THE WOODEN BOAT
by Anita Rafael
“Wooden boats provide a reassuring connection with the past and contribute to the romance of going to sea in a way that steel, aluminum or fiberglass cannot.” – David Brown
Newport woodworker Jon Heon’s first glimpse of Newport was from the deck of a wooden boat. “We sailed in and tied up at Goat Island late at night. At first light the next day, I came up from my berth below and looked out across the inner harbor at the city’s ‘skyline.’ ” That morning, in May 1974, the 65-foot schooner Mistral, just completing a four-day passage from Bermuda, lay alongside the dock waiting for the customs officer to grant its clearance into the United States. As Heon and the other deckhands stood beneath the yellow quarantine flag and from afar, admired the town they had never seen before, everyone standing on the dock gaped at the beautiful two-masted Mistral. At a time now called the dawn of the modern tourism era in Newport, the unheralded and demure appearance of this L. Francis Hereshoff-designed wooden yacht in Newport, just one of many such wooden vessels making this their port of call, was arguably among the best attractions the city had to offer. To these photographers, there is no question that classic wooden boats still are.
Akin to something like love at first sight, a glance from stem to stern across a scrubbed teak deck or a peek through a porthole at the captain’s mahogany-paneled cabin makes your heart say to itself, Aboard this boat, I can sail away to beautiful places…I can never sail to anywhere and the boat is a beautiful place all its own.
“What makes wooden boats so special, whether you’re a boat owner or a boat builder, is that the wood is a living substance – it’s alive, organic,” says Carl Cramer, publisher of Wooden Boat magazine. Like everyone who speaks or writes about wooden boats, he is involuntarily romantic. “Boats are made out of any number of materials, all good, but only wood gives the boat a different spirit.” The hand of the craftsman who built that boat is present, as well as the hand of the sailor who took her to sea. Neither fellow is likely to be more or less passionate about wooden boats than the other.
Yet, in wood’s sublime beauty, there is also noble tragedy. “Wood rots,” says Heon, who has since become the owner and restorer of his own vintage wooden boat, and he points out that even shipshape wooden boats nonetheless proudly bear their past in ways that fiberglass or metal vessels do not. Look closely at the mahogany on that yawl’s tiller or wheel. Take an extra moment to inspect the brightwork on the runabout’s rail. Lean over to really observe the individual planks on a sloop’s teak deck. Study the gentle curves of a plain, unvarnished oak cleat on a schooner’s bow. What your mind’s eye will see is that while deterioration may be present in the wood, the priceless patina of age, durable use and practical care are all simultaneously evident as well. “Every wooden boat,” says Heon, “has an interesting story to tell.”
They all start out as trees. Then, shaped by the minds and hands of craftsmen, they become wooden canoes, dinghies, rowboats, skiffs, sailboats, lobster boats, luxury yachts and, at the extreme, ships – wholly aesthetic and fully functional at the same time, with an appeal that appears to be somehow profoundly pinned to the human psyche. At the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, Clark Poston, the program director, says that in his view, the universal allure of a wooden boat is precisely about the perfect union of form and function. Even people unaccustomed to thinking nautical, Poston explains, can sense that to make that distinct “boat shape” out of wood requires a high level of craftsmanship. “We can see that’s it’s made by hand,” he says, “and there is an inherent attractiveness in that. There is also an inherent ‘something’ that everyone sees in any object made of wood – looking at a wooden boat, no matter who you are, you can still relate to the tree.” An inexplicable prehistoric, ancestral and unbreakable bond? Perhaps, says Poston.
Since its inception in 1993, the students at IRYS (eye’-ris, as the locals say it) have restored some 25 wooden boats to full commission, meaning the vessels are back in the water, actively sailing, and not collectibles preserved for display. “We’re teaching people the traditional craftsmanship that creates wooden boats.” Poston says, all but implying that neglecting to pass those skills along to each new generation could and might potentially render the human species extinct.
