“How to Build a Boat”… a must-read
With such a small proportion of Australia’s and New Zealand’s wooden boat fleets able to go about business as usual, here’s a different opportunity to get your classic sailing fix. I grew up, looking forward to the arrival of Classic Boat Magazine in the letterbox each month…and I’ve never felt the need to throw out a copy…so they are an ongoing part of my life. This book review written by Steffan Meyric-Hughes, the current editor of Classic Boat, tells us about a book that is part life journey, part philosophy but mostly a highly accessible account of what it takes to build a boat. Perhaps, its the perfect antidote to the times we live in.
Jonathan Gornall’s book How to Build a Boat is the best book about boats and the sea I’ve read in years
There can hardly be a human endeavour (I shudder to call it a “sport”) that generates the sheer amount of printed pages that sailing does. Every week, we receive a steady trickle of new titles. Chief among them are the perennials (The Diesel Bible – 457th edition, 50 Useful Knots, Anchorages in the Eastern Med and so on), then you get the very niche books, often on designers and particular yachts. These will find no interest outside their target market, although they are often treasure troves for their intended readers.
We get very few books across our desks that really capture the imagination, books that a sailor could recommend to anyone. Over the years the handful of books I’d put into that category would include The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway), A Voyage for Madmen (Peter Nichols), Coasting (Jonathan Raban), The Perfect Storm (Sebastian Junger), We Didn’t Mean to go to Sea (if I could only pick one by Arthur Ransome) and, more recently Philip Hoare’s The Sea Inside.
How to Build a Boat joins that exalted list. It’s a first-person narrative about boatbuilding and fatherhood, with the rather snappy subtitle A father, his daughter and the unsailed sea. Jonathan, who becomes a father again at the age of 58, realises that he is not going to be around forever for his three-year-old daughter Phoebe. Despite his lack of practical experience, decides to build her a 10ft clinker dinghy in real wood, and in the space of a year. The result is, by turns, moving, funny and perceptive.
Author Jonathan Gornall built a traditional lapstrake boat for his young daughter, Phoebe, because he wanted “to bequeath you the sea, my darling girl, for you to love it, as I have loved it, for its beauty and its drama and the pulse-quickening promise it holds of what lies beyond the horizon….”
Living on the East Coast, Jonathan soon discovers the Nottage Institute (it is, in fact, the Nottage Dinghy that he builds) and recruits Fabian Bush as his mentor and occasional instructor. He takes space in a farm building, buys the necessary tools (this is one of the most entertaining parts of the book) and surrounds himself with a council of “dead experts” including our own late technical editor John Leather.
Why a real wood clinker dinghy, you might ask. Well, you might not actually, but if you need to ask, then Jonathan’s description of the allure of clinker, as the most romantic, beautiful and timeless of all the build methods, is one of the stand-out passages of the book. Woven into Jonathan’s tale are the stories of his two failed transatlantic rowing attempts (one nearly cost him his sanity, the other his life) and the story of his own rather neglected childhood (including a thrilling, illicit night-time raid on the River Orwell aged 12, in which the author is thrown into the freezing river alone, with no lifejacket, by the wash of a passing ship).
If you are thinking there is going to be as much about boatbuilding as there is about looking after motorbikes in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you’d be dead wrong. This book’s principal subject is exactly the one in the title, and it’s the book’s biggest achievement to turn a detailed description of building a boat into a real narrative. After Jonathan has quite badly injured himself getting the first garboard on, you look forward to hearing how the rest of the planks will go. It sounds crazy, reading that back, but it’s really true. Of all the narratives in the book, the one about nails and planks and hammers and the trusty bandsaw is the best story of all.