The Last Boat

Article by Fred Elgie

This is the story of an old sailor, me, and my last boat, Fred, named in honor of my father. Now, the truth is that my father knew almost nothing of boats or the world of the water, but he was one of those men—common for his time—who could build things as they were needed and who could fix nearly anything that broke. If I came to him with a broken toy or a jammed bicycle chain, his first response would always be, “Well, let’s see how this thing is supposed to work.” Pop’s attitude served me well as bicycles morphed into hot rods and then on through the sports-car years and, finally, decades of passionate relationships with boats. It remained my anchor through the love/hate affairs that we’ve all had with cranky old engines. I like to think that Pop would be proud of me and Fred.

Since we’ve just met, let’s pause for brief introductions. As I write now, I am well into my 80s. By the time I reached my 60s, I had built or rebuilt several boats, I had singlehanded offshore twice and Wendy and I had been liveaboard cruisers for several years. After cruising up and back to Alaska three times from a home port in Puget Sound, we had settled in a tiny island community west of Juneau just off the story-book Inside Passage. We had arrived, late in the cruising season, looking only for a snug harbor for that coming winter. By the time spring came, though, we had already begun to snuggle into community life and it seemed that roots had miraculously sprung through the bottoms of our sea boots. We realized to our surprise that this was the place we had been looking for. Over the next two years we sold out in Washington State, found a site, built a small house and moved ashore.

It took a few years, though, to realize that Alaska winters were too hard on the 70-year-old wooden ketch we’d come up on, and that maintenance was getting ahead of me. After a few more years of wishing that it wasn’t so, Journeyman had gone on to a new owner, Wendy had her fishing skiff and I was considering my options for staying afloat. By this time, 80 was not far off and the late-life wobbles had set in. I was still holding up pretty well but long-distance cruising was no longer going to be in the cards. I was okay with it, though. This part of Alaska is a dense scatter of islands, hundreds of them, that dribble down into British Columbia, just off the edge of the continent. Winter in open water around here can be a pretty fierce affair but there are many deep, protected inlets and comfortable gunkholes are nearly always close at hand. It was a good time and place to be imagining “The Last Boat.”

It would need to be a small boat—easy in and out over cobble beaches because there are no hoists here, no ramps or railways. It would need to be a safe and easy-to-manage boat—no more acrobatics on tiny foredecks for me. It must be stable—no more nimble leaps from gunwale to gunwale to keep her upright through a tack. Finally, it needed to be beachable because at the head of those deep, protected inlets there often lay long flats that invited placid drying-out between tides. Comfort counted for a lot, too. I could get by nicely with one good bunk, but I’d settle for nothing less than a decent galley, a proper stove for heat, and a practical writing desk. Oh, and The Last Boat needed to be quick and cheap to build. I was nearing 80, after all; time was short and I was working almost entirely alone.

Surprisingly, I found that need for economy to be oddly liberating. I would never have to face a covey of boatbuilder friends eager to critique every detail and no clutch of children or grandchildren would be waiting for Fred. Fact is, I doubted that anyone else around here would even be interested in him. Most importantly, my design requirements were modest and I really wasn’t asking that much of Fred.

The Last Boat should stay upright. It should have a deep cockpit to set and retrieve anchors—and to keep me aboard. It should be stout, particularly stout of bottom, because this is rocky country and help is never close at hand—even VHF radio is not always completely reliable. Dazzling speed to windward was not high on my list. In fact, early on I accepted that I’d need some kind of motor anyway so I might as well give myself plenty of off-wind sail, call Fred a motorsailer and let it go at that. If I could make him work with a single low-aspect sail I might never even have to leave the cockpit.

For several years early on, I had happily bashed about in a Great Pelican, which originated in San Francisco Bay, and thought that might be a good place to start the design process. Back-of-the-envelope sketches led to layouts with a sharper pencil, then came cardboard models. The final one, out of door skin plywood, turned out as an 18' x 9'-6" dory/pram with an 8’ main cabin and 6' of headroom under a 4' doghouse. It had a draining cockpit and a single mast carrying a balanced lugsail stepped in a tabernacle on the forward cabin bulkhead.

