How to Build a Boat by Jonathan Gornall

Author:Jonathan Gornall [Gornall, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

13

WONKY, BUT CLOSE ENOUGH

‘Measurements must be exact. Fits close. To tolerate less is fatal. Just as the surgeon demands complete asepsis in the operating room, so the competent boatbuilder strives for precise and errorless measurement and layout in the shop.’

– John Gardner, Building Classic Small Craft

11 MARCH 2017

Today is a big day. After a month of sawing, planing, chiselling, blundering, hacking, gluing and bleeding I have finally completed the all-important, six-part, three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that is the centreline of the boat. Keel, deadwood, hog, sternpost, stem, stem knee . . . of these six components, a month ago I’d have recognised the name and grasped the function of only one, the keel. Now I see, and understand them all, in my dreams.

I arrive at the shed and early-morning sunshine is pouring in through the twin windows behind the workbench, illuminating my creation with suitably dramatic backlighting. Standing in the field outside, there are now two horses peering in through the window as though word of the miracle unfolding in the shed has got around the farm. With all the trepidation of a first-time surgeon removing the bandages from a patient after a risky, experimental cosmetic procedure, I unfasten the last clamps and pull away the plastic anti-glue sheeting from under the keel.

And there it is, sitting on the workbench, a thing of beauty and not a little wonder, six parts become one. The horses, apparently unimpressed, snort and drift away. Remarkably, I have made something with my own hands – and, of course, with the help of my little friend, the bandsaw (and some forbearance from Fabian) – and now here it is, sitting on the workbench like a challenging work of art. All it needs is a label, an absurd description and a fancy price ticket and I could be in the running for an Arts Council grant.

For the first time, I’m able to step back for a moment from the minutiae of plans and the continuous, brow-furrowing worries. Like a palaeontologist who has spent months with brush and trowel, painstakingly shifting tons of dirt an ounce at a time in search of a dinosaur whose existence has until this moment been nothing more than an unlikely theory, I am suddenly confronted with the reward of the skeleton that changes everything.

She might lack all flesh and three-dimensional form, but what I am now looking at with frank pride is without doubt the profile of an emerging boat, an actual real boat and an elegant beauty in the making, to boot. Ten feet from stem to stern, standing on the workbench she looks larger, more imposing – altogether more serious, than I expected. And I, Jonathan Gornall, woodworking dunce extraordinaire, have created this. Take that, gratuitously sarcastic school woodwork teacher.

My self-congratulatory exuberance is interrupted by the sound of Fabian’s old car crunching to a halt outside the shed. He’s here to drop off some more timber and to cast an eye over my efforts so far. I look forward to

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