January / February 2023

Synchronicity,” muses 70-year-old Jonathan “Johnny” Waters, sharing coffee from a thermos with his 34-year-old daughter, Emilie Waters Harris. It is late summer 2022, and we’re sitting in weathered wooden lawn chairs on the wharf at Bradley & Waters Marine Railway. It has been the Waters’s wharf since 1985, and their railway. It’s the last bit of working waterfront in the village of Stony Creek, nestled in Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.

Here’s the thing: I don’t love caulking. I’ll admit I don’t even like it. I do not profess to be a master of the art of caulking; to me, it’s just a necessary step in building a carvel-planked wooden boat, one of the arduous jobs to do before getting back to the fun stuff. I know a lot of people enjoy it and even find some Zen in the repeated action, but not me. It’s aggressively boring in my book. I can’t even tune out, because it has to be done carefully, and that demands attentiveness.

CONSTANCE was like a dog with a bone as we bounded across Falmouth Bay under full sail. It was a fine midsummer’s day and the sea was shimmering beneath the long, shadowy body of The Lizard peninsula to the south. A 12-knot breeze had sprung up, just as forecast, and the rig creaked contentedly as the sails adjusted to the force of the wind. It was hard to imagine a better place to be at that moment.

The remains of elegant and purpose-built trap skiffs are ubiquitous along the Newfoundland and Labrador shores. Most fishing harbors have a wreck or two left as evidence of the fine eye of a builder, good workmanship, durable wood, and a hard but purposeful living. Whatever it is that lets these sculptural relics endure, there is a nostalgic appreciation for the craft inherent in them that seems to prevent their removal as so much blight.

Anyone with an interest in wooden boats in Germany during the past five years would have had a hard time missing news of Jan von der Bank’s extraordinary backyard construction project. Jan not only built a 31' (9.5m) sailing yacht, from scratch, in his long single-car garage in Eutin, in northern Germany, but also spent many additional hours maintaining his extensively detailed website about the project. As the yacht came together stage by stage, people eagerly watched for every new episode, awaiting word of his next clever solution or latest milestone of progress. Before long, he had more than 10,000 social-media followers not only in Germany but far beyond.

Around Vancouver, British Columbia, word is that Arnt Arntzen is your go-to guy whenever you accumulate a pile of castaway wood or metal oddments that have outlived their designated uses. Old church pews, throwaway planks from a ruined pier, scrapped airplane and helicopter parts, metal screens and pipes, railings from a demolished stairway—Arntzen will cheerfully scoop them all up and stash them until an idea for some adaptive new life occurs to him. Maybe as components of the custom furniture he designs and builds for a living.

In mid-September around 1977, early in my career as a captain for Maine Windjammer Cruises, one of the company’s schooners, MERCANTILE, was taken to Southwest Boat in Southwest Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, to ship a new rudder. I was left in Camden with a small crew to lay up and put the winter covers on the company’s other two schooners, MATTIE and MISTRESS.