Boat Building

As with most of my threads, this one on sailing will be roughly chronological. I think most young people are intrigued by boats. It’s only natural. They offer the challenge of a new and different domain. Of course I, being me, found them compelling.

I learned about boats when my dad built a rowboat. He got the blueprints (copies of drawings) for a rowboat from somewhere like Popular Mechanics. Before he started building it though, he designed and built a big table saw and a workbench for woodworking. Remember, we were emerging from The Great Depression. You didn’t spend cash for something you could make yourself.

The first step in building his boat was building a mould, which is an assembly jig that looks a bit like an upside down skeleton of the boat. Nice boats have compound curves, so you need something to form the hull around. Building the boat itself could now begin.

You need good material to make a good boat. Dad’s boat had a plywood hull, so he needed marine plywood. The transom, which was also going to support an outboard motor needed to be sturdy. He bought a one-piece slab of mahogany for the transom. It was about two feet wide, four feet long, and nearly two inches thick. He assembled the boat using an assortment of brass screws and special waterproof glue. It was a classic beauty, painted battleship gray.

The boat was all about fishing though. Sometimes we just rowed it a short distance offshore to get to where the fish were. We used his fishing buddy’s outboard motor if we wanted to go up and down a river, or to a good spot on a larger body of water. All this was fun, but it was not “messing around with boats.” That’s what I wanted to do.

At various times I considered building a canoe, a small hydroplane, and a sailboat. I didn’t have time (I had other interests to pursue), nor funds for those projects though. But I was primed for a little serendipity (next post).