Antigone, our oldest daughter, was about two years old when we began building Ganymede in the yard of our house in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Her earliest memories, probably, are of me declaring, “boats don’t build themselves,” as I headed out to glass in another bulkhead or laminate a side deck. The statement was as much a reminder for me that progress depended on my advancing of it—nothing would happen if we didn’t do it, and everything put off for cooler weather or better conditions would still need doing eventually.
I had a column in Cruising World magazine back then—the “Backyard Warrior,” which chronicled the unfolding story of the project: a project some followed with horror at my unconventional methods, others with a morbid expectation that it would sputter and die like so many other boatbuilds. Most though, I’d like to think, followed along with genuine goodwill.
Nearly twenty years later, with Ganymede successful in spite of all the doubters, with thousands of miles under the keel, and thousands more to go hopefully in the near future, we have another boat to build in the yard. This time it’s for Antigone, who doesn’t really know any other way. If you want something you can’t afford to buy, your build it yourself. Now, she could have gone the route we did at first: buy a half-wrecked derelict to fix up, then upgrade when time and circumstance allow. But she’s seen that movie, and decided to skip to the next step, where you simply build the boat with all the features you want and none of the ones you don’t.
It sounds easy to say, “simply build,” but of course there’s rather more to it than that. With the skills I’ve gained since the Ganymede days, working as a boatbuilder and rigger, it seemed a better option to build a hull from scratch, rather than compromise on a kit hull that may not completely satisfy, or lack a critical feature. So we drew out some parameters: length big enough to live on comfortably, but small enough to handle easily and afford. Full keel, stern-hung rudder (of course). Lots of inside volume for stores. Gaff rigged, with all the features of Ganymede that worked well or have been refined to work well by now. It took a fair bit of drawing, measuring, and laying out, using battens and weights and measuring tapes and string on the ground. The length and beam and draft changed several times, but finally we had a set of parameters to put into a CAD program and create a fair and boat-shaped surface.
The next step was to have cross-sectional slices from the CAD hull, at every two feet starting from the bow, printed full-scale at a local print shop. These gave us the curves of each “station,” which Antigone then cut out, transferred onto OSB sheets, and sawed out to form full-size frames on which to build the hull.
Over the winter, a stack of boat-shaped stations in the shop slowly grew, waiting for springtime weather to be assembled. Once the weather was good enough-ish, we bought two wooden I-beams meant for floor joists, and spent several days setting them up as level, parallel strongbacks. Having learned from hard experience that any lapse in standards leads to a lot of fixing later on, we were meticulous in laser-leveling the strongbacks, in putting crosspieces in precisely the right spots, in making sure each step in the process was as thorough and as good as we could make it. After all, at every step there’s lots of ways to get things crooked, out of plumb, or not on center, and it pays to carefully ensure each piece is in just the right place and orientation before moving on.
For all our care, as we stood up stations on the strong backs, one after the other with a laser on the waterline, we had to go back more than once and re-position a station that wasn’t quite on its lines, or square up a crosspiece that had wandered just a hair as we screwed it into place. It’s exhausting, being that careful, but it saves a lot of anguish farther down.
As I write this, all the stations are standing up, parallel, centered, plumb, and square, and we’ve begun running stringers along the hull, to which the first layer of core-foam will attach. We’re figuring a lot of this out as we go along, some of our ideas may not work, and we might have to shift our methods. Just as that backyard warrior of long ago had to figure out many things on his own, so now the backyard warriors, father and daughter, will have new ground to break as they use the experience of past events to forge into new territory. Whatever happens will at least be interesting, and we hope you’ll follow along this series of blog posts and see to where we get.
