“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 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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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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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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“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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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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It can be easy to become separated from the fact that the boats we build go on to have lives outside of the boatyard—they are no longer a boat builder’s infinite series of tasks, but instead become a mode of transportation, a piece of art, someone’s dream. So it is special when the people who build the boats get to experience them on the water. It gives us perspective on our jobs, a bigger picture of our work that we might not get otherwise.

In 2008, Rockport Marine was rewarded a contract from the state of South Carolina to build a replica of a 17th century trading ketch for display in a historic settlement in Charleston. Charles Towne Landing has many displays of life of the early settlers, and the boat would be part of their interpretive exhibit at the state park.

The build started at the beginning of January, and we delivered the boat in October. The delivery was done with crew from the boatyard, mostly carpenters, who had had experience sailing traditional wooden boats. I was lucky enough to be one of the delivery crew, and I recently came across my journal from the trip. I came to Rockport Marine through a love of sailing and wooden boats, and this trip reconnected me to that love. Looking back at the journal and my pictures, at the beginning of a new sailing season, helps me to remember why I do this work, beyond the endless lists of maintenance tasks, things to buy, and problems to fix.

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Ideally, custom boats are built to perfectly express and mold to the character of the person using them. In the case of GYRE, a restoration we began in the fall, we faced a different challenge: shaping an existing boat to meet a client’s needs. Our client bought a used, wooden cruising boat and asked us to transform her into a comfortable daysailer. To this end, the cabin house was cut back by a few feet. 

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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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As winter marches on, the paint department works through the list of storage boats, giving them their annual maintenance coats of paint and varnish to prepare them for the sailing season. We talk to each owner and discuss what work they would like to do over the winter, and then each boat is moved into one of our two paint bays in turn, which are solely used for finish work. These bays are equipped with large exhaust fans, to change the air often, and are cleaned regularly, to keep dust down. The bays have radiant floor heat as well as baseboard heat, so the temperature can be controlled easily, and brought up or down rapidly, as needed for the finish work.
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Rockport Marine is the winter home to many offshore cruising and racing boats that have participated in the Bermuda Race or have crossed the Atlantic. Tom Kiley, service manager and rigging expert at Rockport Marine, has been a Bermuda Race inspector for 20 years. He can be found on the dock in the warmer months preparing our storage boats for the sailing season, offering advice and troubleshooting any rigging issues.  All our customers know him for his practical advice and he is an invaluable asset to anyone preparing for a race. 

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