Eye for Design Te Sam Devlin Interview Y
acht designer Sam Devlin, proprietor of Devlin Designing Boat Builders, and a pioneer in the world of stitch-and-glue
boatbuilding, sat down with Small Craſt Advisor to review his career in boat design and construction, and to talk about what might come next.
Were you involved in boats as a kid...and what did you do for a living before turning to boat design and boatbuilding?
My dad had a boatshop when I was 4-6 years old and he was at the time inventing the first jet pump for inboard-engine boats. He was just about done with refinement of the design when the money ran out and he went bankrupt in the process. It might seem a bit surprising I would remember the boatshop with fondness, as there must have been tension around at the time, but I mostly remember the feeling of the shop and the heavenly smells of wood, paint and other things. Also, right be- hind Dad’s shop was Sweetland Archery, which had a patented process for making Port Orford cedar arrow shafts, so there was the pervasive smell of Port Orford cedar in the air. If you think maybe I’ve been chasing those childhood memories for many decades, you might be close to the truth. I learned to sail
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in high school, cutting my teeth on a Tistle on Fern Ridge Reservoir near Eugene, Oregon. I worked my way through college by working summers aboard tugboats in Alaska, and had a short, not-very-successful venture building log homes in central Oregon just aſter college before starting my boat- building business.
We know your first official boat design was the 15'-3" Egret, an open sail-and-oar adventurer that’s still going strong. Was that the first boat you built, and how did the design come about?
I had been building small-scale models of balsa wood and glue and had several different designs completed. I showed them to my father (then a contractor in Eugene) and he thought they looked good. He offered to supply the materials if I built him a boat, so the first one turned out to be the Egret design, and the second boat I built was a 16-foot canoe I’d designed. It’s funny about the Egret: I’ve tried to redesign her several times over the years, and aſter doing the exercise I inevitably come back full circle to realize she’s just fine…and a better boat than I might want to admit.
SMALL CRAFT ADVISOR
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