Will Lesh builds wooden sailboats by the thousand
Issue 49 : Jul/Aug 2006
To say Will Lesh is mad sailboats would be a gross understatement. Since childhood, his life has revolved around sailboats. He was commodore of the Princeton University Yacht Club. He sailed his home-built 24-footer across the Atlantic. He teaches people to sail boats. He dreams about boats. He designs boats. He teaches celestial navigation. He skippers charter boats. And above all, he builds boats.
When you ask him exactly how many he has built, wrinkles break out around his blue-gray eyes as he squinches up his face to count. “Well, certainly more than 55,000,” he hazards.
The vagueness of this tall, trim, bearded man with the ready smile is understandable. After 23 years of boatbuilding, it’s difficult to give a precise number. With the first 50,000 behind you, you tend to lose count.
The great majority of these sailboats have been miniatures — model wooden sailboats, pond-sailers lovingly crafted in his home workshop in the rolling foothills of the Cascade Mountains in the Pacific Northwest.
But bigger boats of all kinds surround the house that he and his wife, Cynthia, have built on their 28 acres of wooded farmland in the northern part of the State of Washington. These boats lie around in cradles. They’re propped up against walls. There are a canoe, a dinghy, a Laser. There’s Gimble, a 24-foot Cutlass class Midget Ocean Racing Club sloop that Will built of cedar veneers and sailed from the Chesapeake Bay to the Mediterranean in 1981.
And lurking in the background is the bare hull and decks of a sleek fiberglass 50-footer. “For our retirement,” he explains. “When we get around to it.”
In the meantime, Will keeps his San Juan 34, Fantasia, in a marina in Bellingham, a half-hour’s drive away. When he’s not conducting skippered charters on her or up to his eyes in orders for more model sailboats, he cruises in Fantasia among the San Juan Islands of Washington and the Gulf Islands of Canada with his well-seasoned crew: Cynthia and their two daughters, Robyn, 11, and Lainey, 8.
But his bread and butter come from the carefully stacked piles of Western red cedar that he turns into solid-hulled model sailboats. They’ve sold like hotcakes in 46 countries of the world, including Iceland, Thailand, and, ironically, China, the very country you’d expect to be exporting toy sailboats to America.
Will never gets tired of boats — designing them, building them, and sailing them. His enthusiasm for his business, Tippecanoe Boats, is palpable as he shows visitors his home-built workshop. Decades of experience have enabled him to hone his model-building skills into a production line with precise templates and improved
machinery.
“I can now build a boat in about one-tenth of the time it took me when I started out in Seattle 23 years ago,” he says.
It takes Will just minutes, for example, to produce a 12-inch model T12 hull. He runs his hands carefully over it at every stage, ostensibly feeling for imperfections, but actually loving the feel of the satin-smooth cedar and admiring the beautiful swirls and colors of the grain.
“It’s the only wood to use for solid hulls,” he insists. “Most woods are too heavy, so you can’t ballast the hull properly.”
The other thing that keeps him enthusiastic is the response of his customers. “They’re all the nicest people. It’s amazing. Model boats just seem to attract good people. All the time they send us email messages, letters, and pictures of their boats in action. People feel the connection back to the old days of sail,” he says. Many of those people are owners of regular-sized cruising sailboats who enjoy sailing the models in quiet anchorages.
The cat-rigged T12 cruiser and its bigger sisters, the sloop-rigged T15 racer, which has a 15-inch-long hull, and the T-Class racing sloop, which is 18 inches long, all feature deep narrow fin keels with heavy zinc bulbs at the bottom. The T-Class sloop is Will’s most popular line. More than 13,000 are sailing now and are likely to be for decades to come.
“They’re so simple,” he says, “almost indestructible. And they’re good to look at. People hang them on the walls of their homes when they’re not sailing them.”
Will makes the sails from brightly colored nylon spinnaker cloth, which does not stretch appreciably in small sizes. As for the standing rigging, he finds nylon fishing line to be ideal.
“You can sail the T-Class sloop out for more than a quarter of a mile from shore with 8-pound fishing line attached to the bow,” he says. “When you want her to come back you just give the line a tug. She comes about and sails back to you.”
Besides the simple solid-hulled boats, Will produces more complex 37-inch-long radio-controlled models that he builds of 1⁄8-inch mahogany plywood. He describes the T37 as “lighter, faster, and prettier” than fiberglass hulls and believes he’s the only manufacturer of wooden radio-controlled sailboats.
Like his other products, the T37 is available in kit form or fully finished, and it features innovations such as a novel Mylar hatchcover with a special double-sided tape that seals with a touch of a finger.
At Princeton, Will majored in English, but he was also proficient at math, science, and physics. Besides all that, he discovered that he was good with his hands. He built Gimble, his house, his woodshed, and the machines that shape, drill, and sand his boats from wooden blocks. He designed his website and even makes his own promotional videos.
Will jealously guards Tippecanoe’s reputation for quality. So much so that the company was awarded the coveted gold seal of the Parents’ Choice Foundation. Over the years, his business has grown mostly by word of mouth, greatly aided by his popular website.
“I came out West because it was so fresh and the opportunities so great,” he explains. And while he certainly put his arms around his star in the sky, he doesn’t want his business to grow too big. He controls its growth carefully so he’s able to enjoy a satisfying lifestyle with his family.
“If it were any bigger, we wouldn’t be able to get away as we’ve just done,” he says. “We’re just back from 44 days aboard Fantasia exploring the remote Broughton Islands in Canada. The wonderful thing is we can close down the business and take off with no problems. We just shut up and go.”
But right now Will has sailboats to build. “I’ve got orders for 30,” he says. “The UPS van will be here.” In his workshop he slips on earmuffs and safety glasses and starts right in. After all, what’s another 30 after you’ve already built more than 55,000?
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
