This is the 30th anniversary catalog of @clcboats. I have no relationship with the company but I’d like to take a moment to sing its praises. Back in 2014 a conversation with my son got me thinking and wondering how hard it would be to build a boat. 
2/ Or more specifically I started wondering how hard it would be for a 45 year old man with no experience boat building or woodworking or really building anything. I was about to find out. I starting researching how to do it. And I eventually decided to buy plans - essentially ..
3/ blueprints - from an outfit down in Maryland called @clcboats. They also sell kits where you get all the parts precut. But I decided just to go with plans. It was an amazingly rewarding experience. One thing it did was get me started with woodworking, which has since …
4/ become one of my great pleasures in life. I do hand tool woodworking, mainly chairs, cabinetry, miscellaneous furniture. That’s a somewhat different set of skills from what goes into what’s called “stitch and glue” boat making. But there’s a lot of overlap.
6/ First of all it’s just pretty amazing to build your own small boat by hand from scratch. It’s not no money but it’s not a crazy amount of money, especially if you just buy blueprints and purchase and cut the material yourself. And in terms of space basically …
7/ just a garage sized space is plenty. Part of the appeal for me was the absurdity of it. I had no experience at all. So it was an education about what you can do if you’re methodical, focused on the details and just don’t give up. All good life lessons generally.
8/ Here’s what I ended up with. That’s a younger version of my younger son, another of my projects.
9/ In any case it’s an immensely rewarding experience and if you put some time and focus into it I guarantee you you can get similar results. And you’ll learn an amazing amount. The catalog I showed at the top has all their stuff. There are plans and kits …
10/ for kayaks, paddle boards, rowboats, small sailboats, larger sailboats, small motorboats. Nothing too huge but if you want to think big you can build a sailboat for a handful of people. I had never sailed in my life. And really by any real standard I still haven’t.
11/ I’m quite adept at a single sail standing lug rig, which is what you see in the picture above. But if you put me on a sailboat sailboat with multiple sails and living quarters and someone started spouting jargon to me about pull this or hoisting that I’d have no idea …
12/ what they were talking about. But this was all I wanted to do. I went on vacation once to a place where there were hobie cat single sail catamaran things and I was like this is the most fun I’ve ever had. And it’s that experience I was trying to duplicate by building …
13/ this thing. In any case if this idea has every occurred to you I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a great company. And they were always available to answer my questions when I couldn’t make sense of something when I was trying to build this thing. It was a great experience.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
