Here is a post I strongly urge you to read.

The Stades Last Stand.

One of the forces affecting what gets written here is my sense of the need for something to be written. If something is not being said, then let me take a stab at it. But when others write eloquently on a topic of importance, well, then it’s time to give them our attention and not simply clog the works with more verbiage.

That’s how I feel about this piece by my friend, Christian Ford.

So, please read it.

He has laid out our physical predicament as clearly as anyone has to date. If we are to move on, we need to absorb these facts and follow their repercussions where they take us.

More on this soon, I hope.

Unfortunately Hogsalt does not accept comments. If you would like to respond, feel free to do so here. I’ll see that he reads it.

I’m drawn to articulate a distinction between craft and technology. It is an enormous topic. That is part of the trouble with it, where to begin, or, if we’re past the beginning, where to continue….

It does seem that what is required is a process of disentanglement. Technology is a term that appears to cover everything we do when we interact with the world, especially if our actions are effected through some tool. This is not a useful distinction. When we speak of technology today no one is thinking about crows using sticks, or our ancestors knapping stone tools. Technology today is an all-pervasive attitude towards the world.

The term Craft can be an umbrella for a different attitude towards the world. As with Technology, the common definitions of Craft aren’t that useful. They’re entangled with a history of resistance to the technological attitude, but that history, and our perceptions of it, are fraught with confusing assumptions. Similar troubles surround terms like anarchy and Luddite, for example. It is difficult to unravel this from the straw-men and projections that have accumulated over time, applied by the opposing, “winning” side.

As I’ve stated before, the crux of a distinction between these attitudes of craft and technology is how Craft is tied to a wresting of meaning and the maintenance of interconnectedness between all aspects of our situation as we confront existence. The Technological attitude rejects all this as unnecessary and an obstacle to achieving a single-minded maximization of a particular result, whether measured simply as efficiency, or as profit, or as the good – where what is good is not examined, simply accepted as received wisdom.

This is the point of distinction between the two, but how does this actually emerge in practice?

This is not so simple. To begin, the fact that we are embedded in a social system which takes the technological view as dogma means that it is impossible to carve out physical places in which to practice craft unencumbered. No park or reservation, or Bohemia, or even a walled-in ghetto will bring us into “clean air.”

We carry this prison within each of us. Our conditioning; the way we have been accustomed to think, to feel, to perceive the world, as well as the forms and types and habits of our actions; are bound by and continue to re-forge the chains of our prison.

There are two broad beliefs that hold us. We are encouraged to see life as never good-enough, always proceeding towards a “better state.” Alternately, we are also encouraged to believe that life is a vale of misery and that we need to be saved from it. These form another aspect of our entanglement.

Entangled without and within, we need to disentangle ourselves from these notions of “Progress” while recognizing that no effort is likely to “save us.”

The entire notion of salvation, that we can turn to some outside force or factor to remove us from our existential danger, is one of the founding illusions of our current technological religion. For all the superficial bluster between fundamentalists and those seeking the singularity, these are just two ends of a single polarity of viewpoint. Tied to each other in mutual projections and hatred of the mirrors they see in each other, they are unable to see the entire spectrum of possible ways to be, perceive and act, outside their present philosophies. The purpose of life is to live, not to await or scheme after “salvation.”

The way out of these nestled forms of imprisonment is tied to how we disentangle Craft from Technology. The core of the attitude of Craft, that it is a space in which we grapple with meaning in relation to necessity establishes an alternative to our prison.

Technology is a mechanism by which we hide from our fears of unknowing, afraid of the foundations of an uncertainty we have no choice but to face. This is its founding lie. If we embrace the technological attitude we find many willing accomplices to help us hide from our discomfort with uncertainty. This abdication produces all the rest of our difficulties. In the end, we are locked into the supremely efficient technology of ecocidal destruction, a suicide machine. A final, final solution.

Recognizing and registering this entanglement dissolves our compulsion to remain deluded by it. But even when we have “seen through” the trick, even when we can no longer view its machinations as anything but violence and destruction unleashed against us and all the world, we still cannot find or embrace any other way of being, simply by willing it so.

Here, Craft is a compendium of practices we can engage in that foster new ways of being, perceiving, acting.

Unlike Technology which insists that all we need to do is tie ourselves to some ideology and find our place within some hierarchy of coercion, Craft holds us to the discipline of direct engagement. We cannot honestly, sincerely engage in Craft while settling for comforting illusions to hide behind. Craft does not amass stockpiles of power to defend illusions against contact with reality, the way money and weapons and consensus do.

While all of this is a stab at establishing a perspective for what is involved in a practice of Craft, it also presents a stumbling block between our need and how we may enlist those most capable and attuned to this process. Those who have a living connection within our various Craft traditions, with elements of its practice, are unlikely to have the patience to sit through such intellectual circuses.

This is not through a lack of intelligence! On the contrary. These people are a reservoir of natural intelligence – intelligence directly applied to existence.

But, unless there is some connection made across this gulf, we are truly trapped. People involved day-to-day in Craft have an intuitive grasp of what is at stake, but they may lack the fulcrum needed to bring its full force into play. This conceptual framework is an aspect of that fulcrum.

My efforts have always been along the edges, at the boundary between worlds, between artistic and craft-based views. This means I’m not quite comfortable in either realm, but I hope it might make me a good ambassador between them. This is the role of this forum, to make connections, conceptual and metaphoric, as well as personal and concrete, between those who consider these questions and those who have the tools and the practices with which to do the work.

