Year of the Boat: Small Craft Advisories from a Builder's Garage by Lawrence Cheek

From the Publisher

"Wooden sailboats inspire lust. The good ones exhibit beautiful lines, classic proportions, efficient simplicity, and timeless craftsmanship. Author Lawrence Cheek decided he had to have one. But to fully embrace the wooden-boat ethos, he had to build his own - even though he was at best a novice sailor and the master of no woodworking skills, The Year of the Boat is the story of this adventure." "Cheek opted to build a 13 1/2-foot sailing dinghy. It would be a single-sail vessel of classic lines - seemingly a perfect first boat. Only later would he learn that the "classic" ended its nineteenth-century run because it was too difficult to build." So begins a most captivating expedition into the wilderness of doing it yourself - not only the challenges of making arcane boat parts and assembling them into a vessel that could actually venture out to sea, but also navigating the internal tides of self-doubt and discouragement. The project becomes an inquiry into values. How to strive for excellence without becoming mired in perfectionism? How to keep from building one's character defects into the project? The life lessons, it turns out, are larger than the boat. The Year of the Boat is the winning story of how one man built a boat in spite of himself.

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• Table of Contents

Table of Contents