CRAFTSMANSHIP Adrian Morgan The apprentice... ...mine or his? wonders Adrian of the well-qualified new boy T
he time for lengthy emails in a warm room in front of a computer screen, is over. Time for the tools... Thus ended my last month’s chronicling of the vicissitudes of a small wooden boat builder. Since then the emails and the conversations with my owner have, if anything, got lengthier. No matter: thinking is a vital part of the process and also keeps me away from the shed on cold, windy days like today. Thinking time is not time wasted. It takes every waking hour to get my head around a new boat, and this – an Iain Oughtred Arctic Tern, less a foot or so – is no exception. It entails relofting the stem and stern, and cutting down the sheer. And because construction is to be traditional, I can pretty much discard all Iain’s meticulous drawings relating to epoxy and p**wood. That leaves a lot of head scratching: viz, how to build- in rocker with a solid, deepish keel; whether an offset centreboard (offboard?) or daggerboard would make sense and how to frame it to give the stiffness needed to carry a contemporary gunter rig.
As luck would have it, I may not need to hurry down to the old milking parlour every day at dawn to chip the ice off the windows, for I have acquired a partner, one
who is not only keen, but better qualified than I to build a Shetland boat of the type rising from the strongback. Which is a good thing. It may, paradoxically, be a bad thing for a column which relies heavily on embarrassing confessions, and is often less of a column, more like self-therapy, albeit one which some people clearly take perverse pleasure in sharing. But with Mattis Voss on board the chances of fitting a plank back to front or all the many ways of making a mess of a clinker boat will have shrunk considerably, for he is a graduate of the Skeppsholmens Folkhögskola in Stockholm, no less, where not only do they build traditional boats, but stitch the sails, mix the paints and trek into the forests to chop down suitable trees. So, although my quota of cock-ups may diminish (bad news for this column), my boats should improve – although I am not sure who’s apprenticed to whom, which is why I’ve made him a partner. Certainly there are things that I know that he doesn’t and things that he doesn’t know that he thinks he knows (and every Donald Rumsfeldian variation). And I do have upwards of 15 boats to my
“It takes time to convey in words what I used to bounce around internally”
name to his one (ha!). But that’s about it; for in every other respect he is more than my equal and can put an edge on a blade that you can shave with. He is both meticulous and fast (a good combination) but mostly it will be good to bounce things that I used to bounce back and forth in my head against another head, instead. The only problem is: it is taking a bit of time for me to convey in words to Mattis what I would normally bounce around internally in a discombobulated kind of way, as in: “You know, Mattis, I was thinking of maybe, you know making the keelson thingy a bit deeper and, maybe, you know, the outer keel bit, where it meets the stem, kind of scarphing it. Then again, we could always make it one piece and, perhaps laminate...” Having worked alone for so many years, it will be interesting to see how it pans out. On the other hand I might just let him loose and sit back in the armchair in the executive suite at Viking Boats International’s palatial premises, light a fat Havana and have a good long think. Tell me though: can I charge for thinking time?
CLASSIC BOAT APRIL 2012 83
CHARLOTTE WATTERS
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