I envision a joining of these two pathways. Neither is sufficient on its own. To disentangle Craft from Technology we need to both understand what’s at stake and have the tools and experience to do the work.

Looking out across an unfrozen yet still icy-cold salt pond, a boat goes by. I’m reminded of times on the water in winter. Such times make it supremely clear what is always there when we leave dry land: the realization that this reflective, undulating surface we cross not only buoys us up, acts as the mode and reason for our being there, it also another kind of boundary. Unlike on a warm summer’s day, or in our times on land, where the fact of our mortality and the thinness of what maintains us on this side of that barrier is easy to forget, here it is always there, in the back of our minds, in the chill rising up from its surface. If we fall in, we are dead.

It’s counter intuitive that so many of us should seek our recreation and dearly sought pleasure in a place, and in a way, that holds us to such an intimacy with the surface of our mortality. I’m not sure how it helps, but many, if not all our forms of recreation do, in some way, put us at risk. Or, at least within contemplation of our fragile state. This holds as well for sitting on a couch reading or watching media – remember sitting kills! – as it is for mountain climbing or doing Jager-shots in Vegas.

I find myself often returning to the primacy of the boat as a vessel of transformation. In a recent conversation Christian Ford and I agreed that every contact we have with boat is telling. That in every possible relation to boat we are drawn to some form of connection with the interrelatedness of all aspects of what it means to be alive and how we might navigate the seas of life with nothing more than our inadequate perceptions and our propensity for illusions. Contact with boats; building them, sailing them, seeing them, even just thinking about them and discussing what they mean to us; all these contacts are compelling. They call us to acknowledge what we do not know and then to go on to act within a dynamic relationship between what we perceive and what is there. I keep coming back to the submariner’s creed.

Say not, “This is the Truth!” but “So it seems to me to be as I now see the things I think I see.”

So few things put us into this relationship with the world in a way that is so clear and at the same time so enjoyable and not without some reasonable expectation that such a confrontation with reality will not simply overwhelm us, kill us, sink us outright.

We seek recreation, to be created anew, in situations that bring us into connection with the fonts of our joy – instead of the contingency of what we perceive as what we must do – and a sense that what we are doing matters. It is paradoxical that while engaged in so-called necessary work we are so often alienated form any sense that what we are doing means anything, that it matters. The confusion resulting from the accumulation of conditioning that has brought us on this day to have to spend our time in this particular way – say filling out TPI Reports – traps us in a muddle of incoherence. Our engagement with boat, even the most preliminary musings in that direction, have an immediate effect on us. We are buoyed by the prospect. Without having to analyze it, we are aware that here we are alive. Here we confront life with meaning.

This is paradoxical, that something the work-a-day world insists is a silly and expensive distraction from what is “serious,” we find such a conduit and connection to our wellsprings; but so it is.

Meaning is carried by boats, just as they carry us. Meaning is transfixed within boat, just as it is – if we could see it – in life itself.

As challenging as it is to work on boats and so embody meaning into our lives, it is nigh impossible to just jump out of the day-to-day without any transition and work on our lives directly. Not only would this be exceedingly difficult, it holds an expectation that we should be able to “jump out of our skin at will.” Life, and its meaning, only exist within the forms we inhabit. Transition from being locked into the forms demanded by our conditioning, forms whose hold on us extend back beyond our first memories and which are embodied in all the institutions and structures of our lives, would be impossible without some thread to follow, to lead us to some other way of being.

We cannot learn to build boats by simply reading about it. We cannot do it by simply following directions. A Boat – a real boat, and yes there is a difference! – is the culmination of the attention and care brought to its formation by those involved. Building a boat is a practice, an interrogation of reality. We are confronted with the equivalent of a score, a recording of a series of intentions and suggestions onto paper. To this, we bring a gathering together of materials and the strength of our bodies and the sharpness of our tools. We also bring a growing realization that to fulfill the promise held before us in its design we need to coordinate these elements. We do so by harnessing all our past experiences of other boats, of tools, materials, and also of any situation in which what could be is not strictly trapped within the mechanical replication of some formulaic recipe. – Hint, this is a sign of the difference between a real boat and a simulation….

This amounts to a confrontation with the unknown. We face a transparent, translucent, reflecting, and undulating surface – akin to that surface of mortality that is the surface of the sea itself. This is the surface of our not knowing.

The building of a boat is the playing-out of a series of interlocking and intertwined mysteries. Around it all is that fog of perception alluded to by the submariner’s creed. At each point, from deciding on its form, through lofting, and on to the last detail of a boat’s construction; we face these, our only certainties:

I do not know.

I cannot be certain.

Whatever accuracy I may achieve is hard-won.

It is easily lost through the smallest lapse in my attention later.

By facing these constraints honestly, with sincerity – as if our life mattered – we find a way to be involved in the creation of a wonder! The result sings back at us in each day’s labors and will reside in each surviving remnant of that boat’s fabric until they have all worn away to dust, or there are no people left to see it. – Another hint re: real boats. They have a life span. They are brought forth. They live and then they return to the earth from which they came to feed new growth.

Building a boat is a tremendous responsibility. Not only in a risk-of-life-and-limb sort of way, like forging weapons or concentrating poisons; but it is a sobering responsibility in the way it carries, or fails to carry, our sense of meaning, the possibilities of what is possible, the way a poem, a song, a sculpture or a painting does.

