The Passion Behind Building Wooden Boats
 

The daughter of friends of ours in Iowa, now living in the San Francisco area, sent us the August 5, 2001 copy of the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. It features the recent boat show on Lake Tahoe The main story is titled "Wooden Boats On the Water". The section that caught my eye was one written by Heidi Benson titled "Boatstruck! The Passion Behind Building Wooden Boats". I felt that Ms Benson, interviewing author Michael Ruhlman, identified the character of some of those who work on these treasures, whether they do it professionally of as an amateur. I can't help but feel that there are other ACBS members who might be affected as I was.

Keep the bright side up!

Stan Petersen

His passion for wooden boats grew as he learned the craft, and deepened as he got to know the stories of people who have made boat-building their life.

That love affair is charted in his newest book, “Wooden Boats: In Pursuit of the Perfect Craft at an American Boatyard” (Viking, 2001).

On the eve of the Concours d’Elegance – the Lake Tahoe celebration of classic speedboat-the Chronical spoke with the author about the pleasures of wooden boats.

Ruhlman has made a career of taking a very close look at the work people do. In all his writing – for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Gourmet magazine, and in his books “The Making of a Chef’, The Soul of a Chef’ and Wooden Boats”-he exercises his belief that “through their work are people known.”

Why are wood sailboats and speedboats so evocative?

Wood is a natural material. Any time you’re working with natural material you tend to care more about the final results. It’s more satisfying.

There isn’t that connection, that feel, that touch, that pleasure working with fiberglass.
Wood only bends certain ways, and those ways happen to be extraordinarily pleasing aesthetically as well as perfect for moving through water.

You argue that people are deeply affected by their work – that we are what we make.
The pleasure we take in our work is fundamental to our sense of well-being. That’s why so many people are unhappy.

Our work shapes who we are, and making a wooden boat is deeply gratifying work. The beauty is inextricable from the science, There’s an inner logic.

Trees are miracles of engineering in themselves and they’re beautiflil to look at. Any man-made construction built of wood is graceful and infinitely interesting. It always engages the mind. You can’t exhaust it.

You make a distinction between the “boatstruck” – those who go cray and pour money into boats – and those who are “boatsmart”. What do people who love wooden boats have in common?

There are common traits among the people who sail things and those who do this work.
Boatbuilders are very self-reliant and resourceful. They can fix anything. They are very efficient, economical, they don’t need a lot of stuff There’s an anti-materialistic element to their lives.

Very rarely do we build anything that’s meant to last longer than a generation. And we like those things that are still as great as they were when they were built.

Go look at the stinkpots out in any harbor and then compare them to any well-maintained wooden boat. Everybody looks at the wooden boat and says, “That’s a beautiful boat.” It’s almost like an inner form that we know. It’s as old as the ocean.

You write about the soul of wooden boats---how can a boat have a soul?

I believe that they do have a soul. There are things about this world that we don’t know, and it’s hard to explain. But when you build something out of wood with your own hands, and it’s beautiful and it protects you, there is something in the energy of that work and in the composition of the structure that’s more than its parts.

I do know, having watched craftsmen of different sorts---from chefs to, most recently, a pediatric heart surgeon---when you put intelligence and beauty and work of the hands together, it’s gratifying like nothing else.

We’re losing touch with what is lasting. And wooden boats are a reminder of what is available in appreciating living on this earth and sailing on the sea.