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Apprenticeshop grad continues boatbuilding tradition
Twenty-two year old Jacob Harvey has been building wooden boats ever since he was in high school, but his interest in these floating works of art goes back to childhood. Harvey's father Bob, who used to fish out of Spruce Head, owned a wooden lobster boat and occasionally built wooden boats himself. Around the age of six Harvey attended his first launching of a wooden boat built by his father.
When he was 15, Harvey began building boats after hearing James Gregg of the Apprenticeshop speak to Rockland students about joining a program. His first project was a Norwegian pram. Another was a quarter model of a Friendship Sloop that is still under construction. While still in high school, Harvey became a house carpenter, building houses in the summer when the weather was good and building boats inside in the colder months.
Altogether, he has completed six boats, most recently building an Adirondack Guide Boat along with fellow Appreticeshop students Liam Moody and Victor Petrowky. The Adirondack boat, which was launched on Rockland's Lake Chickawaukie during the last weekend of June, is made from sawn red spruce ribs with a white pine bottom board, quarter sawn cedar feather-edge lapstrake planking and cherry gunwales. It comes complete with two rowing positions, with seating caned by Harvey.
During a stint in Tupper Lake, N.Y., Harvey worked for a boat builder who specialized in Adirondack Guide boats, a light and fast lake boat built since the 1880s. He learned patience and accuracy through the very exacting construction techniques required to build this boat.
Henry Van Dyke, author of "Little Rivers, A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness" (1895) describes the fundamental nature of an Adirondack guide boat:
"A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that the skill of man has ever produced under the inspiration of the wilderness. It is a frail shell, so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders with ease, but so dexterously fashioned that it rides the heaviest waves like a duck, and slips through the water as if by magic."
For Harvey, wooden boat building is about "using the mind and body to create something beautiful and usable." he said.
The way Harvey describes the boat building process sounds like a game of chess: knowing how to use the right tools, problem solving and always planning and seeing a few steps ahead. Harvey graduated from the Apprenticeshop on June 14. He plans to continue woodworking and boat building and to go cruising in his 26&Mac226; double gaff cutter Plumbelly.
Seasoned boatbuilder, Dynamite Payson, talks one-on-one
Harold “Dynamite” Payson, 74, is a highly respected boat and ship model builder, the author of numerous books on building boats and models and a favorite instructor at the WoodenBoat School. He has lived his entire life on the Maine Coast in Owls Head and South Thomaston. Most days he can be found out back of his house in a small shop filled with tools, ship models and the like. Payson’s ship models will be on display during Rock ’02 in the Model Shipwrights Show at the Mariners Gallery & Store located at the Atlantic Challenge Foundation. He agreed to be interviewed one afternoon in July.
Susan Milisa Mustapich: Do you remember the first boat you ever built?
Dynamite Payson: I most definitely do remember the first full-size boat. I wanted a boat in the worst way, couldn’t afford one and there were none around to buy at the time in the 1930s, so I built one that sorta looked like a cement box. Nevertheless, I was very proud that I had built it. I hauled it down to the shore, waiting for the tide to come in and when I went down, I saw it was all smashed to hell. I found out my father did it in, fearing for my safety, that I’d go out and drown myself. But I had no intention of doing that. He stove it to pieces. So that was my first boat. He bought me an Iver Johnson bicycle as sort of an apology, compensation, whatever you want to call it. But it didn’t work. The boat building urge was still there. And after that I lobstered for 30 years and built boats in between.
SMM: Did you learn how to build wooden boats from other boat builders?
Dynamite: No. They were pretty closed mouthed and didn’t want to tell you anything. I used to watch them some, but I never asked them anything because they were pretty intent on what they were doing and they were not likely to stop and hobnob with you while they were working for the boss. I would go in and do an awful lot of looking, but they never told me anything. I just did it out of desperation, a will to do it, gotta do it, so you just do it. The lessons I learned, the mistakes I paid for out of my pocket, so I damn well can remember. When you pay for your own mistakes, you tend not to repeat them again. So that’s the way I learned, bit by bit by bit.
