The Nature of Wooden Boats

A lineup of well-kept wooden boats at Stimson Marina in Seattle.

A wooden boat is unlike any other thing, natural or invented. Boats are creations of the human mind which have evolved with us over millennia, like the saddle, or the plow, yet we give them life in our imagination in ways that we do not grant to other things. We call our boats “she”, and we trust that she will bring us safely home from our voyages, undrowned. No other object of human art is so personified. Unlike other human inventions, boats have an existence and a nature that is independent of their utility - a nature which we can choose to honor or disregard in the care of our boats, depending on our own nature, sensitivity, and empathy.

A wooden boat is always an accurate reflection of the way it has been treated. Some cherished boats are continuously maintained by owners who honor their nature by using the boat as she was intended, preserving the hull and finish, and making sympathetic modifications within the intent of the original designer and builder. My first boat, Savona, was one of those. She had been owned for years by a Puget Sound Pilot, a professional mariner who carried that expertise into all the work done on her. Her varnish and paint were well-kept, her mechanical systems were reliable. Her hull, decks, and cabins were sound. Her Isuzu diesel engine started every time, and ran smoothly. At any moment she was ready to go, whether on a day trip around the lake or a weeks-long cruise to Desolation Sound.

Many boats are neglected. Walk down any dock and the majority of boats will be in this category. They sit season after season, never leaving the slip. The finish fades, the hardware tarnishes. But they are still solid underneath. It can be time-consuming to bring these boats back to sound condition but it’s usually not difficult. On stepping aboard a neglected boat it’s immediately apparent that they have not been abused - that what you can see is an honest representation of the underlying condition - they only need the attention of a caring owner.

But then there are boats which have had the misfortune to be owned by people with no respect for them. These people focus on “upgrades” in place of maintenance. Repairs, when made, are jury-rigged using components from the nearest hardware store. These boats may look very nice to a casual observer but the finish hides corruption underneath. And it’s always possible to tell. It’s obvious from the cheap fittings on the galley sink, or the tangle of wiring surrounding the flat-screen TV mounted in the master stateroom, that the owner did not value the boat for itself, as a thing with a purpose and a past and a future.

As I began caring for Perihelion, the boat I had moved aboard after selling Savona, I was finding that she was one of these sad vessels. Her previous owner had spent thousands of dollars adding wood paneling to the interior, and household furniture in the salon, and various other changes intended to make the boat into something more like a vacation cabin. But he had done nothing to care for her essential nature and purpose. Her decks had been left to deteriorate once water started to get into the wood, and were soft in places. Her engines, navigation gear, steering, and other systems were only barely functional. In my first outing aboard her. bringing her down from La Conner to Seattle, we encountered problems with the electrical system, running gear, and other issues. And much more was to come.

One incident illustrates Perihelion’s condition perfectly. The previous owner had installed a tub in the aft head. A tub! Any tub aboard a fifty foot boat is ludicrous but this one was something else entirely. It was made from half of a 55 gallon drum painted gold, with faux claw feet. It would have been a strange sight anywhere, but it could not have looked more out of place aboard a boat.

Just the existence of this contraption was a shouted warning to anyone who would pay attention that Perihelion had been abused. But the really frightening thing wasn’t apparent until I took it out. Removal of the tub was one of the first projects I tackled. It wasn’t difficult to do, as it was just screwed down to a plywood panel. After removing the fastenings I gave the tub a light pull and the unclamped hose popped easily off of the drain pipe, which was a standard household straight drain, not a proper hose barb designed to keep the hose securely in place.

As soon as I pulled the tub free water began gushing into the bilge. The drain for the tub was just above the waterline, but the through-hull fitting - the hole in the hull allowing water to drain overboard - was under water. Once the hose came loose from the drain, the water on the outside of the boat started to become water on the inside - a condition technically known as “sinking”. The only thing keeping Perihelion afloat had been a slip fit between the hose and the drain pipe. No hose clamps. No seacock. I quickly propped the hose up high enough to stop the leak, and went to find a cap for the through-hull.

The water coming in from the disconnected drain was a shock, but not a surprise. I knew that Perihelion would have problems that had not been found in the pre-purchase survey. And this is the part of the story where I admit to hubris. I was not a naive buyer. I had owned, lived aboard and cruised Savona for several years so I knew what a good boat was like. I had been around wooden boats for twenty years. And I had years of experience rebuilding cars and motorcycles so I had some understanding of the effort required for a restoration this size. I knew that Perihelion would take an enormous amount of work but I thought that I was up to the challenge.

Every boat is someone’s dream. As much as we may enjoy working on them, no boat would ever reach the water without the passion of a builder or an owner with a vision of themselves at the helm, sailing to some blue water paradise, motoring up a towering fjord or simply anchored in a sunny bay, enjoying a good book and a glass of lemonade. And that dream is what keeps us going when the work is stalled, the money gets short or we have to backtrack after some failure. It also makes it very hard to know when to quit.

After completing the immediate work that was needed based on the purchase survey I anticipated that I would cruise with Perihelion just as I had with Savona - making regular trips around Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands and farther north. And I did go out for some short day trips, . but one evening in April, only a few weeks after I had moved aboard full-time, I started up in preparation for a short evening cruise. When I checked the engines visually before leaving the dock I saw a white oil/water sludge coming from under the port Detroit 6-71 diesel engine, indicating that several mechanical things were going very wrong at once.

I quickly shut everything down and the next day I called Duncan Engine, a local Detroit Diesel repair shop, for advice. They sent a mechanic who examined both engines and presented me with a long list of problems, including a hole in the port reduction gear housing that was the source of the oil/water mixture.

I spent a couple of days considering what I should do about that list. It was essentially a prescription for a full mechanical rebuild of the running gear. While it might have been possible to make repairs and limp along with the engines in their less-than-optimum state, I wanted Perihelion to perform the way the factory intended so I decided to have everything done at once, no matter the cost.

This is a good place to pause for a digression on the marine survey, a standard inspection that any prudent buyer commissions before handing over the money. Perihelion was by far the most expensive purchase I had ever made and I wanted to make sure that I did it right. I had both a hull survey and a mechanical survey performed. Neither came back with any major recommendations or problems.

By then I had a few years of wooden boat ownership under my belt and a lifetime of experience on and around them so I thought I knew something about boats and surveys. With the benefit of hindsight I now know that a survey is just one tool in understanding the true condition of a boat, and that the surveyor can only report on what they are able to access. The rot in the trunk cabin, the mechanical issues we ran into on the run down form La Conner - those were indications that Perihelion had much bigger problems. I knew about some of those issues when I bought the boat but ignored the implications.

On May 10, 2001, Perihelion left Shilshole Marina under tow for an extended stay at Duncan Engine to completely rebuild both engines. I had now owned Perihelion for all of four months. One of those months had been spent in a shed having the aft deck and cabin rebuilt, and now she was about to have both engines removed for what I hoped would be a simple rebuild before I would get back to cruising and enjoying life aboard my new home.

This is the point where things started to go badly. I just didn’t know it yet.