I cannot think of another category of objects that has the potential and the scope to meet these responsibilities we reflect onto them. Or anything else which can so buoyantly transport us across the customary divides between “useful objects” and the products of art.

Most useful objects are poor at carrying their meaning well. Art objects remain in the realm of “uselessness.” This is not a disparagement. It is a recognition that when grappling with meaning so directly we would be overburdened to expect to also force upon the results some expected utility.

Somehow boats float across this divide with an effortless buoyancy. Just as they do, on a frigid winter’s day, carry us across the icy surface of the sea, reflecting back on us the surface of our mortality.

These aspects of the boat are intertwined and interwoven, as are all of its elements and avenues of meaning. In this way they are truly vessels of transformation and that transformation is of our very natures, of our selves, and how we see ourselves and the world.

This is quite a burden one might think! This is why we build them strong, with so much care. This is why we love them so. Why we do not see them as mere objects but some hybrid living thing.

We bear them at their launchings and they bear us on our journeys.

Difficult times.  I don’t have numbers, just impressions.  World wide most people struggle to eat, shelter or pay their bills.  The few with money and property live to prove their worth.  So, we’re trying to find something to eat, working to pay the bills, plotting to get richer, we think we are the salt of the earth, doing what we are supposed to do, following the program, right, whichever one.  Generalizations are never true, but you know the pressures you feel, the incentives you respond to, and the flavor of your dreams.  Maybe, but are they creative and constructive?

Boats.  I like rowing boats and sailing boats.  I like boats made from tree parts, plant materials and little metal fasteners.  I like these boats because they are renewable, of the earth, and, both in construction and use, remind me of knowledge and skills as old as humanity.  Use is the important part.  Not everybody likes boating, but not everybody likes gardening either, and both boats and gardens are important.

My father loved fishing, but seldom caught anything.  He was an expert bad fisherman.  He once fished with a friend all day when his friend caught 50 fish and he none.  They exchanged places and tackle, but it made no difference.  On the other hand he enjoyed just being there in the boat, on the water, sky overhead, fishing with his friend and the amazing funny outcome.  Sitting in a boat on a lake was one thing, otherwise motor boats always gave him sea sickness, small boats or big ships.  He enjoyed sailing, said he never was sea sick in a sailboat.  He never became a skilled sailor, he just liked being in the boat with whoever else was there, feeling the motion, the shared experience.

Boats for difficult times might be any boats but used in ways that make sense in a difficult time, or maybe the boat itself makes a difference.  High power motor boats, and sailboats with bedroom, kitchen and bath, are all over the boat shows, but hard to fit with a consciousness of present day indulgences.  Mining the earth’s resources today means fracking and mountaintop removal, with the price of fossil fuels and metals in the hands of large corporations, as is most food.  Considering costs morally and economically, I like boats affordable for the boater and the earth.

I understand the impetus to build with plywood and epoxy.  The cost of labor makes building the boat yourself important for anyone with limited money or credit, and needed tools and skills for plank on frame construction are unimaginable for many, so they get building and boating with kits, plans with full size patterns, and slab building with plywood sheets, epoxy joinery, often glass and resin covered.  On the other hand, the price of resins has gone up with the price of petroleum and plywood, so gains are the cost of labor, experience, and, the point after all, getting on the water.

Times change but much remains the same.  A hundred years ago and more, pleasure boating seemed the domain of the rich, but there was always a Corinthian and work-a-day presence.  Labor was cheap and boatbuilding techniques guarded secrets, but modest yachts were being built and promoted, and almost everyone in coastal and lake communities had a skiff, dory, sharpie or canoe.  In those years, world trade fed by colonial and industrial development brought contacts and knowledge as well as materials, some for the better, some for the worse.  In the way of boats, design and construction flourished, as populations grew and interest spread in boating of all kinds.  Some of this activity was frivolous and extravagant but much of it was beautiful and thoughtful, whether from widely known or little known builder. At the same time small boats cruised for pleasure along shore and off, sailboat racing grew in popularity, and  open boats of all kinds were built and used far and wide.  The functional beauty of boats from this era provide us with plenty of designs for dreaming, building and use in this difficult world.

Pick a design, lapstrake or carvel, sawn frame or bent, chined or round, Herreshoff or Watson, Alden or Strange, Swampscott dory or skiff; to build the boat you wallow in human history and wood shavings.  Skills of hand and eye, tools sharp as chipped obsidian, line and surface fair to eye and hand, measurements to numbers or not, the whole process fun and important as launching, floating, pushing off for the known and the unknown.

I spoke of plywood, but there are people with sawmills in most parts of the world where you can buy the rough green or air dry lumber you want for boat building.  You might get to know interesting people, and you need to learn about different trees and their wood, this is to step off the concrete and out of the supermarket for a look at the world that sustains us, the living breathing world.  When you find the timber needed, you will find yourself supporting other basic manufactories, screw cutters, nail stampers, cotton wicking suppliers and (believe it or not, if you have the good sense to apply liberally) linseed oil.  You might buy wire and learn to splice, using cast and machined thimbles, and loose eyes over hounds.  Or, you will look for a sweetly straight grained spruce plank and fashion oars, cutting blanks, rounding the looms but tapering them to oval running into the blade’s centerline rib that diminishes to a slightly flexible tip, the other end oval in both directions to fit the hand as the force of rowing shifts from the end through the middle to the inside, rolling across the hand, blade feathered on the return.

