My First Boat

I enjoy making things with my hands. I’ve been an amateur woodworker for most of my adulthood. My first major project was to build a traditional woodworking workbench with a front vise, tail vise, wooden bench dogs, and a tool tray at the rear. I built it about 35 years ago, entirely by hand, in my basement, with only a crude 2′ x 3′ work table. In the process, I purchased some good-quality hand tools: saws, planes, clamps, etc.

My wife’s parents, Sandy and Sally Fowler, were life-long sailors with extensive sailboat experience “crusing” the Atlantic Coast, especially in Maine. Sandy also built some small boats. I learned a tremendous amount about sailing and navigation from being on the water with Sandy and Sal, and gradually got to the point of realizing that I could apply my woodworking skills to building my own boat.

So where does one start in boatbuilding? Most books about boatbuilding address this question at some length. I’ll just tell you how I went about it.

I knew I wanted to build a small sailboat so I could learn how to handle a boat on my own. Even at the outset I imagined that I would progress to building a larger boat, so I decided to build a suitable “tender” for a larger boat: a small boat that could be stored at a dock and used to access a larger boat on a mooring. So I sought a design for a boat that could be both rowed and sailed.

I was also a subscriber to WoodenBoat magazine, and I knew that the WoodenBoat Store sold plans for an assortment of wooden boats ranging from about 8′ to 40′ and more, including both sail and powerboats. They even offered a complete kit for a small craft called a Nutshell pram which is a rowboat designed by Joel White that has an optional lug sail rig. Plus, you could buy an inexpensive book with step-by-step instructions and photographs that you could follow to do the actual building. So I bought a kit and did the building in our basement over the winter of 1996.

Pearl has been in the water every season since. She’s constructed of marine plywood, is 7’7″ in length, and is capable of carrying 3 people in relatively calm water if you are rowing. Under sail, she’s pretty cramped with more than one person aboard. I learned to sail in Pearl, and supplemented my hands-on experience with lots of reading. In addition I began to learn about maintaining a wooden boat—specifically annual painting and varnishing.

Pearl has been everything I hoped for: a vessel for learning how to sail, a beautiful design, and a capable tender for a larger boat.