This is certainly the best design I ever made… When I come up for judgment and they stop me at the gate and ask, ‘What’s your excuse?’ I’ll tell them I designed the Gloucester Light Dory and they’ll have to let me in.

- Phil Bolger (taken from his obituary in the Boston Globe)

For the record, I don’t think this is at all how it went down on Sunday, when Phil Bolger’s brilliant life came to a close. You don’t design the Gloucester Light Dory, and countless other great boats, and then have to answer for yourself. You get waved on through and directed to the VIP lounge. And, if you are Phil Bolger, you then walk out of the VIP lounge and begin rethinking the design of the whole place, because you know you can probably help God Himself “think outside the box.”

Our corner of the world, lovers of small boats, especially wooden and classic ones, is feeling the great loss of Phil Bolger two days ago. We here at Chine bLog are in especially deep mourning. As I have noted, the aforementioned “Gloucester Gull” was the first boat we built and was truly a thing of beauty. The sweep of the sheer is divine, the rake of the ends spot-on, the project of building her accessible to most, and the performance magical. The design has no equal, and those of us who design boats on any level accept a second rung of greatness as the best possible outcome, much the way any rock band knows it will never quite touch St. Pepper’s.

As great as the Gloucester Light Dory and a handful of other Bolger designs are (see my tribute to him from several months back), what has to set Phil apart in the historical record is his willingness to stand above convention and fashion. If you have never grabbed his 103 Sailing Rigs, you are missing out on a great text on small boat rigs. Sure, there are the many boatloads of practical advice, but the true value are the genius pieces of common sense. Bolger rants over and over, for example, about how arbitrary racing rules have dictated rig preferences for boats that are rarely - or never - beholden to those rules. He writes of the dipping lug rig:

… the dipping lug remains ideal for the use for which it has always been ideal: to produce maximum power in a straight line with minimum clutter on deck and wind resistance aloft. The cartoon shows it as an auxiliary sail on a motorboat, a purpose for which it is so much better than any other rig ever devised that its a monument to the rarity of common sense that its so little used.

Bolger never forgot that each boat had a purpose, and to create a design that fulfills traits unaligned to that purpose was beyond counterproductive. In some sense it is so easy - figure out the problem you are trying to solve and solve it. Period. But few ever do that, and Bolger did it almost every time out. Are some of his designs ugly as all get out? Absolutely, but read the design spec first. If you want something that allows one to bird-watch in shoal-draft water in all weather, guess what: you don’t get Rosinante. You just don’t. Bolger used to do design commentaries in the dearly-departed Small Boat Journal (readers would send in requirements and he’d knock out a sketch to solve the problem). I used to go nuts looking at the lines, but then you read the boat’s purpose and it all makes sense. No one else could so focus himself on the needs of the owner and so divorce himself from “the way things are supposed to be.”

I hope we’ll see another Phil Bolger, but I am not betting on it. Such brilliance only comes around once. Fair winds and following seas, Phil - you will be much missed and always admired.

And now, if you don’t mind, I am going to keep trying to create a design that is 1/4 of the Gloucester Light Dory.

Those who fly-fish (I don’t) and want to do it like the classy folk of the American West should check out this nice piece from Vida, Oregon about the McKenzie River Wooden Boat Festival. The piece quotes “class” expert Roger Fletcher, who I wrote about a couple years back:

The combination of beauty and usability are what make the boats so popular, Fletcher said.

“You’ll see these boats all over the world, but lines of that are traced back to this river,” he said.

Even better, was this gem by attendee and enthusiast Ken Helfrich:

“There’s nothing like a wooden boat on the water,” he said. “It has a total feel of itself.”

Preach it, brother!

Co-sponsor of the show Tatman Wooden Boats is worth checking out for kits and materials. Pretty boats.

I noticed a while ago that our friend Gary Dierking, the Kiwi outrigger maestro, has been running a blog to compliment and promote his work. Take this as a study in how well I am doing at keeping up on this blog these days - I am just now getting to an appreciation of this resource on these amazing craft. And an appreciation it deserves, because there is some great stuff here.