Whether I’m sitting at anchor, rowing through quartering swell, hand on tiller off voyaging for an hour or a month, lying in my berth, I want to see floors, timbers, rivets, knees where needed, standing knees, hanging knees, lodging knees, a proper ship of rolling bevels and complex curves, integrating structures with incredible strength given their individual weakness, but able to give and take in the seaway.  A well built wooden boat looks good from any angle at any stage of construction, one of the pleasures that comes with the process.  In use the same applies.

Can you find affordable mooring in our crowded world?  Tricky and in some places impossible, but anchoring works with an eye to the weather and the bottom.  Floating  brings a new perspective on the world.  The water reflects the sky and you move in between.  From shore the water heaves and splashes on the land, gulls ride the wind and water watching for what is thrown up in the exchange.  At sea, bird, wave and mariner pursue their course.  One remains conscious of set of sails, stroke of oar, or thrum of engine while watching the weather change, storm petrels flit along the waves, gannets circle and dive, a pair of fin back whales pass on important business, even a clear sky and oily sea for the details and changes that fill the world around the compass.  The rules of the road are different on the water, don’t collide with anything including a rocky shore.

These difficult times are all too real for the earth and it’s denizens.  World and personal financial crises, as well as political complications, have all too real effects, including ones ability to appreciate the life and universe of which we are part.  Some use boating for further aggressive encounters, mirroring much human life ashore, but we need not concern ourselves except to watch out and avoid collision as the rules prescribe.  For all warmed by Kenneth Grahame’s, “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats”, it is not getting away from the world but feeling well and truly part of it that makes time in the boat so worthwhile.  So much of our world engenders feeling a cog in a wheel or, worse, a broken discarded cog, we need time to see things apart.

Boats are important in difficult times.

Thad Danielson

After a long pause the Schooner Boat design has made it to another iteration. The hull is now 32′ and the lines have been revisited and calculations taken arriving at a loaded displacement of 15,000 pounds. The sail plan has come together along with the overall deck layout and house size and proportion.

At this point we’ve arrived at a distillation of what my long meditations on the New England Fishing Schooner brings to the potential of a small, sturdily built schooner boat. We have, essentially a compact version of a schooner from about 1880.

So far, this project has been a process of getting this concept down on paper. I’ve had this boat developing in my mind’s eye for decades. As an exploration of the forms of those larger vessels from a time when these boats were developing as part of a long living tradition the important thing this far has been to capture the essence implicit in their example while adapting it to the constraints of size and a difference of usage and expectation today.

This is most apparent in the boat’s size. In the nineteenth century this would have been a sloop, or some sort of shallop with a cat-ketch or cat-schooner sprit rig. It would have been considered too small to be a schooner. This is still an open question. How small can we go with a schooner and still have it viable?

One of the keys to answering this question is to weigh the trade-offs between the complication and expense of this complex rig with the advantages it might provide. This draft posits a boat with a generous light-air capability combined with the ability to snug down to shortened, yet still powerful, reduced sail for heavy weather. It does so without relying on high-tech gear and components that cannot be fabricated locally by boatbuilders, sailmakers, and blacksmiths.

This is an important consideration in this project. One of the most vital lessons in traditional boats is the combination of resilience and strength held within a simple, robust construction that can be supplied locally. The chain between the boat’s raw material and its ultimate usage is short and does not require extensive capitalization. It does require the maintenance of the elemental skills of woodworking, textiles, and the forging of metals. The boat is made possible by a community that contains these skilled crafters and in return it supports them by providing an outlet for their work.

Efficiency, keenly visible in the logic of sailboat racing, considers robustness to be a minor factor. The boat that holds together once the finish line has been crossed was too strong, therefore too heavy, and not efficient. There is some play in this demand, obviously a certain continuity, and not having to rescue every crew after every race, does enter into it! But still, robustness is not much valued.

Here it is given great priority. A boat represents an enormous investment in material and labor. It needs to be as robust as it can be. It also needs to be as self-sufficient as can be. These requirements combine to value the schooner rig.

In light air, this rig will fly a lot of sail. The boat will move in just about no air. But the sails are small. This is a trade-off. Larger sails are more efficient. But large sails require more sophisticated fabric and the mechanical advantages of winches and synthetic lines to keep their shape and to reduce weight aloft. Such sails have limited life-spans, even though the polymers they are made of will persist and disperse in a stubbornly toxic state down to the molecular level for a very long time. These sails can be of simple cloth. They do not require synthetic fiber lines or exotic hardware.

The divided rig also provides another form of resilience. The schooner’s two masts are two chances to retain a usable sail plan even after catastrophic conditions. The schooner foremast, especially, is very strong, well stayed, and can fly a variety of sail combinations even in a jury-rigged condition. If we are not relying on deus ex helicopter then this becomes an important factor.

In a schooner 100′ on deck the forces involved in the rig are tremendous. The boat’s size does give it some resilience in bad weather, but we are closer to the limits of the materials both to resist damage and to hold up over time. In a small schooner, those absolute limits are farther away. There is a significant redundancy, not only in having two masts, but in having them small and heavy enough to last. This goes for the hull as well. It was possible to build wooden-hulled ships hundreds of feet long, but these vessels were not long-lived. Not just because of rot, but because of the limits of the rigidity possible in such a structure. A material’s advantages just don’t scale beyond a certain point. At 32′ we are well within the sweet-spot of wood’s advantages.

