Messing About In Boats 2001
One day after going on about building a certain wooden dingy for the 1000th time my future wife said, “Why don’t you just build the damn thing already?” Well I didn’t build that boat but I did build another and another and so on until I had built five. The last boat is a recently finished Wee Lassie of Mac McCarthy’s design.
It just seems that there’s always another boat I need for some specific purpose. Like I never wanted a canoe until I built a couple of kayaks. All of a sudden, when on a river or lake, while having to portage or get out on some muddy bank the idea of a canoe started to make sense to me. So that was the next boat.
Then we acquired a larger sailboat that needed a dingy, so I thought why not make the sailing dingy that I’d thought of years ago. I even put a reef in the sail just like the Pardy’s said I should do, and this always gets a laugh from the dockside cognoscente.
The other problem is that my wife likes to do all this messing about in boats stuff, as opposed to my friends’ wives who seem to have been born with the hate-boats gene. So I have to build two of everything.
One day at a wooden boat festival this guy was building a strip planked kayak and right next to it was a beautiful Wee Lassie. My wife commented on how cute it was. He said go take it for a paddle and bade me to take the form home and build the boat. Well she went paddling and I ended up hauling the forms to my basement and four years latter my 5th boat was born, a Wee Lassie. The thought of putting such a thing, varnished within an inch of its life, into dirty water horrifies my mother. And I think she might have a point considering that it occupied me for about ten times the designers estimated building time.
It seems that every boat I’ve built brings me closer to understanding why people have a need for all these myriad boats. It helps me to understand the boats that Chapelle documented from ever little hamlet on the East coast. And it helped me to understand, or should I say experience, boat design first hand. I’ve gotten to feel how flat versus round versus V-shaped hulls react to wind, waves and my clumsiness. And how a deep boat with fine ends will track straight all day and one with a pronounced rocker will spin on a dime.
So if any of you are thinking about building a boat, just build the damn thing.
