Building a boat was an education that paid for itself
Issue 69 : Nov/Dec 2009
We hear a lot these days about student loans and young people working for years in humdrum jobs to clear the heavy personal debt needed to pay for a university education. I’ve heard of former students who’ve almost had to forgo buying iPod Nanos, plasma TVs, and magnesium rims for their Civics just to make ends meet. Some are even forced to continue eating Kraft dinners.
This is unacceptable and, for those young people leaving high school and thinking about attending a university, I offer an alternative option I myself took several years ago. Your parents will hit the roof when they hear it, but they’ve done that before, as when you came home with the Celtic tattoo and a lip ring.
So here goes: for the same amount of time and money you’ll spend on a college education, you can build yourself an incredibly beautiful and useful sailboat. I guarantee you’ll learn more about life, yourself, and the nature of stuff. The bigger the boat, the easier it is to build. Little boats need precision. Big boats just need energy.
Building a large sailboat by yourself has several advantages over going to university. It’ll take you some serious construction time . . . about as much as you’d spend deconstructing things and being terminally bored in an undergraduate program. And there’s a very positive side to the boatbuilding option: you’re putting together something beautiful, rather than taking apart something ugly.
Besides, after you finish, you can live on the boat and sail away in it. Then, after several adventures involving beautiful women, you can sell it for much more than you put into it. Try doing that with a diploma, unless of course it’s in psychiatry or advanced plumbing.
Tools for life
So forget about the skill set. What you really need is a Skilsaw. As far as learning about life and becoming a serious thinker goes, the boatbuilding experience is better here too. Everything you do physically when building a boat you must also do mentally. You’ll quickly learn to plan, reflect, and especially not to drill a 5-inch hole in the hull unless you’re damn sure it’s in the right place.
Let’s look at some comparisons. For one, the examinations are much tougher for the sailboat than for any academic work. The sea is a hard marker. A 30-foot wave tearing off your deck- house is more devastating than a note from your prof saying you should rework the essay on “Heretical Tendencies of Disparate Families Living Near Organized Places of Worship.”
There’s an artistic side to boatbuilding too. Some yacht designers are pure artists with an ability to match functionality with grace under pressure. Remember, a Stradivarius violin, looking so fragile and vulnerable, can be put through the rigors of Beethoven’s Force 12 storms with little damage. (Remember, too, that boats are like songs, so build one you can stand to have in your head a long, long time.)
Learn without effort
When you opt for the boatbuilding education, you’ll receive several free bonus courses. You won’t find free courses at the university, I assure you. With the boatbuilding bonus courses you’ll hardly feel you’re learning. Even before the sailboat is completed, you’ll get relatively painless lessons in geography and some nifty new vocabulary words like metacenter and phrases like ballast/displacement ratio.
You’ll also receive, absolutely free, a slightly more painful course in how to use a screwdriver while inverted in a space resembling a horizontal Johnny-on-the-Spot. You’ll learn about exotherms and how the potential explosive effect of too much catalyzed resin in the acetone bucket can quickly get you off the All-Bran and possibly off the boat. When you build a big boat, you actually get into it; you’re not just faking that you’re into it, as you might when writing an essay on Cardinal Newman’s Apologia.
And, of course, after you’ve finished the boat, the learning will go on. You’ll enjoy a free course in natural conflict resolution by virtue of the sailboat’s habitat at the interface between atmosphere and hydrosphere, boisterous personalities frequently at odds with one another and quite willing to tear you apart to prove a point.
So why go into debt for $50,000 learning things at university you’ll never use, like finding out why Hegel was such a dork or that Fidel Castro isn’t a hedge fund, when you can go into debt borrowing $50,000 to buy stuff in order to build a boat? It’s a no-brainer. You’ll sail the boat for years, hopefully with a wonderful partner you’ll meet who thinks you’re absolutely terrific, partially for having such a fine boat and maybe because you have calluses and perhaps a missing finger or two. Then you’ll sell the boat for at least $150,000. Trust me, I did this myself, except for the missing fingers.
Forty years ago, I opted to build a sailboat rather than go to college I still think it was a good move. A 36-year-old university degree has very little power to impress. But the boat — that today is sitting pretty in tiny Luperon Harbour in the Dominican Republic under Dutch registry — still turns heads. And, while I don’t own it anymore, I’m still learning from it. I’ve found that something you build yourself remains yours no matter where it goes.
Graham Watt is retired from the advertising industry. He took 10 years to build Canada Goose, an L. Francis Herreshoff Marco Polo schooner, in fiberglass from a male mold he built in 1969. Canada Goose set sail from Montreal for Murder Point, Nova Scotia, in 1978.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