This isn’t going to be an exhaustive analysis of the design. But before we go, here is a glimpse of the lines.

As with the rig, this form is not simply a scaling down of any particular ancestral schooner. Such scaling never works. Factors change with absolute size in different ways and nothing reduced by 60% or more would actually be workable. These lines are inspired by the schooners but arrived at to accommodate these scale changes and also to incorporate certain features and proportions I’ve found helpful in other boats I’ve designed.

We’ll get into the hull more in the next installment. For now, I’d like to leave you to contemplate this boat and consider how it is an homage to the schooners that inspired it, and how it is also a boat that would not have existed at that time. The tensions between those views are the space in which this design develops. Looking back to look forward, working to find ways to meet future needs by drawing on the lessons available to us from the closing days of a living craft tradition.

I don’t expect boats fifty years from now will look like this. But I do believe that the way to get to whatever might be possible a few decades ahead is best served by passing this way. To be able to continue to evolve, we, and our boats, will need to reconnect with viable traditions and reincorporate them into our lives.

Great news! Harold Burnham has won a fellowship! It’s great to have something touching on the theme of Boats for difficult times appearing on a national stage, even if relegated to the Style section…

“You couldn’t make a living at building boats and I haven’t yet, but to me it’s not really about making a living. It’s about preserving the craft and the culture.”

Lost in the cognitive dissonances surrounding Harold Burnham’s appearance in The Washington Post, and receiving a prestigious national honor, is the universal application of Harold’s straightforward, unassuming understanding of reality. At a time when only those deep within distraction can have any doubt that we are all increasingly unable to “make a living.” Harold declares that such a concern is besides the point!

“It’s about preserving the craft and the culture.”

It’s a folk tale premise. The “unlearned,” rough-hewn country boy/man delivers solid truths to the desperately sophisticated, wins awards and accolades for his stirring example. He discovers that his fame was only a flash in the pan and the narrative returns to business-as-usual.

That won’t happen to Harold. Oh, Washington will forget him by nightfall, but Harold won’t be there to discover that fame is fleeting or to see the next contestant meet his fifteen minutes. He will be back on his schooner, in the bosom of his friends, with his experience and skills intact, none the worse for his junket; he will have his Craft to sustain him.

My hope is that the real lesson of Harold’s example gets through the noise to resonate with people who might have simply stumbled upon his story.

Dana Story, ancestor to the Dana Story mentioned in the article, once said something to this effect,

“The Story family has been building boats for three hundred years.”

This back in the 1890s,

“We lost money on every boat. Made up for it on volume.”

It’s a context that changes how we read Harold’s confession of economic crime. Harold’s boatbuilding is simply outside the money economy because, as Dana Story told us, Essex boatbuilding was always outside the money economy. The real punchline of Story’s joke is that the continuation of the Craft and the culture was the point. This was what made the profession “sustainable.” The fact that Harold is still working and living this notion more than a century later is worth our attention because it’s becoming increasingly clear that the growing impossibility of “making a living” is mostly a euphemism for someone else “making a killing.”

The history of boatbuilding in Essex is bound to the depletion of the forests and of the fisheries. But not perhaps in the ways common wisdom would have us believe. Building wooden boats did not deforest the East. The schooners fishing the banks did not bring the sacred Cod to the brink of extinction. Making money did both.

All too often, “wealth” is the end result of creating impoverishment – of ecosystems and of human lives – and concentrating the extracted riches in the hands of the powerful. Dana Story’s work was “unsuccessful” in that regard. Instead of clear-cutting to burn wood to make lime for building cities, or launching enormous floating factories to plow the sea bottom for fish-sticks and fertilizer, they worked with a frugality of purpose and a sense that the quality of one’s work was an end in itself.

For a long time, it would have been hard to imagine living like Harold and not thinking him a fool, even if a holy one. But that time is fading, and with that comes the question of where the real foolishness lay. Harold’s simple and strong example shows us how he answered the question. The lessons he gleaned from his heritage of Craft leave him with a clarity of purpose and cheerful perseverance which shines forth as an example to us all.

Congratulations Harold!

And clear sailing!

Hayden was a sailor. Perhaps the quintessential American Twentieth Century sailor. He provided the model so many have aspired to. A creative spirit, he was wild and untamed. He did what he had to do to pay the bills and then ran off to sea every chance he got. He was easy to admire; strong, handsome, a warrior. He was the kind of “star” we could relate to. In our own fantasies we might have wished,

“If fame falls to me… Oh, to handle it like Sterling Hayden did!”

The dream he came to represent grew increasingly creaky over the years. From the 1960s to the 1980s the face of adventure sailing morphed from the likes of Sterling Hayden into Jimmy Buffett. The dream, like every other dream in this culture had been thoroughly co-opted. It became a “lifestyle.” It was a “brand” surrounded by other brands. One could buy it piecemeal or get it wholesale, a package deal with an endorsement from a rum company and franchise outlets everywhere that Romanticism had found an impression of the remote, the fantastic, the other.

We are in a hangover from this period. This is an important fact of these difficult times. Difficult times begin to put the recent – and not so recent – past into a new perspective. They challenge us to do more with less.

