Reasons to be cheerful.

Why build a boat ?

How long will it take ?

How much will it cost ?

Three years ago this winter I was in the final stages of deciding whether or not to build a boat and then trying to decide which design to use, having seen the designer’s estimates for build time I figured to double the number of hours required and worked out that I should still be able to do that inside a year………it’s year 3 now !

Even with regarding the build as a full time project – full time between the end of winter and the beginning of the next autumn it still took two years worth of building time and quite soon I will be in year three although the main construction is all done and it’s all down to detail now ; detail takes time though……and a good chunk of the budget.

So I ask a question of myself : “was this two years well spent or could I have done something more useful with that time” ?

As I write it’s winter of 2022 going into 2023 and we’re having a cold dry snap in the UK, the workshop is damp because the steel roof tends to collect ice on the underside – a bit like an old fridge – and now it’s dripping away in there, which will mean a big tool maintenance session as soon as the weather goes back to it’s usual cool and wet.

Recently I had a visit from my boatbuilder friends and they both tell me that firstly I have done well to actually start and finish a boat right from scratch within just those two seasons and secondly that most projects that they know of drag out for an average of 5 years or more – they also say that they regard most yacht designers as wildly optimistic about their build time estimates with a usual error of 2 to 3 times the time involved. Just to add that my friend went into the build of a 31 foot catamaran with a building partner, they were both reasonably well skilled and it still took them 3 times the amount of time that the designer (the late James Wharram) stated…….they kept an accurate log of their build time.

So…..the first reason against building is that it will most likely take a lot longer than you think even if, like me, you are retired or in some other way can regard it as a full time project.

The cost…..or “how much will it cost” ?

Answer……long piece of string !

Having seen several boats being built over many years I have seen ‘that moment’ when the builder is glowing with enthusiasm and achievement because they have got as far as a complete hull, you can almost see the relief in them and the excitement that ‘maybe’ next year all of the peripheral stuff will be done and they will be watching their pride and joy slipping into the water.

The reality though and especially with a cruising boat that has an engine is that the ‘peripheral’ work of installing the engine and it’s gear, then the rig and then all of the systems that modern yachties seem to insist on not only takes a lot of time but a huge amount of expense too. It used to be said that the hull of a cruising boat only cost about a quarter of the total budget but then the engine and it’s gear was another third (or quarter) and then the rig and sails accounted for the remainder. Nowadays the divisions are more like a quarter each when all of the peripheral systems go in as once again it seems that there is more and more gear that the boat-builder feels that they have to have – probably because that’s what the yachting press tells them they should have.

The question ‘how much will it cost’ does of course depend upon the size of the boat, the chosen materials, the standard of fit-out intended and then the cost of all of the peripherals like rig, sails and anchoring gear. At the small end where I am I don’t have to worry about an engine right away – a pair of oars are a lot cheaper and will work for the boat in most conditions – for sure a small engine might well be useful one day but even then will only represent about a tenth of the total cost. Right now it is the trailer that will be the single largest expense of the whole project but you might also need to consider that trading up from a city car to a towing vehicle will also be a major part of the whole cost.

At the start of my own project I asked the boat’s designer how much he thought it would cost to build the hull and in my own mind took that number and doubled it as the probable actual budget for the boat : so far that’s been about right except that I was about 20% over the original hull estimate because I glassed the entire hull and while glassfibre cloth isn’t that expensive the resin that goes with it is.

If there are hints and tricks they are mostly to do with keeping a build simple rather say than going for ‘gear complexity’ – one of my examples has always been to not have expensive equipment like jib roller furling and a single ‘one size fits all’ jib but rather having a couple of different sized headsails and hanked on rather than expensive headsail foils. A second example from my own build is to take the time to make a set of cleats – for sure a nice set of cast Bronze mooring cleats and a similar set of jamming cleats for the running rigging would look nice but my wooden ones look perfectly in keeping with the boat and have cost nothing except for 20 or so fasteners……I just happened to have a piece of nice straight Ash in the workshop.

The broken Coda.

Regular readers will know that one of my major themes has been going to sea in small boats, the smaller the better I often say and then what would otherwise just be a conventional ‘milk run’ takes on the flavour of adventure.

In a series of posts that became it’s own thread I developed a kind of personal small boat Coda in which I basically suggested finding something small, cheap and serviceable , doing the work needed – maybe as a learning exercise, and then basically just getting out there and doing it all for real. Anything that got in the way of that I felt to be a waste of time and money be that buying a more expensive craft than is really needed, buying unnecessary gear or having an expensive marina berth just for the convenience. Instead I argued that the fun is in the doing even if ‘fun’ has the slightly loose connotation of lying on your back under an old bilge keeler while grinding off years of bad antifouling or rowing a few hundred yards out to a cheap half tide mooring……it’s all basic seamanship and all relevant.

With my current project I have completely broken the Coda because I started with a big stack of brand new plywood and Douglas fir rather that say taking up the offer of a free GRP hull and quickly converting that into a minimal cruising boat – that’s a project that I briefly mentioned but never went ahead with. Had I done that then I would have been back on the water in towards the end of 2020 at much less cost and maybe having the kind of bare bones and seat of pants experience that I think I want. Instead I have had 2 solid years learning to be a backyard boatbuilder so maybe I should focus on the positives of that experience.

Nearly but not quite……project ‘Think Pink’.

Three years….

