Building a 26' Gartside Gaff Cutter
Early Days of a Family’s Home Build Boat
After rowing, pregnant, 280-miles across France in Tramp the wooden rowing boat in 2022 with my partner, our next adventures are looking a little more ambitious.
This article was first published in Watercraft magazine, issue 161 September 2023, titled “The Lady After the Tramp”. It is reprinted here with kind permission of the editor and has been reformatted for online.
“It’s the first birth I’ve attended with boat plans on the dining table” said Helen, who supported us through the birth of our first baby, Ernest, at home in December 2022. The estimated due date for our baby boy was 11 December but ten days later there was still no sign of him. “Keep busy” people said but we’d finished everything on all the to-do lists and had no busy left to keep. It was time to start the boat.
Boats in and out of our lives
Boats had never been part of my life until I went to the island of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) to research environmental education for my Master degree. There I met Larry, a Micronesian navigator from Lamotrek island, who was carving a traditional Yapese sailing canoe and training a crew to sail 500 miles over the Mariana trench from Yap to Guam to participate in the Festival of Pacific Arts. Only then did I start to understand the transformative power of wooden boats, as community and knowledge building as well as a mode of transport. Four years later I realised my dream of being on the water in a Yapese sailing canoe when I was working at the College of Micronesia-FSM on Pohnpei island and our Outer Island students crewed the college canoe on a brief sail to celebrate Yap Day 2020.
Less than three weeks later, I was quarantining at home in Suffolk at the start of the first lockdown, having chosen to weather the pandemic with family. Leaving Micronesia — the Caroline Islands — so suddenly left so many things undone. I dreamed of returning there. By boat.
By contrast, boats have long been an important part of Ben’s life. The running theme in Ben’s boats are simplicity, beauty and purity. He learned to sail aged 10 on Lackford Lakes near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and landed his dream job with Spirit Yachts straight out of high school. There he learned his craft and completed his first self-build, Tramp, a 17'6 (5.3m) cold moulded rowing skiff, in 2012. By 2014, he had completed Today, a Dark Harbor 26' (7.9m) American knockabout gaffer. That same year, he collaborated with Lawrence Peckham using CNC water-jet-cut frames to construct a 16' (4.9m) 50hp powerboat. Ben’s philosophy is that the love and attention pretty boats attract ensures their longevity.
But when I met him in 2020, he’d spent the previous few years renovating a 15th century pub and building a house; he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been on the water. I set about changing that. “Can we go rowing?” I asked him. From rowing from Pin Mill on the Orwell river, to rowing across Scotland and then the length of France, our relationship has evolved with our adventures on the water.
In late 2021, in part exchange for the sale of Today we received Bougainville, a 14'6" (4.4m) François Vivier Ilur, perfect for me to learn to sail in. They say the longest journey starts with the smallest step and each hour we sailed on the Orwell my thoughts turned to those dreams still bubbling in my mind. “Can we sail to Micronesia?” I asked Ben. “You can’t come back the same way you came so we had better go around the world,” he told me. Our love of adventure makes us a great match!
To build or to buy?
I asked Ben to tell me all the things not to like about building your own boat. What better way to test dreams than with positive discouragement; if someone can be so easily dissuaded from taking on a challenge, clearly they would never be able to finish. I asked an illustrator to make the list into a birthday card for Ben.
The first thing not to like about building your own boat is building for the wrong reasons. We discussed what kind of yacht would be suitable for sailing around the world and concluded that it would be cheaper to buy a used proven boat than to build one. But with a baby on the way it was clear we wouldn’t be setting sail any time soon and buying just didn’t fit. What better reason for building a boat than to sail around the world as a family? Ambitious? Yes. Crazy? Definitely. But why limit your dreams? I’d rather dream too big and let reality do its work than set our sights too low.
Choosing the right design
Mindful of the risk of big dreams leading to big boats and even bigger problems, when considering designs we sought to strike a balance between a boat economical to keep yet big enough for serious cruising. In the initial excitement of getting going, Ben ordered Paul Gartside’s plans for a 29’ (8.8m) cutter but soon realised this was too big to build in a reasonable timeframe — and in an 18' (5.5m) wide workshop. Paul’s design 116 is 26' (7.9m) long but similar in layout and based on traditional designs with full keel, transom hung rudder and easy lines. We can build her ourselves with the intention of maintaining and fixing her when and where necessary.
Paul’s Design 116 has a beam of 8'9" (2.7m) — since increased on Design 116a – but the slimmer 116 made sense for us for the same reasons as the original client, workspace restriction. We expect that without her cabin top she will fit into our workshop and are somewhat confident that any dismantling of the workshop will be minimised to get the finished boat out.