Doing more with less. This is a particular kind of challenge. It matters how we approach it. If we remain within the chaotic mash-up of assumptions and expectations we’ve been led to believe within a culture that looks at us the way a predator looks at its prey, then we push on, doubling-down, chasing “efficiencies,” and staying mired in a frustration that all of these efforts cannot touch.

What if we look at this challenge, doing more with less, as an opportunity to discover what matters and bend our efforts, modify our habits of desire, to bring the discovery and articulation of meaning into the center of our lives?

No matter how “cool” the icons of the Twentieth Century might have been, their lives were a chronicle of failure and despair. If we give it a little thought, it’s not at all surprising. Even someone with the courage and aplomb of a Sterling Hayden split his life into despised career and desired avocation. No matter how well we might handle each part, when every effort is split and broken, the whole does not cohere. Our efforts degrade into an insistence to impose our will on reality. We strive to conquer balance, when balance can only emerge from coherence. It cannot be manufactured out of fragments.

There’s an ambivalence at the heart of my relationship with yachting. On many levels it celebrates everything divisive and destructive within our culture of accumulation. But at the same time, yachting has sheltered great value and meaning right at the heart of its showroom-lit darkness. Without this haven for fundamental knowledge and a community of practice these avenues for wisdom would have disappeared from memory. This apparent contradiction is just one of many paradoxical situations we find ourselves in today.

We shy away from ambivalence. We forget that it provides access to paradox. It’s an open door, a refusal to accept that whatever seems broken will always remain that way. I find myself looking for a transition, for a way out of disintegration and imbalance. Boats are pivotal for me and I’m discovering they are for others, as well. I have a seasoned conviction of the value of boats. They are conduits of meaning. Their value to us so much more than mere vessels of escape.

We can benefit from examining the pitfalls of our expectations. We can wrinkle something important out of challenging the habits of mind we’ve inherited. We can learn from how these paths have closed and been co-opted.

No wonder the Jimmy Buffett craze sailed on a tequila sea! How else could we continue to believe there was anything left to find that way? Chasing manufactured dreams across barren seas on vessels designed to take advantage of us. The business of escape is a trap. Sterling Hayden recognized this. The day-job he longed to escape was at the heart of the escape industry! He strove to sail away from the veritable belly of the beast!

As “jobs” sink out from under us, we have no choice but to look elsewhere. There are other ways to build meaningful, integrated lives. Boats – totems we’ve been conditioned to see merely as vessels of escape – can reintroduce us to purposefulness. Tugging on our imaginations, they may carry us there. We are poised to unravel the paradox of “pleasure” boats leading us beyond “happiness” to the enduring satisfactions of an integrated life.

There will be more here soon on a specific project that might shed light on one notion of how this might look. In the meantime, let’s examine how we might integrate boats into life. In rejecting the worn-out expectation that boats only offer escape, we might find that they can truly be vessels of transformation.

The first step is to let go of the primacy-of-desire. We are accustomed to believe that what we wish for is more important than what is essential. The prison of false security is barred by our insistence to follow ill-considered desires. Bending to meet this challenge requires discipline. The glimmers of value and hints at meaning we catch in glimpses in our every interaction with our boats, brings us the courage to adapt how we might respond.

Let’s leave these hangovers of “Margarita-ville” behind! Let us strengthen our powers of imagination. Life is too valuable to surrender to hollow dreams of escape. The strength and character we admire in our boats is good for more than just “sailing away….”

So are we.

Thought it was time to update the progress on the Schooner Boat.

As you can see, length has been increased to 32′. Almost any boat can be improved by easing the lines just a little bit. Along with more length there is deeper draft, although in part that is a result of raising the load waterline.

The lines show the boat at close to fully loaded. Since the hold area is aft, under the quarter deck, and fixed weights are farther forward, the boat will trim up by the stern when light. This will bring the immersed transom out of the water making the boat easier to drive when less stiff.

At this point, it’s time to measure and calculate displacement, L.C.B., and Prismatic Coefficient before re-drawing the lines to adjust these parameters as they appear to need it. Another re-calculation and we should be ready to draw the lines a final time to bring the design together, fair and flowing.

Providence River Sloop, from Howard Chapelle’s Small Sailing Craft

John Cline’s recent comment in response to this post, has opened up a powerful pathway into a subject that’s been brewing within me for some time. I am struck by how far we’ve come from meeting any measure of competency in almost anything and everything that is done today. What are the conditions required for us to carve out new and valid forms of competence?

To begin, here is John’s comment:

Strangely, you have skirted around an important precept. Craft really boils down to integrity The quality of the choice of materials is all about Integrity. The design process is all about Integrity. The building process is all about Integrity. Ownership and maintenance requires integrity. Seamanship requires integrity. Finally, it takes integrity to know when a boat has done enough, is tired ,un-seaworthy, and ready to be put out of it’s misery. If at any of these stages integrity is lost, boats founder and peoples lives are lost.

I wish I could say that I left the point of integrity hanging to provide an Ah Hah! moment for someone making a close reading of what I’ve been saying! The most I can say is that I’ve been looking at this question from a slightly different view, and I’ve been considering these issues as they relate to sincerity and seriousness, and I had not caught the connection with such a powerful term as integrity and all that it does to illuminate these questions. Looking at integrity alongside of sincerity and seriousness, we can use them all to reflect on each other and provide greater possibilities for insight into the broader questions at hand: How do we act in the world?