The final model was scaled one inch to the foot so it was a simple matter to take measurements directly to 3/8 MDO plywood. I’ll guess that most readers of SCA are knowledgeable enough so that I can skip the details of my building process except to say that I stuck to the usual steps of the plywood/epoxy method. (Well, I did bend them a little. Seeing no advantage to forms, frames or molds, I erected the two major bulkheads (3/4" ply heavily glassed on both sides) directly on the shop floor, hung the pre-made topside panels on them loosely and pulled the ends in to meet the transoms. The topside panels took their own fair shape and I built up chine logs later by springing in multiple thinner pieces, everything set in thickened epoxy. The two cabin bulkheads and the two transoms defined the final fair shape and after a final square-up I leveled out the chines and put on three layers of 3/8 ply for a bottom. Two keels built up of edge-glued 2 x 4s, scribed to the bottom with the cut-offs bolted through from the inside made for a good stiff bottom.)

All this done, we rolled the hull over and I moved on to the upper works. I had laid up and glassed the 3/8" cabinside panels and I set them now against the bulkheads, scribed and cut them to the sheer and set them, and the thick rub rail, in place—no edge-set required because the sheer was a straight line on the topside panels. The main bulkheads had been left oversized in height and it was only at this point that the final shape of the cabin top was determined and the final top curve of the cabin side panels cut. Temporary longitudinal cabintop frames went on, then three layers of 1/8" door skin laid up all wet in place, allowed to run wild over all four edges and then trimmed to size later. Several thinner chine and corner pieces went in, all set in thickened epoxy. The doghouse roof was cut out of the cabin top, sides built, and port lights set, then the whole thing set back in place over the roof cut-out and everything glassed and filleted in place.

We are so close to the end now that I’ll skip over the details of final trim-out and rigging except to say that I suffered no more than the usual array of snags, snafus and screw-ups; that Fred was a safe, speedy and comfortable boat and that he met my late-life needs wonderfully. He proved to be a good sailer in nearly all respects. No surprise that he was not close-winded but he dependably shouldered up to 65 or 70 degrees off the wind and went nicely fast when it was free. Going to weather, the 8-hp outboard at medium idle gave him another few points on the wind and just enough heel to be comfortable. For several years Wendy complained good-naturedly that she barely saw me during our short summers when I’d be gone for days at a time tucked in, aground or afloat, up one of our many inlets with pipe, pen, cat and music. This happy state of affairs lasted for just over six years.

But it didn’t last. Nothing does, does it?

One of the keels took a cruel crunch during a routine hoist and, for the very first time, Fred began to leak—pretty seriously, too. The obvious thing to do would have been to haul him out, wrench it back into position, lay on the glass and the goo and carry on. How about doing it close-up overhead while on my back? Well, it wouldn’t be fun but I had certainly done it. Ah, but how about now that I was deep into my 80s, lighting up metal detectors with replacement joints and still pretty much working alone? You can see it coming. The end of this story is getting close now.

The original prediction that none of my neighbors would be interested in Fred turned out to be sadly accurate. In Seattle or Port Townsend I’d have been fighting them off with a stick, but here, with only one or two real prospects? Not so much. Even getting him 80 miles to Juneau was not a practical option considering all the attendant expenses and the logistics of selling him there. I could, of course, just beach him and turn away. After all, you can poke through the underbrush just up from the beach nearly anywhere around here and you’ll stumble over the bones of some old wooden boat or the heavy carapace of a plastic one. I just wasn’t willing to go that route. I couldn’t have stood by and watched it…and besides, Fred deserved a better end than that.

It took quite a few months but a solution finally presented itself, in my dreams as my best ideas usually do. Over the winter months I emptied him out, found a buyer for the sail and made a garden bench from his cockpit seats. His barometer hangs in the kitchen now and his hollow Sitka Spruce mast stands erect on an outside corner of my shop. As for Fred himself, my Last Boat—the one that satisfied the most? The one that I got to build to my exact needs of that time and that served those needs very well, indeed? I motored him three miles across the inlet to where an old friend does custom logging and milling. There, we lifted him out with a big forklift, trundled him up to the mill yard and set him down gently on a big slash pile.

My logger/sailor friend and his wife were there. We go back maybe 40 years and we’ve sailed in each other’s wake many times. Wendy, of course, was right there, standing close, while we passed a bottle of good Irish whiskey and spoke of boats and harbors. I struck the ceremonial match. Soon we were standing back from the heat, then farther back. When it was over, all that could be found were a few blackened cleats and lacey scraps of fire-scoured fiberglass. Memories, delicate as they are, will persist. Good thing because Fred, my Last Boat, was gone. •SCA•

First appeared in issue #118