Building a Wooden Sailboat: The Design, Build, and Launch of the Whimsey

By Barry Pomeroy

The tale of building my outrigged wooden sailboat is one of limitations imposed by materials, space, money and time, making decisions on the spot, solving problems created by mistakes, and the daily slog which was the building process. I follow this process from the initial idea, research through boat-building manuals, sketching out the design, purchase of the lumber, and completing the build of a five-thousand-dollar sailboat.
I began with an unimposing pile of lumber from a local sawmill, and gradually transformed that into a wooden representation of the plans I’d drawn. Designed with a stern of a caravel, the prow and beam of a Marshallese sailing canoe, and out-rigged like a South Pacific sailboat, there was no other boat like it. I had some unusual design parameters. I wanted to be able to beach her in an emergency, sail even if she were holed, and for her to be unsinkable. If the main hull became no longer viable, I designed the outrigger to be used as a boat in its own right. Not being able to swim, I’m fond of contingency plans.
In two-and-a-half months of daily labour I laid the keel, built the ribs and the frame, and planked in my round-bottomed main hull. I built the outrigger next, relying on plywood and stitch-and-glue to give me the shape I sought. When it came time to join the hulls, I built robust timbers, and by the time I had the mast tabernacle done and finished the mast, I had a better sense of what I’d built.
On launch, the Whimsey floated right at the waterline, proved to be both stable and seaworthy, and before long I was living aboard as I traveled around the inner passage between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: Feb 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781990314445

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it. Jeanette Winterson - Why be happy when you could be normal?

I think the urge to travel by water lies deep in the human psyche, and part of that dream involves building a boat. I don’t think I’m alone in that wish for the freedom implied by being able to cross the water and although I tried to make watercraft several times when I was young, that culminated in building a twenty-foot (6 metre) wooden sailboat in my sister’s garage in the spring of 2003.

When I was young, even the pond in the pasture was intriguing, and I spent many hours along its shore watching the dragonflies coming and going and waiting for frogs to poke out their inquisitive heads. Before too long I was trying to make rafts I could use on the pond. Even though it was no more than ten yards (9.14 metres) across, I dreamed of sailing above its depths. I’d seen what that was like when the winter first froze the surface. When I peered through the clear ice I could see caddis fly larva wandering on the bottom. In spring, I used large rafts of ice, but I wanted to be able to do that in summer when a spill was less serious.

When a wooden culvert was dismantled along the main road and dumped on the edge of the field, I laboriously carried parts of it to the pond and there assembled a raft about the size of a single bed. I fashioned a paddle, and although there was nowhere I could go, I had the pleasure of moving the craft across and around the pond. In an excess of enthusiasm, I dug a kind of harbour on one bank. The water in the harbour was no more than six inches (15 cm) deep, but the raft drew less than that. I improved the raft by adding boards to its deck, and before long I was searching for another project. I built a small platform in the middle of the pond on stilts, like a dock, and worked from there to make an island out of sods tied in bags.

The pond supplied me with hours of entertainment and ideas for projects, but I had already begun to dream of some way to travel on the nearby streams. I couldn’t afford a canoe, so I dreamed of making one from a folded sheet of aluminum supported by a wooden superstructure, although I wouldn’t have been able to afford the metal either. Perhaps that’s why, when a storm knocked down a large white spruce near the field, I immediately began to cut off the limbs and carve away at the hollow interior. In movies, I’d seen outrigged canoes made from a single log. I figured it would be merely a matter of removing wood to make my own. I spent long spring evenings with my hatchet cutting away at the log until I had a rough shape of a dugout, although it was too narrow for me to sit inside. I didn’t know, at that point, that the paddlers of small outriggers in the South Pacific sit above the deck, and the canoe acts as a float to keep them out of the waves. I thought, rather like a Canadian Indigenous design, that I needed to sit within, and the size of the hull took a lot of the wind from my sails. I abandoned that project finally, long before I figured out how to seal up the log’s two hollow ends.

In my wish for a water craft, I was full of ideas but found their execution impossible. I saw a kayak in the hardware store for over a thousand dollars, and I was struck by the vinyl exterior on a simple wooden frame. It imitated the Inuit umiak, although I didn’t know that at the time, and I strove to think of a material that I had access to which could cover a similar frame.

Without access to such material—although in retrospect a tarp would have worked—I was left without a boat and had to rely on going canoeing with friends whose parents had access to whimsical funding. Only when I was older could to return to the dream and find some way to get on the water.

The First Whimsey

The people shew great ingenuity and good workmanship in the building and framing their boats or Canoes. They are long and Narrow, and shaped very much like a New England Whale boat. James Cook – Captain Cook’s Journal During His First Voyage Round the World

When I finally bought a canoe of my own, I was working most of the week. I used it on the streams and nearby lakes and even tried to fashion an outrigger and sail for it. The outrigger proved to be less buoyant than I wished, and the proa-type sail did little to catch the soft winds I had on the one chance to test the boat. Without standing rigging, the mast I’d made from a piece of bannister bought at the hardware store bent from the load, and when the wind died as the sun descended, I unbolted the outrigger and connecting timbers and rolled up the sail.

