Ever since I was a kid, I romanticized the idea of designing and building a boat. As a young man of 11-12, I spent my evenings poring through sailing magazines and obsessing over things like hull shapes, keel designs, and accommodation plans. I would fill tablets of graph paper with my own designs for cruising boats – hull forms, lines plans, and rig sketches dominated my mind and distracted me from my schoolwork. I recall one frustrated teacher demanding to know why I wasn’t capable of doing my math homework, but I had no problem calculating volumes of lead ballast and wetted areas in my silly boat designs. After a few years of being scolded and told to focus elsewhere, I forgot about boats for a few decades. But now, in my late thirties, that old bug bit again.

It started with a facebook marketplace post for an old O’day sailboat. The boat looked throroughtly tired and worn out. The ad indicated soft spots on the deck, old rigging, and promised a long to do list of deferred maintenance items. Boats are terrible investments, you see, but this one was simply a bad bet. Nevertheless, the sight of that intersection of fiberglass, Dacron, and saltwater stirred something deep in my psyche that been long dormant. I started to visualize the wind in the sails, sun on my face, clipping across the water.. Family aboard, anchor dropped in some exotic lagoon after a long passage.. Baby steps, right?? As the algorithm began to sense my wish to separate myself from my financial security, it began shoving boat after offshore boat at me in my feed. I began learning names like Ted Brewer, Bob Perry, Sparkman & Stephens, and many more. I studied the metrics on sailboatdata.com for any boat I came across. I started reading books about sailing, and unfortunately discovered John Kretschmer and his writing that made me want to run away from everything and sail straight into the first gale I could find to feel that intoxicating cocktail of adrenaline, concentration, fear, and the sea that he has such a gift of describing.

As I read more about different boat designs, metrics, and construction, I began to learn a few more names – Bruce Roberts and Dudley Dix. These fellas tell me that I can build a boat in my backyard! Plywood, cold moulding, steel and aluminum designs began to dominate my imagination. I pored over the study plans for huge cruising boats. Realizing that one doesn’t “start” being a backyard shipwright with a 50ft schooner, I started looking for smaller boats to cut my teeth on building. Daysailers and pocket cruisers look cool, but I should start smaller for a first go, right? Even a small daysailer is a pretty major undertaking, and my attention span doesn’t have the best track record.

Enter the boatbuilders gateway drug dealer, Chesapeake Light Craft. These brilliant bastards manufacture ready-to-build kits for kayaks, rowing craft, and small sailboats. The kits are mostly cut-to-fit, and include plans, instructions, and all the accessories you need to build your first boat. I spent a considerable amount of time perusing and weighing the different options available, and decided to start by making a kayak. I decided to make a tandem kayak, so that my wife and I could go together, or we could take a kid. So one evening in late October, I hit the “pay now” button, and in 2 days I was delivered the kit for my Mill Creek 16.5 kayak on the roof of a Subaru. Seriously, the guy from CLC said he had to be in my area for something and personally delivered it to my house. A+ customer service, if not a little TOOOO friendly.

I decided to make the kayak the “big” Christmas gift for my wife. In retrospect, this wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had, but that’s a lesson for another time. Notwithstanding the quality of my gifting plan, this gave me a deadline. The kit was delivered on about Halloween, and I had until Christmas to finish it. And I had a business and job to run. We had just taken on a project near Indianapolis which would require me to spend 2 of every 3 weeks out of state, starting after Thanksgiving. Oh, and my wife had a broken ankle, so I was picking up the lions’ share of the domestic duties as well while she convalesced. I’m really good at time management and balance.

Fortunately, our shop at work has a decent sized lean to which is functionally a separate unit from the rest of the work area, and naturally lent itself for commandeering into a personal workshop. Evenings and weekends became shop time as I worked methodically to craft a boat out of a pile of plywood and sticks. Epoxy resin haunted my dreams and my laundry, ruining most of my not already ruined pants with crusty droplets of misplaced resin. Long evenings of studying plans and shaping the wooden parts eventually started to give way to the unmistakable shape of a boat. Once fiberglass was applied to the final shape, I could start finishing. The layer of sawdust in the shop was covered further in epoxy dust, then primer dust, and lastly topside paint dust – scientists may one day catalogue the geologic record of my workshop projects by cross sectioning the distinct dust layers in the deepest corners of the shop.

Ultimately, the kayak got built in time for Christmas, although it would be another 6 months before I “finished” it – after building the boat, finishing the seats became an insurmountable obstacle in my executive function. Again, I’m really good at staying focused and managing my time. I’ll post a gallery of the progress photos throughout the build in a separate post.