In the early 1960s, when fiberglass boat construction was rapidly catching on, wooden boatbuilding began its steep decline. But in Bay City, Michigan, the Gougeon brothers felt that wood was still a good material.
Meade, Joel and Jan Gougeon grew up sailing in the 1950s on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. Like their ancestors, the Gougeon boys would build boats on the city’s beach using wood, bronze Anchorfast nails and Weldwood glue. One of those boats was an Optimist pram that changed Jan’s life, set the brothers off on a professional boatbuilding path and led them to create a line of epoxy products that transformed boatbuilding.
In his later years, Meade, the firstborn, would say that Clark Mills, the designer of the Optimist pram, saved his baby brother from a life of misery. Jan was seven years younger than Meade and sickly from the day he was born. Small, cross-eyed and dyslexic, he was so skinny that kids called him “rack of bones,” which only added to his low self-esteem. But the Opti changed that. When their local yacht club got 30 Opti kits, the Meade boys built one in a week. And even though it was April and cold as hell, Jan, who was just 11, jumped into the pram and sailed it for the next 50 days. After that Jan never lost an Opti race and it was that experience that motivated him to become a professional boatbuilder.
Meade and Jan had used resorcinol glues but those required an inordinate amount of clamping pressure and lacked gap-filling properties.
