February 15, 2005
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Amateur Boat Building
Oh! This guy cracks me up so bad!
December 15, 2000
A Few Small Boat Opinions
Advice For Amateur Boat Builders
By Robb Whiteexcerpts from http://www.messingaboutinboats.com/archives/mbissuedecember00.html
". . . there ain't no money in it. The nearest thing I can think of like building small boats for a living is writing poetry for a living. . . .
. . . Second, anybody who thinks that any person can build a boat as cheap as people in a factory can is a fool. . . .
. . . What I am getting at is that a boat that you build yourself is going to become very dear to you no matter what kind of a piece of junk it is and when it self-destructs, it will break your heart. Since you can't build a boat as cheap as a bunch of desperados with chopper guns sucking the juice from a pallet load of fifty five gallon drums, you might as well do what no factory can... build a boat that is far better than any manufactured boat ever was. . ..
. . . Here is what I would do if I were starting out right now. I would build one of those little strip planked Wee Lassies from a kit. You can worry about your dignity so much that you never do anything in your spare time but wash the car, cut the grass and participate in political discussions. Until you have wedged your ass tight into something like a Wee Lassie and paddled off up a little creek somewhere, you ain't really got the goody out of life. You can drag one of those little things through the bushes with a string and put it into a piece of water that has never floated a boat before. . . .
. . . After you get that done and learn all about little pieces of wood and epoxy and fiberglass, then you can hunt around for the plans for a little more boat. I'll tell you something for a fact though. The joy of boats is inversely proportional to their size. The dwindling starts when you get to where you can't carry it in one hand and the fishing pole in the other and keeps on getting worse from there until you get to the bottom-job and joker-valve stage.
There ain't no joy left when they get big enough to grow oysters on the bottom and have a plumbed in toilet and deck leaks and electrolysis and lightning struck electrical system and rusted out exhaust elbow and fuel in the bilge and osmosis blisters all over the bottom and mold on the mattress and mushrooms on the stem and leaks in the deck and frazzles in the running rigging and cracks in the swage and leaks in the deck and galled shaft in the stuffing box and penetration in the core and deterioration of the hoses and cormorant doo-doo on the teak and leaks in the deck and stoppages in the fuel system and worry in the the thru-the-hulls and leaks in the deck.
You know, having a big boat is kind of like what happened to... well.... it is a little attractive at first thought I guess, and there is probably a little thrill to it while it is still in the oval office stage, but you know what is going to happen... serious trouble. Best thing to do when you get thinking about something that will get you in a bad fix is to buy one of those big shiny magazines and just look at the pictures. . . ."
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