The sun is warm and the breeze fresh here in Bermuda. ADVENTURESS and her crew slipped between the coral heads and made landfall last Sunday, the 18th of November. Although I have had many exciting experiences here in the past few days, I thought it might be fun to describe the sail here, as well as some of the mechanics of an offshore passage, for those of you who might be curious how one sails a large, gaff-rigged schooner 600 miles across the Gulf Stream. 

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Michael Norgang

Sitting comfortably in the dog house of Adventuress with the wind howling outside and the boat pitching with every gust and swell, I enjoy thinking about the chain of events that have led me here as delivery crew on Adventuress.

About three years ago I was hired by Rockport Marine and was one of three carpenters to begin restoring this same boat. My first day at RMI I was instructed to pull a garboard plank constructed of two inch thick teak that was through-bolted and tightly fit. In the words of my project manager, we were going to "take a look." With a feeling of trepidation, but with Taylor Allen's encouragement, I took a two inch chisel and proceeded to demolish what, at the time, was the most expensive and exotic piece of wood I had ever touched.

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Since our last post, summer has faded into fall, and frantic pace of the ADVENTURESS project has finally slowed down. The work list, seemingly endless and overflowing on yellow legal pads, has been whittled down to a few items. The boat has traveled to the Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors Show, the Newport International Boat Show, and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta and thousands of people have taken off their shoes, walked over the decks, poked through the drawers and cupboards, and run their hands over the raised panel interior.
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The night before we launched ADVENTURESS, I went by Rockport Marine Park on my bike to look at the boat before I pedaled home. I crossed the little creek we call Goose River, and marveled that in less than 24 hours an 83-foot boat would be maneuvered into it. It looked narrow and shallow as I cruised over the tiny foot bridge. 


Across the green lawn of the park, opposite of the statue of Andre the seal, ADVENTURESS looked huge. She dwarfed the lime kilns and old train, the remaining artifacts of Rockport's former life an industrial town. Although it was evening, long after closing time, our crew was still moving up and down the ladder. Martha Coolidge, the interior designer of the boat, was planning to be there late into the evening installing cushions, adjusting pillows and fixtures and making sure all of the interior details were just so.


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Over the course of the year, I give a lot of tours to school classes. Although the teachers sometimes balk as their charges frolic through the heavy machinery and scaffolding, kids generally love the boatyard. For some kids, it is even a real "a-ha" moment--that they might be able to make a living making something beautiful with their hands.


Over the past three years, I have shown hundreds of school kids the ADVENTURESS restoration. Kids and adults alike find it overwhelming, 83 feet of classic yacht loveliness crammed into one of our work bays. On the floor, the boat towers over us, and when you walk on deck, you must duck to avoid hitting your head on the ceiling. My favorite question to ask them is, "How the heck do you think we're going to get this big boat out of here?"


The question really stumps them. I've heard children postulate that we could remove the roof and crane it out, flood the shop and float it out, or even drag it out with ropes. To complicate matters, our boat hoist can't lift a boat like ADVENTURESS, she is just too heavy. So now really--how are we going to do it?

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Last week my comrade in arms for all things blog posted a great piece about the biennial Classic Yacht Symposium held at the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Bristol, Rhode Island.

In it she touched on the level of thought and care that goes into the restorations of historically significant classic yachts and of how this yard has developed a restoration philosophy that leaves room for the owner’s tastes and preferences.

Ours is probably not the true purist’s preferred approach. It would not surprise me if curators of master works rendered in other media took umbrage to this methodology. I find that where you happen to find yourself standing in the debate about the importance of originality is far less important than creating an atmosphere where the debate actually occurs.
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This must be a stressful time for marketing professionals. It seems I keep reading about the demise of traditional avenues for advertising. From what I’m told, ever evolving “Social Media” seems to be the panacea , but it would appear that the constant shape-shifting makes it pretty hard to get a firm grip on that too. Likely the feeling of uncertainty about where this is all headed is the first indication that I am no longer an especially youthful member of the labor force. I remember watching how my parents’ awkward, stumbling, negotiations with various forms of “new technology” resulted in what I interpreted to be reluctance followed by resignation of their growing technological obsolescence (for carbon dating purposes those technologies included ATM machines and cordless phones) . It is no comfort to me that, at age 34, I may be approaching the same obsolescence, but I tell myself that this apparent inability to keep current has more to do with the amount of time spent cooking and cleaning up after kids than ossification of cerebral tissue. For the record, prior to my Father’s aforementioned resignation I had the opportunity to learn my first engineering axiom: violence and portable electronics do not mix.

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When I was first getting into wooden boats, I rented a room from Alec Brainerd, the owner of Artisan Boatworks. At that time he was just getting his boatbuilding business up and running. That summer, not only was he my landlord, but we also worked together on the schooner Appledore. He taught me to drive a big schooner, and would also chide me about my unwashed dishes.

