, a modified Rozinante, and with that launch in 1995, the new designs and constructions resumed in unbroken and increasing succession. And that in addition to more maintenance work on all the boats G&B had been building and more repair work on boats that came to the yard as its reputation grew. The work in fact became daunting. There was almost too much of it. You couldn’t work with a drawl in your movements anymore. There was no more coffee on the dock in the morning while you stretched the sleep out of your body. You had to barrel through the work behind Ross’s interference. And all of it, this increased work and new construction, rode the resurgence in wooden boat construction of the 1990s.

In 1998 Nat began work on the greatest of his designs, greatest in every measurable way—weight, size, complexity of construction, aesthetics of design. Rebecca would be the biggest plank-on-frame vessel to be built on the Vineyard since the mid-1800s, a 60-foot sea creature with a mighty bow and a swift, graceful stern, a marconi main and gaff foresail schooner, a deepwater vessel built to cruise the Pacific and the Indian Oceans alike, built powerfully to turn the notorious corners of Good Hope or Cape Horn, built to be comfortable and safe in the late-autumn blows of the North Atlantic as she headed south for the winter or across to the Azores. Nat, now in his early fifties, beloved at home and in the community, heading a solid business, completely at peace with himself and his work, was arguably working at the height of his powers at the exact moment the commission for Rebecca appeared. She might be a vehicle for all his ideas, experience, and knowledge; he might put his entire being into the service of this boat. He might give all that he knew, like any artist, and all that he’d learned in his half century of life, to this boat, a realization in wood of those helical symbioses of art and science, safety and beauty, and durability over decades. Pieces of wood held together by bronze that stay together in dynamic conditions at sea. You couldn’t kill it. You couldn’t kill this thing if you tried, not G&B on a beach in Vineyard Haven, not Rebecca, not the wooden boat species. The wooden boat, big or small, after all, embodied and gave extended meaning to the natural world, trees harvested one by one, sawn, planed, bent, and faired with small tools into an exquisite shape that could be both home and vessel, that you could sail away on. Rebecca. A big vessel built by hand—art and science, uncertain, imperfect, and bound for the beautiful, deadly wilderness of the sea.