Happiness Is…

…a new set of boat plans!

The postman was kind enough to deliver to me Wednesday, in addition to a detailed topographic map of Kisatchie Bayou, a set of boat plans from Swan Boat Design in California.

It was like Christmas all over again.

The plans arrived in a nondescript brown envelope a couple of inches thick. While I was tempted to tear it open gleefully, I took care to do so without risking tearing my beloved plans.

The plans are for a design called the Nez Perce 16, a 15-foot six-inch flat-bottomed skiff of the type once abundant in the Pacific Northwest. Though those historic boats were planked with solid wood, this is a plywood-on-frame version.

And an elegant little boat it is! With a gentle swell from the transom forward to about two-thirds up her hull, then curving into a graceful stem, the Nez Perce only has three or four inches of rise at the bow, which should make for a sharp, dry entry in a moderate chop. The sides flare nicely, and should pitch water away from the boat as she goes, rather than over the rail and onto me!

I laid out the plans on my bench in the shop, poured over them as if reading scripture. I’m sure if someone had taken my picture I would have been quite the sight: Brow furrowed, finger tracing the bevels and angles and curves of the framework, reading over the instructions for building, already noting what would be a cinch and what would be challenging.

I was, in a word, in hog heaven.

It’s been eight years since I built my classic mahogany runabout, and three since I built my pirogue. In fact, other than some work in the house, I’ve done virtually no woodworking at all, that being a different beast than remodeling, which to me is carpentry. There’s a difference, not necessarily in craftsmanship, but in technique and result.

You may be wondering why I didn’t want to build a Cajun skiff, being a Lousyana boy and all. Well, for one, I wanted to be different, which shouldn’t surprise anyone by now. For another, I wanted plans because, even though a skiff is among the simplest designs to build, I still really consider myself an apprentice boatbuilder. Thus after searching through many, many plans, I settled on the Nez Perce, named after the famous Pacific Coast Indian tribe, from which my personal indigenous hero, Chief Joseph, hailed.

Eyes focused on the black lines on white paper, my imagination of course ran away with me. Just there, on the sheets, the little boat is already gliding over Lake Fausse Point or Grand Avoille Cove, nose up just a bit over the water, pushing along quietly but surely. I’ll put my 15-horsepower Johnson on the boat, she won’t be fast, but who’s in a hurry?

In my mind’s eye, the little boat is being built, and then is built, and she has a white hull with a green waterline and bottom; her insides are also white, but there is a varnished ash rub rail around her sheer, and inside a forward and aft thwart seating arrangement. Not wanting to ruin her good looks with cheap costume jewelry, I plan on installing two pedestal seats, but the seats themselves will be of my own making, slatted like a cypress porch swing, rather than those vinyl padded concoctions you see in boats nowadays.

She floats upon the river of his thoughts, Longfellow pined, and so it is. And more to the point, I couldn’t help thinking of boat builder Lance Lee: “Knowing how to hang a garboard plank or tuck in a wire splice gives you the capability of getting out of a jam if you’re in one and the confidence to get into a jam if you’re just sitting on the shore getting old.”

Had I the financial wherewithal, I could go buy myself a nice boat…and I don’t really know for sure, not having much financial wherewithal as it were, but I don’t think I would. Because building one, after all, is a satisfaction I can’t begin to explain.

Ross Gannon, of Benjamin and Gannon boatworks in Martha’s Vineyard, once answered a question by a writer as to why he spends his career building archaic craft, outdated and clearly “inferior” vessels to modern polymer and fiberglass ones, which those of us in the wooden boat circles call unkindly and certainly unappetizingly “snot boats.”

“Do you want to teach your daughter that what you’ve done, what you’ve created, is disposable?” Gannon demanded of the writer. “That it can be thrown away?”

Of course I grew up in wooden boats made by my father’s hand. The sole one I have remaining, now at 47 years old, is showing its age. What should I do, haul it to the dump? Sink it in the bayou? Incinerate it in the back yard on the burn pile? To do any of those things would be to throw away a huge chunk of my entire life; it would erase some of the fondest, bittersweet moments of my existence. To discard it in its old age would be to tell my father that it, and all the times we had together in it, were disposable. Of no value.

My goodness, I sat on that hard, uncomfortable bench seat as soon as I was old enough to not fall over. I stayed with him out there from dawn to dusk, and no matter how much I complained and whined and moaned, he always brought me back. In its oak frames are oils from his hands, perhaps some blood from a misplaced hammer fall that struck his thumb; in its plywood bottom and sides are, under the paint, still the pencil marks he made of his measurements and the boat’s unique, lovely lines. He built it two years before I was born.

I will carefully preserve it, and keep it. I don’t know what will happen to it after I’m gone, I doubt anyone will cherish it as I have.

A good fishing boat must be pleasing to the eye as well as the world in which it intends to coexist. It must not be an aberration on the water, must not accost its surroundings. It must not reek of assembly line production; it must have the subtle imperfections that come with hand craftsmanship. A boat which is so smooth and slick as to be obviously manufactured by machines fits into the natural world as suitably as a football into the ninth hole of the golf course. A shoebox will float; add a slight sweep to the bow and it will even travel relatively well under low power. But a boat must be fashioned to glide with the water, over it and through it, supported by the water like a cradle. It is an amazing and welcome coincidence that the lines which make such grace possible are also so pleasing to the human eye.

A good fishing boat should rest easy when the water is calm, not wander aimlessly like a simpleton. It should, likewise, follow the flow of the water obediently, bow forward, and not twist sideways like a miscreant log. When directed, it should turn without protest, and when requested, it should find a calm, quiet balance, still and silent, to allow an undisturbed lunch or nap under the cypress canopy. It must be well behaved and well mannered.

For me, only wood boasts such a fine pedigree. A good wooden fishing boat is all these things, and more. Some may feel a little proud but also a little odd, perhaps even eccentric, putting in over at the launch, surrounded by sparkly fiberglass bass boats and blunt-nosed bateaus or sharp-stemmed, nearly right-angled sided aluminum skiffs. Many might even feel uncomfortable under the grins, the condescending smiles that seem to voice the owner’s thoughts that they are too poor, too stupid or too tacky to own a sparkly bass boat. I ignore these things. They are only the wedges of a modern world that demeans anything which is not produced by that most dismal of technologies, conformity. These wedges are driven to split and fracture the timber which is individuality. It is somehow a measure of excellence to be so generic. Distinctiveness, once the mark of a Renaissance man, is frowned upon or ridiculed because the distinct individual does not conform, and that is to be pitied. Such derisive people insist on being insulated from everything which might make them believe there are things out there more important than money.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 10:08 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.