I particularly enjoyed Gary’s thorough study of ama lashings, done in six parts (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6). These posts provide good pictures of the different types as well as their derivation and advantages. Now he is on to different rig types, with the most recent post giving a nice overview. We’ll certainly be watching - and learning from - this excellent blog.

OK - its best I admit it. They say that is the first step. I am thinking about a new boat already. I want to build to my own design. I have some ideas coming together - I’ll share more when there is more to share. The key point is that every time I see a skin-on-frame boat I feel incredibly drawn to them. I think it has to do with the rawness of the medium - the boats go together by feel with pegs and lashing. Its gorgeously primal.

In the course of noodling on this idea I came across the site skinboats.org, which consists of The Skin Boat School and Spirit Line’s Skin Boat Store. The former, as it sounds, is the educational resource area, though there are some good nuggets online. The latter piece seems to be a great source for materials. I found proprietor Corey Freedman extremely willing to chat about this topic, giving me a number of ideas that I didn’t directly solicit. This is one worth keeping close at hand for the skin-on-frame medium.

The second highlight of our recent revisit to the National Museum of the American Indian began as we entered the grounds. I looked up and saw a series fo decorated canoe paddles in an upper-story window. “Must get to that spot” I thought.

Without much trouble we found them in a resource area. Through a program called the A. Susana Santos Journeys in Creativity 2008 “Art of the Canoe”, students in the Northwest had made the paddles in a variety of styles.

Here’s some more.   » Continue reading More new stuff at the National Museum of the American Indian »

OK, call me thick if you will, but I had never noticed a cool feature of the National Museum of the American Indian here in Washington, DC. As I have mentioned before in a few posts, there as a small, but spectacular, collection of four native craft displayed in the main foyer of the museum: an Inuit skin-on-frame kayak (using modern skin), an Ojibwe bark canoe, a Bolivian reed boat, and a Hawaiian outrigger canoe. The foyer is a cool, multistory affair with each floor open to it. I finally looked down from the top floor and, with help of the sign right there (I’m good like that), saw that the boats are not randomly arranged. It’s clear looking down from above: the kayak is in the North, the canoe to the East, the reed boat to the South, and the outrigger to the West. Clever! Makes the whole display that much more worth viewing.

I am way behind on posting stuff and am trying to crawl out of it. One post come courtesy of my dad. Messum’s, and art gallery in London, had been selling the work of James Dodds. It looks like they are no longer, so I had to track the work down directly at Dodds’ own site. Well worth the extra keystrokes!

Dodds paints classic boats, and he manages to capture the lines accurately while injecting color that is natural but more vibrant. Note how he understands the timbers and how to study them. The detail on these classic wooden boat paintings is tremendous. Dodds has a whole series of works like these on his site - I highly recommend a visit. From there, who knows? Maybe you have a wall that needs adornment…

Congrats to our friends at WoodenBoat, publisher Carl Cramer in particular, for launching the new blog My Wooden Boat of the Week. It looks like it is what it sounds like. This week’s entry is on training boats used in New Zealand. Interesting little boats. We’ll keep an eye on this blog to see what else Carl puts out there. Welcome!

Many thanks to our friend Michaela Hackner who is en route home form Bali and somehow found time during a 9-hour layover in Tokyo to send us her picture of Balinese jukungs lying shoreside. My guess is that these serve the tourist trade, but they look authentic enough to call them the real deal.

Call it a two-fer. I have been doing the Apprentice for a Day program at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. I thought my Dad would enjoy it as well, I gave him a day of it for Christmas. Of course I had to join him. So he got to check it out, I scratched my boatbuilding itch, and we got some father-son bonding time in. Hey - that’s a three-fer!

The mission - and of course we chose to accept it - was building a 13′ 3″ Melonseed skiff, based on lines taken from a 1920’s craft, the oldest surviving one of its type. Specifically, the task for the day was beginning to install the ribs. We were both thrilled as neither of us had done that before. I’ll not carry on - check out the images.
  » Continue reading I built another boat! OK, I was just ribbing… »