“I don’t know how to do that. But I will figure it out and get back to you.”

This is my favorite part about working at Rockport Marine; I utter these words or similar almost every day. “Figuring it out” could take a couple of minutes, or it might take an entire day. It doesn’t really matter—either way it’s an enjoyable, challenging and rewarding way to spend your day.

At its core, design is puzzles and problem solving. The puzzles we have at Rockport Marine tend to be large, with a gajillion pieces ranging from new to beyond repair. There are pieces missing and there are extra pieces. Some of the pieces you will need are available in a catalog. Some you will have to invent and manufacture yourself. They are expected to fit together perfectly into a finished assembly whose physical beauty, quality of craftsmanship, elegance of engineering, and prowess under sail or power will inspire all who step aboard. Oh, I almost forgot. It should also last forever. Or maybe almost forever. Some of our grandkids might pursue this line of work and it is probably okay if a few things need fixing by then.

Rockport Marine is a busy place. So there are always puzzles in abundance. We don’t see most of them in the design office because they get solved by the crew and the project managers every day. The solutions take the form of ingenious jigs, and tools improvised or invented that increase the accuracy, efficiency, or otherwise improve the execution of the task at hand. I’d be surprised if we see 1% of the puzzles, but they tend to be good ones so I thought I might share a few.

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The last time I anchored in Pulpit Harbor, my wife volunteered to get dinner ready, and so the kids and I set up the rig for our little tender and ghosted around the outer harbor in the last of the light before sunset. I didn't have a camera with me but I found these shots online taken by another family who enjoyed the same view of the sun dipping behind the Camden Hills as one of the local windjammers anchored for the night…you get the idea.

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It’s been a while since I posted about the goings on in the design office here a Rockport. If you’ve been keeping tabs on us in other ways—Facebook, newsletters, or out on the water—you already know it has been a busy summer here at Rockport Marine and I hope you’ll forgive us for the radio silence from the design office. Every project is an all hands on deck effort as completion dates approach, and ADVENTURESS has proved no exception. We had a spectacular turnout at the launch, engine trials and sailing trials went smoothly, and we got to show her off at the Fife Symposium in Castine alongside a few of her cousins. Perhaps most memorably we had a fantastic few days of casual racing in the Castine Classic Yacht Race, the Camden Classic Feeder Race, and the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta. In fact, if there was a downside to that whole week it was that from the foredeck I never got to see how good she looked going about her business. It would be fair to say she was well received. In fact I think ADVENTURESS is the first of our projects to draw enough traffic to the website to crash the server. She did it twice.
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“A friend and, in a technical sense, an employee, but more truly as a partner.” That’s how Olin Stephens described his relationship with Aage Nielsen. As to their working relationship during Nielsen’s tenure as head of the Sparkman & Stephens Boston office, he had this to say: “Theoretically I was the chief designer, but I was well aware that Aage’s knowledge and experience were far greater than my own.”

As far as endorsements from your boss, on a scale of one to ringing, that one knocks the bell right off the top. And this is from a man who has himself been described as the most successful and influential yacht designer of the last century. Mr. Stephens wrote these words for all posterity in the forward to Maynard Bray and Tom Jackson’s book Worthy Of The Sea. The book is a fine effort filled with biographies of Nielsen and his boats and is an excellent introduction to his life and work.
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Late last week I went to an event at 10 High Street, an art gallery here in Camden, Maine.

I was there to support a friend whose paintings are featured there this month. At one point during the evening, I found myself on the receiving end of an inquiry about Spirit of Tradition yachts. You might expect, as my conversation partner did, that given what I do for a living and where I am permitted to do it, that I would be able to define that term. No sooner had I stammered something about performance underbodies coupled to long overhangs and modern sails, rigging, and mechanical systems, that several exceptions to my supposed rule sprang into my mind. As I prepared to extract myself from the conversation and further embarrassment, my interlocutor followed up with “Are there Spirit of Tradition powerboats?”

At this point Jessica Stammen, my friend whose work I had come to admire, came to my rescue and I was permitted to talk art instead of boats for a few minutes. Now I know considerably less about art, but the difference is that I am not expected to be able to speak intelligently on the subject and this was much more to my liking. By the way Jessica’s work is exceptional and I encourage you to stop by Ten High Street if you happen to be in the area. If you’re not in the area you can check out her work here…
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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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I came across a piece of writing recently that set me off on a course for this week’s design. Or rather I came across it again—given the number of times I have looked through The Catboat Book, I can’t imagine that I could have missed it every time. I have noticed that the resonance a particular piece of writing has as much to do with the combination of life experiences you bring to it as it does with the originality, quality, and clarity of thought it brings to you. 

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“Layla and Majnun” or “Layla and the Madman” is the story of a Bedouin poet and the woman he loved. They lived in the 7th century under the rule of the Umayyad Dynasty in what is now Iraq. Consumed by his love for the astonishingly beautiful Layla, Majnun set out to woo her with his poems. Local traditions forbade the match however and Layla married another man. In his anguish Majnun lost his grip on reality and abandoned his family and community to wander in the surrounding desert, reciting his poems to the sand. Majnun’s body was discovered in 688 AD at the site of his beloved Layla’s grave. Before he died he had carved three verses of poetry into a rock nearby. 

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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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Last week, I was doing a little digging around about William and John Atkins for my last post, and I came across a reference, actually a curious insult of sorts, used to describe the efforts of the two men. They were, at least according to some of their detractors, designers of character boats.  If you spend enough time in the pages of the boating press you’ve likely come across this term before. I think the first time I came across it the author was describing the Lyle Hess designed Falmouth cutter/pilot cutter type favored by Lin and Larrey Pardey and much heralded in their many books recounting their adventures.

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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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In 1942 a man named William Atkin designed a 19’ skiff for the purpose of landing on far away beaches to collect American servicemen wounded in battle. The aim was to get in, load up, get out and do it quickly.  Atkin named the design RESCUE MINOR. Plans for his design are available here.

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Image courtesy of Andrew Williams

If you have been following these blogs or checking in on our website or Facebook posts you’ve noticed that these last few years have been filled with a lot of restoration here at Rockport Marine. It occurred to me that there’s a part of that restoration process that is almost completely hidden from view.

Photo by Billy Black

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Not so very long ago we had an opportunity to prepare a presentation design for an individual interested in getting to his property on a nearby island and back again. The design requirements were speed and grace. A passing reference was made of the fact that it should probably look like it belongs in Maine. Also, it’s likely that it will be used for the occasional tour of the island. A beautiful boat, sunset, Maine Islands and a gin and tonic. Just add lime, the rest was up to us.

The design brief immediately called to mind a collaboration between Rod Stephens (brother and co-worker of the famous designer, Olin Stephens) and designer Al Mason. In 1940, Commodore William Justice Strawbridge commissioned a design for the expressed purpose of cruising the islands around Penobscot Bay. Stephens and Mason called the result ESCORT. When a client came into the design office and asked for speed, grace and a distinctive design that would still look at home in a rocky harbor in Maine, ESCORT struck me as a pretty good place to start.

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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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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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