Builders of boats have able guide in Rossel

THE BOATBUILDER’S APPRENTICE: THE INS AND OUTS OF BUILDING LAPSTRAKE, CARVEL, STITCH-AND-GLUE, STRIP-PLANKED, AND OTHER WOODEN BOATS by Greg Rossel; McGraw-Hill, Camden, Maine, 2007; 342 pages, large-format hardbound, $39.95.

Boats and airplanes take up a lot of space in my boyhood memories. In 1960s summers, anyway. My father flew his seaplane on various missions around Casco Bay, including spotting schools of fish for sardine seiners and “hopping passengers,” which meant giving 15-minute tourist rides for $3. From the age of about 8, I was the appointed volunteer assistant, a post which eventually entailed ferrying passengers between dock and airplane in a flat-bottomed punt with an antique 15-horse Johnson outboard motor.

The punts – there were several between my 9th and 16th years – were built by my father in the basement of our house. I remember regarding boat building as vaguely aberrant behavior. My father made it look like the most toilsome exertion imaginable to man. Completing one vessel took eons. Boat skeletons haunted our basement all the time. When one was finally finished, you still couldn’t use it because you first had to sink it for a week so the planking would swell watertight.

Some punts worked out better than others. On one, the sides were too low and it shipped water in the least chop. Another’s gunnels were too high for me to row it. On several the transoms were too weak for the motor; the Johnson kept leaping off one of them into the sea. One larger boat – a 16-foot “speedboat” with a V-hull – was never completed. Its half-built frame lingered in basements and backyards for years, and became a sort of family symbol which I will not go into here. I believe it crossed my father’s mind to try building an airplane. Thankfully, he didn’t. No one knows what disasters would have befallen if he had.

I asked few questions about boat building for fear of seeming interested and being impressed into service sanding or planing, or worse, watching. I did everything in my power to instead be playing baseball and reading James Bond novels, and never learned the craft of boat building.

So 13 years ago when I moved to Troy across the street from Greg Rossel, and saw his “Boat Carpentry” sign tucked cozily outside his house along with a constantly changing assortment of sailboats in his driveway, I immediately felt sorry for him. It must be a life of constant discouragement and sunken ships.

How wrong your one-dimensional convictions can be. Don’t misunderstand me: I never asked him to teach me boat building. I can’t cut a straight line with a guide. But come to find out after many an entertaining conversation with him, boat building is nothing like my memories of it. And the satisfactions come through in his latest book.

Like his previous book “Building Small Boats,” “The Boatbuilder’s Apprentice” is written in an affable, precise style that unpretentiously assures us building a small boat is within almost anybody’s range of possibilities. It opens with an easygoing discussion of why you might build a boat and a survey of projects that might suit your purposes, budget and time constraints.

It then proceeds to a readable overview of different hulls, including concise definitions of terms whose meaning is not self-evident to the uninitiated. The unfinished speedboat of my boyhood, I learned, had a lapstrake hull, “one of the oldest [methods] where the top edge of each plank is beveled, overlapped by, and fastened to the bottom edge of the next one up.” Other hulls described in careful detail include carvel (smooth), plywood, and cross-planked, which was used in our punts.

A section of the book outlines different materials and offers suggestions for setting up the workshop. Different operations and techniques, from lofting to oarlocks, are described in lucid detail, and there are useful appendices and an excellent glossary of terms.

Since I do not intend to build a boat, the reading of this book was for me more of a cruise down memory lane. But the vividness it triggered attests to the clarity of what in someone else’s hands could be very dry text. As in his previous books, Greg Rossel’s good humor, his precision, and his love and knowledge of boat building flood through the writing. This is not only a useful beginner’s guide, but also a pleasure to read.

It does not get much more encouraging than that. Anyone who has a notion to build a boat should get this book.