Beginning a New Boat

[Charlie43]

“A beginning is a very delicate time.” Princess Irulan, Dune

When does the building of a new boat begin? When a hull moving across water captivates eye and imagination and prompts wanting one like it? Or when, after days and weeks of looking at plans, one realizes a particular choice would be feasible, worth doing, and commits to it? How often can a date and time be assigned to the transition from “just thinking about it” to “lofting lines” (preparatory to marking and cutting stock)?

A year ago, I drew and built a 9', flat-water, fly-fishing pram for a neighbor, thinking we’d now each have a boat for our trips. But other than to putting in for a river trial, he’s never used it. This Spring, I put in with it on my home water, which is Lake Britton, and found that I truly had gotten the lines right, as well as loved its longer length. Threading line through guides on a 9’ rod wasn’t the problem it usually is for me. What I didn’t like was its 80-pound weight, which came from using a 3/8th” bottom and framing with oak. (Rod’s a big boy, and I had built stout.)

“But what if”, I thought, “I kept the lines, cut the bottom back to 1/4”, and framed with cedar?” 

Now displacement could be gotten down to a more reasonable 54 pounds.  But one problem still remained. I had cut the bottom from metric Ocumme, which measures out at 48” x 98.4” versus  Merenti’s 48” x 96”. If I didn’t want to lose those 2.4” of waterline length, I was going to have to scarf to make a bottom. A couple of days of stewing about it and a suggestion from Mark nudged me toward foregoing a bit of waterline length to gain building simplicity.

Bingo! I now knew my length. The sheer line and bow/stern rakes would be whatever looked right. The rocker and beam would be whatever were needed for proper hydrodynamics. The design was done except for fairing lines at the drafting table.

"How soon before I can start cutting ply?" 

My shop is a mess for having been neglected the two months I’ve either been in the hospital or else reorganizing my house to be wheelchair usable. An October 1st start would be pushing things. But my projected completion date, the Portland Boat Show, is three months away. Busted up or not from a fall from a ladder, a new boat will happen.

Charlie

[MarkR]

"A journey of a thousand mile begins with the first step."  - Confucius (attributed)

Whether he said it or not, it's so, so true!  Congratulations for the big start!

Mark

[Charlie43]

Mark,

While we're swapping bon mots of wisdom, let me offer this one: Life is what happens when you were planning to do something else.

Getting my shop ready so I can mark and cut ply is taking longer than I'd prefer, because household task --meals, laundry -- need to happen, too. But so much of building a boat is mental, rather than physical, that I'm not yet panicky about a delayed start, and it's not as if I haven't built nearly the same boat nearly a dozen times before and prefer to build "by eye" rather than work from a tightly scripted set of plans, not that I don't loft everything.

But what happens on the building frame is often a far cry from the lines drawn on paper, because materials have a mind of their own.  One can regard those differences as execution failures, or just accept the fact that this stuff ain't rocket science. If the boat sits on her waterlines and moves as expected, it's a good boat. Else, one takes a chainsaw to it and begins again.

Charlie



 

[MarkR]

Charlie,

I laughed at that one!  Yes, life happens no matter what you think you were planning!  

It would be great to have your new boat at the boat show.  It should be staged next to "Fish Taco", Randy's Devlin fishing boat.  He plans to display it with crabbing and fishing gear, so think about that.  If you have an old fly rod that might not come home with the boat...that would be even better.

As to your comment on what happens between drawn lines and building frame: I agree.  Boat building is as much an art as a craft.  The craft comes with drawing the lines and constructing the building frame.  The art comes with the material and the way it forms around the building frame.   Every wooden boat becomes 'itself' when formed from the natural material, which is wood.  Art happens when that form is integrated by a human being into a form that works in the water.

There lies the art. And the magic.  Make magic!

Mark

[Charlie43]

Boat building is as much an art as a craft.  The 'craft' comes with drawing the lines and constructing the building frame.  The 'art' comes with the material and the way it forms around the building frame.   Every wooden boat becomes 'itself' when formed from the natural material, which is wood.  Art happens when that form is integrated by a human being into a form that works in the water.

Mark,

So then, 'art' is 'craft in action'?