Living and working with Alec was my first introduction to the world of yachts, and one name that was often on the tip of Alec’s tongue was “Fife.” For Alec, and many, many others, the boats designed by William Fife III are…special somehow. I came to understand that perfectly rational people who loved boats (okay, maybe that’s a contradiction) would lose their heads over a transom that tapered down to almost nothing, or an interior so well-proportioned that to alter one detail was a call to arms for a certain kind of boat nut. And as I began to look at the designs and understand them, I started to appreciate why grown people’s eyes would grow moist of a Fife yacht under sail in the summer time.
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I’ve noticed that when my work comes up in social situations the conversations tend to be brief. But I have it on good authority that there is some indication one or two of you are actually reading these posts—which is, of course, encouraging. I would describe my reaction as just shy of surprise when I heard that. Perhaps what I had attributed to a less than compelling topic of conversation has more to do with my shortcomings as a conversation partner… but you’re reading, at least a few of you, so for the time being I’ll keep writing.

Yacht restoration is a curious endeavor. My impression is that archivists, fine art conservation specialists, and other restoration professionals have had the benefit of formal education specifically tailored to the restoration process. With the exception of graduates of the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, Rhode Island, (which, by the way, has a fantastic reputation) the rest of us in the field of yacht restoration are on our own. We’re here because we like pulling things apart and putting them back together, because we’re methodical, and because it’s fascinating.

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WoodenBoat Magazine used to run a feature section called Matters of Detail. I always lingered on that page. The descriptions were brief and usually accompanied by a photo of some especially clever solution to a common boatbuilding challenge exquisitely rendered in oak or bronze.  Something tells me Maynard Bray was behind it but I could well be attributing one of his colleagues’ good ideas to him. Anyway I haven’t seen the Matters of Detail section in a while. Truth be told it never quite seemed to fit in the magazine. I remember it as a welcome non sequitor in the middle of the issue. In a way it was the first boat blog; little testimonials to people living out the axiom if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

But here I am writing a boat blog from the design office at Rockport Marine. The shop bays here are a revolving museum of some of the finest wooden boats ever conceived. There are some 50 odd men and women creating these matters of detail here every day. You could argue that here in the design office it’s a big part our job to scheme these things up.

Trade publications have been generous in featuring our work in the pages of books and magazines, but the sheer quantity makes it impossible to feature this level of detail in an article. So I’m going to poach the idea and use some of these design office blogs to feature the details that go into these projects.

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There is no doubt that everybody loves the traditional plank on frame sailboats of a bygone era. The challenge is to keep the authentic looks of that era while making them modern in performance, safety, and manageable for a small crew.  Many of these 1920s era boats were day sailors, with a crew staying aboard to polish the hardware and assist the captain while day racing in the Solent or the river Clyde in Scotland.

Nowadays the modern classic yacht is an ocean going vessel, has all the systems of the new designs but must be hidden between the skins, under the sole or other out of sight places. The trick is to do it right once, have it totally reliable and invsable but accessible.

Hidden between the skins on the starboard side of the 83’ Fife-designed schooner ADVENTURESS, there are no flexible hoses and hose clamps; all non-corrosive metal pipes handle the fluids with seacocks at the hull. Wiring is all secured every 6” and labeled at the beginning and end of every compartment.

ADVENTURESS will be launched in 2012 and join the ever-growing list of updated classic yachts now sailing with modern systems neatly hidden between the skins.

-Tom Kiley

How do you build all of the blocks for an 83’ gaff schooner without access to the machinist, the fabricators, or the boatbuilders (who are respectively already too busy, too busy, and way too busy to take on additional work before launch)? It’s a pretty tall order but we may have found a solution in steriolithography files, overnight 3D printing, multi-axis milling and computer numerically controlled (CNC) routers.

While we haven’t completed any blocks yet, stay tuned — the test run looks promising. The ash shells are made right down the road at Tim Marchetti’s shop. Tim uses a CNC router to produce parts to our design. We sent him a few boards of Ash and a 3D computer model of the completed block assembly.

He took it from there to generate a tool path for the CNC router to follow.  It wasn’t more than a day or two later that Tim called to say that our parts were ready. The intricate shapes arrived complete with precision holes bored for the sheave axle pin, coin, and perimeter rivets. Each piece is a perfect duplicate and entirely interchangeable with the next. This should significantly reduce headaches and speed up the whole process come assembly time.

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Here in the design office at Rockport Marine we have the benefit and added pressure of working with 50 of the best boat builders you could ever hope to find. This means that when a design can be called genuinely beautiful and satisfies the pragmatic experience of that crowd we can claim a measure of success. It’s a pretty tall order so when we recently came across a new tool purpose built for engineering elegance we were keen to give it a spin. The restoration of Adventuress gave us the opportunity.

The spar loft here at Rockport Marine is a huge library of what works well aloft (and sometimes what doesn’t) but designing the rigging hardware for an 83’ schooner is a huge job and a few of the fittings warranted a more detailed engineering analysis.

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