I bring competence and its lack, incompetence, into the mix because it seems to me that it is – or can be, if we define it inclusively – a measure of our capacities and abilities to be effective in the world. To do this we need to scrape off the residue of efficiency that clings to our conception of what it means to be effective. This has been our prime excuse for running after technological “answers” instead of seeking modes of Craft in which we can embody ourselves and integrate our lives into the wider world. Let me just reiterate, efficiency is a habit supported by a reductive tendency to isolate easily measurable quanta out of the total immersion of our every action within infinite complexity and then fixate on maximizing this quantitative quality at the expense of everything else. In this way it can be seen as a master sergeant seeing to it that each individual act of destructive mindlessness in our culture’s War on Everything is carried out as planned. We have been deeply conditioned to accept his commands as valid, but once we pull ourselves away from the noise and bustle, from the enforced urgency of his drill-ground, we can begin to see how pernicious efficiency’s demands are on any efforts we might make to, in a word, be competent.

For this to be acknowledged, we need to distinguish between the common assumption that competence is contained within one’s ability to follow technological recipes, and to see that competence has to do with all of what it takes to live within a vital world and to support life. Every justification for the former rests on a supreme act of denial of the actual terms and conditions of the latter. We are not competent when we “do what we are told,” or “what we’ve been taught.” We are competent when we can see for ourselves and when our actions find traction with all the aspects of life that are left out of “Horatio’s philosophy.”

In this way, competence is a measure of integrity, of sincerity, and of seriousness. Since we’ve lost track of what all those other words mean, it’s no surprise that we are confused about competence as well! I would like to get to integrity by way of these other two terms. Let’s begin with sincerity. We are embarrassed by the common understanding of sincerity. It has gotten lost in a mire of misplaced good-intentions and now, more often than not, simply means that we recognize that someone “means well” and is “trying as hard as they can.” To challenge this reading is to be attacked as uncaring. To accept it is to be labeled indulgent. All of this is besides the point.

We begin to discover sincerity when we find some way to look at our selves with some degree of self-compassion. This is not anything like indulgence. It is the space in which we stop looking at our selves, our organism, as something to be dominated and controlled, either by us or anyone else. This is a first inkling that we are not to be the means to anyone’s ends, least of all that drill sergeant’s! For many of us, this begins by a loosening of the grip of our internalized oppressor, built up out of a lifetime of immersion in a world that sees domination as the only way to get on.

What we discover about sincerity is that it has a certain weight. Its weight corresponds to how seriously we take our sincerity and we can also discover that this weight can be modulated so as to be just enough. Not too insubstantial, so as to leave us fluttering in the breeze. It can be found to be sufficient. We can recognize that it need not be so excessive as to crush us under a load that is beyond our capacity to carry it. In this balance, we find room to act. In this space, we can recognize that imposed constraints are a dangerous fiction and that if we remain burdened by our self-imposition of these impediments we will be unable to do the work necessary to see where our true effectiveness might lie: How it might be that we may integrate our actions with the nature of our situation as it is, and not as we would wish it to be.

All of this lies somewhere beyond what we tend to see as a barrier, one that we fear it is impossible to cross. It lies beyond optimism and pessimism. It has nothing to do with maintaining cherished illusions. It is only accessible once we can begin to see disillusionment as joyful as well as necessary. Our reward is the lifting of this great weight of futility we feel pressing down on us no matter how hard we try to cheer-lead our way out of our predicament. The release of this burden more than compensates for the true weight of sincerity we take on in its stead and, as a result, we are infused with a new vitality that is not hostage to the whims of fate or mood.

I’ve long recognized something in what we can glimpse looking at artifacts from the past that show us the kind of presence held within people who lived in truly vital cultures.  Their seriousness shines forth in a form we just do not see in our world. For us, to be serious is to be the opposite of frivolous or lighthearted. The clue to our error lies in the way this reading enforces dichotomy. We are pushed into choosing between two equally valid ways of being and renouncing the other. Seriousness, as we see in the eyes of an indigenous American gazing out at us from a faded daguerreotype, has nothing to do with this form of self-imposed pomposity. To be serious in this way is to recognize the weight of our sincerity, and to achieve that balance, while accepting that nothing can offer us the kind of guarantees we are so addicted to today. To be serious is simply to be present when we come right down to it. And, in this active presence, we can inhabit the realm of Craft and find ways to navigate a course along the intersection between meaning and contingency.

This thought always brings me back to Melville and Moby Dick. What a colossus that book is! After sinking into an nearly absolute obscurity during his lifetime, it has slowly ascended from those depths. I now recognize it as much more than a window on the world of the eighteen fifties. It is one of the most nuanced and sensitive, and far-reaching, portrayals of our human condition. It captures every part of the pattern of interwoven crises and catastrophes we now face. Here, I am drawn to his description of braiding a rope and the way this can be seen as a metaphor for all that we face in life.

Let’s use this as a way to connect integrity with competence. We are intimidated by the rough and tumble, the sheer hard work of life on Melville’s Pequod. This sense we have of our lack of sincerity and of seriousness is what drives us to all of the strategies we take on to reclassify life as some sort of a game. These range from the desperate nihilism of absolutist extremists of all stripes to the faux sophistication of the charlatan relativists carving out profitable niches somewhere along the “middle” of this reductivist polarity. We cannot imagine ourselves existing without the elaborate “support” of all of our technologies of ease and the illusions of salvation and security they entice us with. As a result, we cringe, and slink away, from any and all confrontation with the rough and tumble of life outside of our elaborately framed surrogate simulations, whether rock-climbing or war-fighting, or drug-taking, or church-going. These hide our incompetence from us, but at a great cost. In return we pledge allegiance to violence and death-dealing on an enormous scale, all going on at a rate that is now on the verge of destroying the very fabric of life on this planet.