Actually, I think neither term is very helpful. Some people draw bad boats. Some people build bad boats. And most people aren't graceful on the water, no matter what they are sailing, rowing, or motoring. The easiest way to see this is to watch recreational singles on a quiet Sunday morning as they row past you on a shoreline. Some are fluid. Some aren't. Same-same with a set of plans, or the layout of a boat shop. Some have an integrity that invites imitation and compels admiration. Others are merely utilitarian. They get the job done, but awkwardly.

Also, there's the whole matter of training and tradition. Is a sense of 'beauty' innate or learned? A bit of both, right? Hence, 'folk art' vs 'fine art'. But I'll leave it to the aestheticians to judge where specific instances boat-building fall on that spectrum.

Is a "craftsmanly" pram a better fly-casting platform than an ugly one? It might require more thought and skill to build. But is it really a "better boat"?  And what is to be said of boats that are an abuse of 'craft' and become  'fussy' or 'overworked'? Many of the stripper builders commit that error. In an an effort to be "decorative", they build a boat that is merely 'tacky'. It floats. It took an obvious effort to build. But it's such an aesthetically strident departure from its origins that it's ugly.

Charlie

[MarkR]

Charlie,

"He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist."

       - Francis of Assisi

This quotation is 800 years old, give or take. I don't think I've ever seen a better definition of "artist."  

How this term is applied to boatbuilding, I'm not sure.  I do know that you can give different builders the same set of plans and the same materials and have very different results.  Most of it is in the head, but some of it is in the 'heart.'  Use of the material comes from both experience and 'feel.'  Some builders just do it better than others - or differently, depending upon your point of view.  

When does a boat become more than a floating platform for some activity?  I don't know.  But sometimes the craft of a thing transcends its very nature.  

Mark

[Charlie43]

Mark,

A half dozen attempts at a reply to your definition of an 'artist' got me no closer to understanding what distinguishes good boats from bad ones, or good builders from bad ones.  I do know I don't like most boats for thinking they are ugly --or, at least, that they missed too many opportunities for 'excellence' to be looked at a second time, much less owned-- , and I've chainsawed a few I've built rather than let them exist.

I don't think of myself as a moral or aesthetic relativist. But honesty forces me to admit that my judgments about boats are totally subjective. I like what I like on an intuitive level and then go looking for supposedly objective qualities like 'balance', 'rhythm', 'proportion', 'tension' to justify what was just a gut-level reaction.

Did you ever read T S Eliot's 1919 essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent? Though he had poetry in mind, not boats, the thrust of his essay is applicable. Any decent designer or builder is keenly aware of what his predecessors have done, and his action are part of an ongoing conversation with them about "What is good?"

Charlie

[MarkR]

Charlie,

I hadn't read "Tradition and the Individual Talent."   But now I have.  Good read.  

Count me in the 'derivative school' as T S Eliot seemed to be.  I believe that we all stand on the shoulders of our predecessors in all things human.  That rings true whether the pursuit is poetry or boat building.  As boat builders we use some of the same methods as those centuries before us even though the materials, tools and results are quite different.

Ultimately, aesthetics comes down to personal taste, expectation and cultural background for all of us.  Probably many other individual characteristics or experiences that we don't even understand or acknowledge, as well.  Each of us goes our own way in the matter of aesthetics.  Who is to say that we are wrong?  Not me.  

Mark

[Charlie43]

Mark,

What I like about Eliot's essay is his insistence that past practice is relevant to present practice and that it stands in judgment of it.

Where aesthetic judgments often go wrong is when critics stop looking at new work with fresh eyes and, instead, depend upon what has become "the conventional wisdom" to say 'Yea' or 'Nay'. Hence, the constant, perennial struggle between 'priest' and 'prophet', between the inertia of 'the canon' and the explosive energy --or aggravation-- of 'the new'.

Bolger's designs are a case in point. Good boats? Bad boats? If I'm remembering right, he's credited with 285 designs, some of which were innovative, some of which were awful, not many of which I'd want to own or build. But his body of work has to be acknowledged and dealt with by any contemporary designer or builder, not simply dismissed whole cloth as "too boxy".

Charlie