As of this winter iv’e only missed out on one year’s actual sailing because of the build and not due to factors which I could do nothing about : in 2019 I had the best year’s sailing that I ever have had – that was the 110 day Brittany cruise in a 22 foot boat. In 2020 of course everything changed and what we know now only tells us how ineffective the so-called ‘protective’ lockdown was – that’s another argument of course. I only started my build in 2021 and that year I largely ignored what was going on in the world outside of my back yard, there were still restrictions so it seems to me now that it’s only 2022 when I could have been free to sail and didn’t that in a way I have to account for ……at least to myself.

By the end of 2022 I really wanted to go get out of the workshop and just go sailing again although at the same time I could tell myself that the hard work of the build really was done and that I was onto the more enjoyable side of fitting out to go to sea again.

There has been, I feel, a hugely beneficial side to this project and it seems to be a mainly psychological change for 2 years I have had to concentrate on just one thing while at the same time doing minor problem solving almost continually. Unlike previous years I have slowly seen a nice looking object take shape and the only mistakes I have had to deal with are where I haven’t done something well enough (by my own standards) – different to my last boat where even near the end of that project I was still correcting at least one previous owner’s mistakes.

So anyway, having admitted that the project is behind time and over budget, and that iv’e broken my own rules about boat usage and ownership I feel that I should finish this post by saying something constructive about being a backyard boatbuilder.

Two years ago I remember how nervous I was, looking at that big stack of plywood, to put saw to wood for the first time : I had then a horrible sense that all that was going to happen was that I would make mistake after mistake and then quite soon give up on the project. Ok, so I was massively under confident plus I knew that I had already made a series of simple mistakes when I had a go at making a first piece out of scrap plywood.

I’m not totally unskilled but what skills I have are mainly about improvising and making do…..and often correcting another owner’s mistakes, rather than as I was doing now which was starting from a stack of timber and a set of plans. I tend to a problem which I would like to call ‘monkey mind’ – when faced with a simple practical problem I seem to go into a kind of overdrive mode in thinking up a dozen different ways to solve something simple . With the build I had to start to do something completely different which was to learn just one basic skill and then repeat that skill ten, twenty or fifty times – with repetition of just marking out and cutting out simple parts I kind-of taught myself how to work.

I think of the build now as being not a complete thing but as a much simpler series of learning a new skill and simply repeating it until I had to move on a stage and learn yet another new thing. By the time I’d done that a few times and the jobs or skills got progressively harder I slowly learnt to trust my own ability to learn and also that a boat doesn’t have to be perfect – I was never going to achieve that – what is has to be is ‘good enough’. Eventually, probably around the end of year one I stepped back from a whole series of small skills learnt and realized that I had this quite large boat shaped object sitting in my drive.

It was still quite funny though because while my partner and my good neighbour were both heaping on the acclaim for my new found ability all I could see were the mistakes and ‘sins’.

At the end of year one I started to think that I hadn’t just trashed a whole pile of expensive materials, in fact i’d learned a lot – one of the big things being that i’d learned how to learn things and that was a huge boost of confidence to later on move into working with new materials for the first time. Given that the main reason I was there in the first place, that is to work on a big lockdown project of course I had achieved that already but the more interesting thing was what happened that winter…..

In the winter of 2021 I stopped working on the boat because it was far too cold under the shelter for the jobs that I had to do next, to be honest though I was glad to take break – the big thing though was that I had a long list of jobs that needed doing around the place and I went at those with a surprising amount of focus and energy…..it was as though my work output had gone up a significant amount just because of the boat project.

A few months ago I spoke with fellow builder, sailor and blogger Steve Parke about his build and one thing I specifically asked him was what he got out of the build – especially that unlike me he was only able to work for a few hours in the evening and at weekends. Steve’s answer is that he worked that way because his wife had had the good sense to see that Steve was stressed out by his job and that practical work would be an excellent way of dealing with that. By a strange coincidence we have similar work histories and there were many times that I was at wits end with my own career and would have benefited enormously from something that got me out of my own insanely busy head and focusing on a ‘simple’ problem that by application of hands, mind and simple tools that I could solve.

Today I would argue that few jobs actually provide the satisfaction of that comes with making an object by hand and equally I would argue that most people’s jobs are only a matter of applying solutions to problems that someone else has already worked out…..just ‘process’ if you like. If you are wondering then most of modern medicine and nursing are like that and the ‘bandwidth’ of decisions that the average doctor or nurse can make is rapidly becoming smaller and narrower . Now for sure , with something like a boat I didn’t just ‘go my own way’ and mostly I had to stick to the plans because the designer has already worked out the hard stuff : in my case though I did a lot of thinking and came up with a few modifications which make my own boat suit my own needs and in a way stamps a bit of ‘me’ into the mix.

Finally I’d like to say a few things about modern yachtsmen and their yachts – to me it seems that most modern yachtsmen have become nothing more than consumers of high end luxury goods and have no personal connection to the mere ‘thing’ that is tied up in a convenient but expensive version of a modern car park. It seems to me now that the people who build and sail their own small craft have somehow escaped that consumerism, created something both beautiful and functional , perhaps even created something that will be a legacy for the future.

Perhaps the only good reason to build a boat is because you want to – if you do then build one and be happy !

For anyone who likes to think about this kind of thing there is a useful book well worth reading which extols the value of working with our hands.

Link. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-Working-Your-Hands-Office/dp/0141047291

Year 2 of the build.