The misery surrounding us, and breaking through our well defended illusions, is also the source of one advantage we have never had before. We are immersed in a moment of clarity that was inconceivable before now. This collision of universal-seeming communication and the ways in which our predicament’s crises are continually assaulting our abilities to ignore them, creates a situation in which we may avoid the traps and dead-ends that captured everyone who began to show any signs of awareness before now. Knowing which avenues are dead-ends and closed off from us is a tremendous advantage.

Attention is fluid. Once we can avoid pouring it down rat-holes we can allow it to find other avenues that were not visible to those who came before us simply because their views were too localized. The dead-ends they blundered into, too enticing. Their suffocating traps were too easy to rationalize as heroic sacrifice or knowing sophistication. Within this moment of clarity we can begin to recognize that we gain strength and capacity by looking squarely at what we face and by recognizing our own existing limitations. Instead of propping ourselves up by cheer-leading, rooting over our clever “advantages,” or beating ourselves down with excuses for continued paralysis, we may navigate out of the tight spots of our difficulties and work our way out of the extreme levels of our current incompetence. And, perhaps, we will in this way find less threatening seas and fair winds. If not, then at least we will have found a way in which to actually be alive, and act as witnesses to the marvels and wonders of this creation, clear of our self-induced blindness.

The root of integrity is, after all, the same as for integration. As much as we are lead to confuse integrity with obedience, integrity truly resides in us when we are immersed in the workings of our own integration. This integration has internal elements. It also takes place in how we see and respond to our world. Together, these bring us to integrity, just as John has pointed this out.

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“Yes, it’s possible, indeed urgently necessary, to act from listening and stillness, which is an intelligence beyond knowledge. Such action is the basis of freedom and right action. Freedom can then be defined as the state of being in which one does not act out of conditioning and programming. But how does that come about?”

“Ending the tyranny of conditioning and programming in the individual requires the awakening of insight through self-knowing and passive observation of the movement of thought/emotion.”

“Independence, freedom, and liberation are different things. One can be independent but not free, and relatively free but not liberated. Independence is distinct from freedom, but freedom and liberation are essentially moving in the same direction.”

“Free of conditioning and the self, the human being participates in the ongoing creation of consciousness of the universe, which is happening every moment. Human participation is necessary insofar as human consciousness is an anomaly in the universe, which only human beings can correct.”

“The quiet mind is free because it is not operating from conditioning. As such, it participates, creatively and imperfectly, in the unfolding of consciousness in the cosmos.”

This is taken from an essay by Martin Lefevre, someone Johnnie Moore has just recently introduced to me. I’ve highlighted parts of this passage that struck me as addressing the core of what it means to me to embark on a boat.

This may seem over-philosophical as a description of why I do what I can to set-off on boats and let go of the shore. You must recognize by now my mania for pondering depths and if you are still here, you’ve at least found a way to tolerate it!

I’ve long considered the moment of setting off as a profound transition. One is through preparing and one finally, simply is. Our senses reach out and are rewarded by cues and clues and a myriad of sensations that continually modulate and change in ways that are clearly synchronized with the state of where we are and what is happening even when we may not be able to take them all in or sort them all out. There is also a gentle – if we are open, or violent if we are not! – coinciding between what we do and what we get. Our willfulness is shown for what it is, and we are rewarded for folding it into a wider sort of attention.

On the water we are always on the lookout for the imminent and that which is veiled or hidden. A riffle on the water might be the only sign we get in time of a shoal ahead or of an adverse current. We are looking and we are also seeing, and we must deal with the differences between these two actions. Looking, we seek that which fits what we are holding onto, an intention, a landmark. Seeing, we are opening our vision – our hearing and even our sense of touch – to recognize what we haven’t expected but which is there and will affect us.

Martin’s essay touches on some of the depths beneath and shows us what might be there to see, even if we are not looking for it consciously. Touching on these points is both a commentary on our floating life and an example of the kind of entry into flow that underlies its value to us.

I know that I return to shore reluctantly. I’m always wondering how to carry those feelings, that sense of matter-of-fact engagement into the rest of life.

I can still see vividly the sand and pebbles receding even as they were magnified by the thickening lens of water the very first time I set-off from shore on a sail boat as a very young boy. I was even then accustomed to sand and water, having learned to walk on this beach and then to toddle off into the water. This was different. Floating above, transported, I was in a different realm altogether. The same place, right down to my having waded out and swum on this exact spot many times before; but now I was floating over, riding upon a surface that still intrigues me because it is so substantial yet so ephemeral at the same time. A boundary between the realms of air and water, even life and death if we aren’t careful. It separates them, but is always moving, transparent, translucent, reflective; all those things that also make up our “unfolding consciousness!”

Since then at least I’ve been fascinated by what can only be glimpsed and then only obliquely or in passing.

Floating, flowing; these are fundamental truths of life that are constantly threatened by our illusions of solidity and permanence ashore. Not so when we set-off, embarking on a boat….