SMM: Did you have people working for you, or did you work for other boat builders?
Dynamite: I just built boats in a small way, by myself. One at a time. Did that for years, from the 1960s to 1990s. About 1990 was when I built my last full-size boat. I built hundreds of them. I built 117 of just one boat alone, the Gloucester Gull Dory for which I’m probably best known, plus many others — a lot of sail boats, power boats. In order to build something, I made a model first so I could get a three-dimensional look at what the full size boat was supposed to look like. Not always, but sometimes, depending on how complicated the boat looked.
SMM: Did you build fiberglass boats?
Dynamite: I built only one fiberglass boat, and that was enough. I’d never do another one.
SMM: Tell me about the Gloucester Gull Dory.
Dynamite: It’s very pretty, 15’ 6”. Very popular. I sent them all over the East Coast from here to Florida. Everybody liked them. They are pretty and they row excellent. It’s a gentleman’s dory, not related to the Gloucester fishing dories that were built for heavy hard use. Very light, built out of plywood, with only one frame in the middle of it.
SMM: Do people who buy your plans for the Gloucester Gull Dory manage to build the boats successfully?
Dynamite: I imagine the ones that aren’t successful are pretty quiet about it. That’d be my guess. But plenty of them get built. People are very happy with them. You don’t see many second-hand Gloucester Gull Dories around. People build them, or buy ‘em and keep ‘em.
SMM: Do you sell many of your ship models?
Dynamite: When I got into boat modeling, I went up to visit a friend of mine in Rockport, a Jay Hanna, who was a great modeler. And, he didn’t have any models around. And I thought, where’s all the models, I’d like to see one in the flesh, you know. Nothing there. He says, well I do have an album of boats I built. So I looked through the album, but it’s not like looking at the three-dimensional model. So I thought if I ever get making models, I’m going to keep some of these toys for myself. And that’s exactly what I did. I make a variety of them, and keep some and I sell some. And I build new ones every once in a while that I’ve never built before. That’s stimulating to the gray cells. Keep those from jelling, I hope.
SMM: Do you build your models to scale?
Dynamite: Definitely. They’re absolutely on the money. I cut up scale plans and use them as templates, the way a dressmaker uses patterns. Never have to take a ruler out of my pocket hardly to get the basic boat. Very simple, very straightforward and it works.
SMM: Is that all there is to it?
Dynamite: There’s more to it than that. In a marriage, the husband wants to buy a boat, and the woman thinks they don’t have that kind of money. One of the models in my book is for that kind of person, who finds himself with a self-doubt, or a doubting wife or a lack of money. It’s a small lobster boat that you can build from the ends of two by fours. If you’re too frugal to invest in a two by four to saw off, just go to a building site and scoop up a bunch that’s going to the dump. If you can’t build that, don’t bother trying anything else.
SMM: Can you tell me about this ship model on your workbench, the Sophia?
Dynamite: She was built in east Boston, a lighter, owned by the Snow Shipyard in the South End of Rockland. She did all kinds of things, went up and down the coast — carrying granite, building granite wharves, driving pilings, raising sunken boats, dredging. They had an extremely talented crew and skipper, John I. Snow, who could do anything that came along. Her heyday was in the 30’s during the Depression and after. Finally she was burned in the 60s when she lived past her useful life. Technology and time caught up with her I guess. She sure does have style. I have a lot of photos and newspaper pieces telling her stories. One of them was when a Snow tug was moving a house that was being towed on a big barge, and the Sophie went along, too. They were towing the house and it became foggy. A reporter later asked the skipper if anything eventful happened. He said, oh no, it was pretty routine. However, there was one incident, he said. The fog shut in and he heard a clang of bells and a horn and a boat reversing. What happened was that a yacht came out of the fog, and saw this house, and the guy thought he was right up on the beach. So he backed her down something fierce afraid he was going run into a house. Can you imagine running into a house in the middle of a fog? The skipper of the Sophie said he had no less than 40 fathoms of water under him. I have pictures and everything, it was a great big house.
For information about Dynamite Payson's books, boats and ship model plans, visit: http://www.instantboats.com.