Brooklin sailboats find fans in Japan

BROOKLIN – Maine-made boats are being sailed in waters all around the world, so it’s not all that unusual that a small sailboat now being built in Brooklin will be shipped to Japan when it’s completed this spring.

But not many Maine boats are shipped to the governor of Tokyo.

That’s where the latest Haven 121/2 being built at Eric Dow’s shop on Reach Road will be headed.

Although other shops are building the small wooden day sailers, Dow figures his shop probably has turned out more of the small Haven sloops than any other boat builder.

Hulls 46 and 47 are now under construction. One of them is being built for Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of the Tokyo metropolitan government.

According to Dow, this will be the second of the Havens to be shipped to Japan, and the sale of this boat was arranged through his first customer.

According to a letter from that customer, the governor, who was a popular writer and adventurer with a passion for ocean racing, saw the Haven and fell in love with it.

That’s not hard to imagine. The Haven has become a very popular small day sailer since it was first built in the 1970s.

The sloop is a truly Brooklin-born boat. Although it was based on the venerable Herreshoff 121/2, it was designed just a few hundred yards from Dow’s boat shop by the late Joel White.

Dow is a Brooklin native who studied boat building from 1972 to ’74 at what then was the Washington County Vocational Technical Institute. He returned home and began building boats part time in his grandfather’s old shop.

“I’d been lobstering some with my father,” Dow said. “This was my grandparents’ property and my grandfather had been a plumber and electrician. He had this building and I turned it into a shop and began building boats full time.”

He has been building boats full time for about 30 years now, and he and Joe Gott and Luke Carter, the two other boat builders working with him, have specialized in the Haven 121/2, producing an average of three or four a year for the past 15 years.

The boat gets its name from its length at the waterline, 121/2 feet, just like the older Herreshoff. The main difference between the two boats, Dow said, is below the waterline.

“The Haven has a much different shape out of the water,” he said. “The profile is almost identical from the waterline up.”

The design calls for a shallower draft and a centerboard, which is absent in the Herreshoff.

“You can trailer it easily,” he said. “It’s easy to haul and launch by one person on a ramp or a beach. And it can sail in shoal water.”

A lot of people buy the Haven to teach youngsters to sail. Dow said it has become a real “grandfather-grandchild boat.”

“We had one grandfather who ordered four of them, one for each of his grandchildren,” he said.

Dow’s shop turns out both traditional plank-on-frame – using cedar planks on oak frames – as well as cold-molded versions of the Haven. Cold molding is a process that involves gluing four layers of veneer, one-eighth inch Spanish cedar, together.

Gott cuts all the pieces ahead of time and then the three men work together on “gluing day” to glue them together at one time. They glue up the boats in halves inside a vacuum bag that helps form a tighter bond. Then they put the halves together.

Many people like the cold-molded boats because there are no seams that will shrink if the boat is out of water for extended periods.

“It holds up better on the trailer,” Dow said.

But he Dow would rather build the traditional plank-on-frame boats. While Gott and Carter are working on the two cold-molded Havens this year, Dow is concentrating on a total rebuild of an old Herreshoff 121/2.

“I like the idea of being a woodworker first and a boat builder second,” he said. “I’m more likely to build furniture or cabinets than to switch to a different material.”

Either way, the Havens from Dow’s shop are all handmade wooden boats. Demand for the boat has remained strong and so far it has not been affected by fluctuations in the economy.

Although the crew does a variety of different work in the shop, including repairs and some custom work, the Haven suits Dow’s business, and with the price of the average Haven closing in on $40,000, the economies of scale allow him to keep the operation small, the way he likes it.

“I like the crew at this size,” Dow said. “I’m still able to work on boats. On some of the bigger jobs we’ve done, I’m in the office ordering materials and on the phone and I don’t do what I like to do; that’s build boats myself. I have no desire to be a business manager.”