“Addiction” is the one word Newport wooded boat collector Jed Pearsall uses to describe his passion for the six wooden boats he owns; yet, he considers himself “lucky” that this is the bug that bit him. The fast and lovely 44-foot Amorita, a 1905 Herreshoff New York 30, is the largest vessel in his personal flotilla, and the smallest is a 1920 Herreshoff Watch Hill 15, the petite Emma, a 24-foot sloop which won the Silver Medal in the 1924 Paris Olympics. He collects wooden boats for what he calls their strong and confident “personalities” and for pure aesthetics. In his opinion, they become more beautiful with age. But, he is quick to say, “Wooden boats require an emotional commitment. You get back what you are willing to put in.”
Amorita, built nearly a century ago prompts Pearsall to ponder how generations past went about preserving the boat for him to enjoy today. As he sees it, it is simply his turn to pay the favor forward to whoever will sail her in the future. He calls that his “reward” for the part of himself that he gives up to care for the renowned sloop. “I think about the fact that Amorita,” says Pearsall, “was sailing fifty years before I was born, that she is still sailing, and that she will long outlive me.”
Asked to sum up just what it might be about a wooden boat that tempts him to add yet another hull to his collection, Pearsall says, “Soul.”
“Wooden boats just feel different,” says Newporter David Ray, yachtsman and owner of three wooden boats. “They smell different.”
Ray’s polished and pretty Ahab, a 33-foot motorlaunch which was originally built in the 1920s as a lake boat, is his “commuter boat” for sipping around Newport harbor. Ray equates owning a wooden boat to owning fine antique furniture. There is an aesthetic involved, he says, that has a lot to do with having good taste.
His Alden-designed Hinkley-built 65-foot yacht Nirvana has been an icon in the world’s oceans since it was first built in 1950. Formerly owned by Nelson Rockefeller, Ray bought it about 20 years ago from the former vice-president. “It’s a classic yacht, but I don’t baby Nirvana,” says Ray, who regularly races he locally, in the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean.
Although his Ahab gets regular use ferrying Ray and his guests between Bannister’s Wharf and Harbour Court (the New York Yacht Club), and although he pushes Nirvana hard, neither one of these two has ever had a total refit. “They’ve just been well taken care of,” he says,” and the thing is, that with a wooden boat, if you need to you can tear out a plank and make another one just like it.”
At Newport’s Museum of Yachting, now in its 20th year of operation and recently named one of the nation’s top ten maritime museums by Sailing magazine, visitors can take a close-up look at more than two dozen wooden boats that are either on display in the galleries or in the water, still actively sailing.
The Museum is the host site for the 2004 Wooden Boat Show this July. Coming home to where it started, the event marks the tenth anniversary since Wooden Boat magazine first became involved with the exhibition. (Prior shows had been organized by the Newport Yachting Center.) WB magazine’s publisher and show promoter Carl Cramer says show goers can expect everything: This year’s event is featuring more than one hundred boats and equally as many exhibitors and vendors at Fort Adams State Park. In-water and on-land displays run the gamut from sail to powerboats, from paddle to rowboats, as well as from old and classic to new and contemporary.
Also on the agenda, Cramer says, is a commemorative note that it has been 30 years since the now-classic-in-its-own-right Wooden Boat magazine first debuted – the announcement and presentation of Issue Number One was a highlight of the 1974 sailboat show in Newport.
David Brown, MOY’s executive director says, “Wooden boats provide a reassuring connection with the past and contribute to the romance of going to sea in a way that steel, aluminum or fiberglass cannot. Visually, few things appeal to the eye more than a wooden boat with graceful, traditional lines, a freshly painted hull, and gleaming varnished spars.” He speaks as if he personally knows the special comforts that wooden boats offer sailors, weary from a long passage and the hardships of life at sea. He says, “At the end of a voyage when the vessel is safe at anchor once again, nothing else is as quite as warm and welcoming as the cabin of a wooden boat.”