Which two do you choose? Build it right, fast or cheap?
By choosing to build it right and build it cheap, we are obliged to build it slowly. We are planning to build as much as we can ourselves which means that we will know every intricacy of each element of the boat. Our build philosophy can be summed up as:
- If we can build it, we build it
- Buy used whenever we can: then fix and service.
- Do a little every day and one day we will launch a boat.
With inflation at the highest rate we have experienced in our lifetimes, it seems that wood will hold its value better than sterling, so we jumped right into the money pit and ordered 21 cubic feet (2m3) of yellow cedar which we will use for the deck and bulwarks. Instead of paying around the £5000 Ben was quoted for an aluminium mast and boom, we are planning to make our own in Douglas fir with bronze fittings for less than half the price and twice the adventure. For this, we ordered one cubic metre of Douglas fir which we will also use for planking and stem.
There can be no logical order when buying used items: if there is a bargain you have to buy now. Buying used parts not only saves us money but also teaches us how to fix and service every item. We trust that building this way will work in our favour when it comes to future maintenance.
Early days: drawing, machining, gluing and servicing
Another morning, another day, another dinner and still no sign of baby. Ben disappeared to the workshop next door with his new packet of six pencils. After a thorough clear out, he started lofting the boat on the chipboard of the workshop attic floor. What better way to pass the time until baby decided to arrive? I could barely make it up the stairs with my bump to see his progress.
Baby Ernest finally made his entrance to this world at 11:15pm on Christmas Eve, by which time most of the lofting was complete. I am proud that the birth certificate states his father’s occupation as boatbuilder.
After the initial twister of life as newborn parents calmed to a mere whirlwind, Ben started disappearing to the workshop for ‘an hour’. A Ben-hour can range from 45-minutes to over four. If I needed him back by a particular time, I asked him to set an alarm but machining timber renders the alarm inaudible.
Though dealing with the sticky mess of epoxy isn’t always enjoyable, it is exciting to see beautiful functional frames appear from the layers of seemingly meaningless laminates. Between tag-teaming with the baby, Ben could laminate up the components of one frame. Machining and glueing them together with knees and floors to form one complete frame was another evening’s work. One frame complete. Two frames complete. Three, four, five… By June, all 12 were ready, an elegant cathedral standing in the workshop.
In February, Ben noticed two round port holes for sale at the local auction house. He made the winning bid and walked away having paid £152. “They cost 700 quid each new” he boasted. We went to our first boat jumble soon after, where we found two more port holes to complete the set, together with an unused Taylor stove for £350.
I was excited about our first Brasso date to clean up the portholes but my enthusiasm quickly waned as they were too tarnished and pitted for elbow grease alone. Ben resorted to the disk sander followed with a polishing wheel. Aside from the one-off satisfaction of parts being new and shiny for a splitsecond before being used, components tarnish from roughly similar starting points whatever the condition we find them in. At our second boat jumble, we found four oval portholes cut out of a mahogany deckhouse, still set in the wood. The same sellers were offering a Fynspray brass lever galley pump for £50. Humming and hah-ing over the portholes and the beautiful pump, we agreed on £300 for six portholes and the tap thrown in for free.
I suggested Ben was developing a porthole problem. “A bronze and brass problem” he corrected me. We tested the galley pump in the baby bath and were disappointed that nothing happened. The cost of free things quickly rises. After hours of fiddling and bashing to persuade the pump to work, Ben succeeding in taking it apart. These older pumps have a leather diaphragm which easily dries out. Newer ones use nitrile rubber. I sent a photo to friends of the three tiny components which together comprise the servicing kit to play ‘guess how much this cost’? Nobody guessed as high as £50. Is the only way to build a bargain boat with free labour?
And baby makes three
Baby Ernest is now over six months old. We have a full set of laminated frames and a box of shiny, functioning bronze and brass bits — portholes, mushroom vents, stove, galley pump and winches. Ernest’s first adventure on the water was far from relaxing, screaming away in his lifejacket, unsure of the whole range of different sensory stimulations. We considered strapping Ernest in the car seat in the boat but I felt more comfortable wearing him on my chest in the sling. We’ve now made a few brief, gentle sails on the Orwell as a family, and when I was able to start reclaiming evenings, I signed up for informal sailing instruction with the Royal Harwich Yacht Club. Not only do each of these small adventures bring excitement to our daily lives, they also road-test our dreams.
We have just returned from our first family holiday where I had my first swim since giving birth, in Aabenraa Fjord. From Langeland, we watched boats and ships sail by, which inspired us to think that perhaps the Baltic might be our first major adventure once our boat is built.