A more significant experiment in turning a canoe into a sailboat had to wait until I was in western Canada the following summer. I bought a much more robust canoe—a seventeen-foot (5.18 metres) aluminum lake canoe which had wide baffles bent into the hull for heavy waves. I tested its built-in flotation by sinking it in the lake, and then used the canoe on small creeks. Mostly, I was interested in taking it on the ocean as a kind of experiment.

I’d gone overseas, and more recently had been driving around rural Canada and the United States, but I’d tired of those ways of traveling. I’d driven Canada’s many highways several times, culminating in at least fifty trips across the country. In my first trips across Canada I saw the rugged rocks of western Ontario, which were so different from the landscape in New Brunswick, and I was struck by the austerity of the prairie. The animals of the different landscapes were a delight the first time I saw them, but once I’d lived in the west, and spent a lot of time on both the prairie and in the mountains, I was starting to look for a new adventure. I knew every road, and could predict what I would find around the curve, but I knew almost nothing about being on the water. The canoe would be a cheap test of what it would be like to travel on the water in the inner passage between Vancouver Island and the mainland. I didn’t know what I would encounter, or whether I would like the experience, but I talked my girlfriend Sarah into the idea and we began to modify the canoe I’d bought.

Sarah and I found a thin spruce pole in a standing forest of similar trees, and located a chunk of cedar from a nearby clear-cut. With a mast and the outrigger, as well as the alder connecting branches would fit into the canoe for transport, we were soon sewing a small sail from a piece of tarp I used for camping and seeking out some waters to try the craft. We put it into the nearby Eaglet Lake and it seemed seaworthy enough, so we doubled up the hose clamps which held the mast to the thwart and outrigger supports to the outrigger and canoe, and we were ready to try the sea.

The last gesture was Sarah writing the name Whimsey on the front of the boat, as well as drawing on two eyes, in accordance with the superstition that a boat should be able to see where it was going. I didn’t know where I was going either, so it was truly a whimsical enterprise.

With the tide against us, we set out from Comox harbour on Vancouver Island. We were aiming for Denman Island, some twelve kilometres away. We’d left at the wrong time, however, and could barely paddle against the tidal race. There was no wind to put up our sail, and instead the water was dead calm. We paddled while I kept an eye on the shallow bottom where clam shells showed we were barely making headway. We paddled hard for Sandy Island—a small marine park off the northern tip of Denman Island, but even before we arrived we saw strange shapes in the water.

The water was dead still so it was easy to see the floating upturned shapes, and we misidentified them as mango peels, somehow pulled off entire, and floating in the water. We went closer and I tried to pluck one from the water. It was a clam shell. The water was so calm that the rising tide had picked up every shell which could float, and taken them out to sea with the current. We landed on the shore where shells were starting to return with the lowering tide and set up our tent.

I told Sarah that I’d learned enough already to want to build a boat of some sort. The canoe experiment was meant to test whether I would find myself thoroughly confused, and it worked. I’d seen something I couldn’t understand, and that was a good rationale for making a bigger craft in an attempt to learn more.

The next day we continued on to Tribune Bay on Hornby Island, another fifteen kilometres. Some of that proved to be good sailing, for the wind was rising as we came into harbour, and it was also delightful to see the seals on the shore as we came around the point at Helliwell Provincial Park. We didn’t cut so close to the seals that they would be disturbed, but they definitely noticed us on the water and I was treated again to what adventures might be mine if I built a boat.

We set up a tent on the beach in front of several rich mansions where we could keep an eye on the boat, and despite the area being a park, we had someone tell us that we needed to move on. I pointed to the storm brewing out in the Strait of Georgia and said, We came in on that wind, and we can’t leave until it drops. The homeowner seemed to understand that, and we spent the rest of the day on the island walking around. When we finally left a day later, we encountered five-foot (1.52 metres) waves. Flying before the wind with the sail pinned on the outrigger side we almost capsized at one point. The wind was still gusting, and when a particularly heavy gust hit the small sail it drove the outrigger under.

That was a worrying moment, but Sarah and I saw the outrigger dive for the depths and we both leaned heavily to one side. Then I moved the sail around to port and we ran before the wind. My only concern was keeping the wind behind us so we didn’t slew sideways and spill, and keeping an eye on the waves which crept ever closer to the gunwales. A few drops would come over on particularly big waves, but for the most part they merely eased greasily past the edge of the gunwale.

When we arrived at Qualicum over twelve kilometres away, we’d had enough for the short term. We’d run directly before the wind and I’d been on the paddle constantly to keep the canoe aiming for shore. The wind and waves had dropped by the time we got to shore, but I didn’t wait to enjoy it. I immediately caught a bus to Courtenay where I’d left the car.

When I drove back Sarah had moved the canoe along the shore by sailing it on a beam reach, and so came to a spot which would be easier to load. We packed up and tried our luck on lakes on the way back to Kelowna where we dropped off the canoe with my sister. I’d learned what I needed in order to return to my dream of sailing the ocean on my own boat.

The Boatyards of the Azores and Hawaii

Early on the morning of July 20 I saw Pico looming above the clouds on the starboard bow. Lower lands burst forth as the sun burned away the morning fog, and island after island came into view. As I approached nearer, cultivated fields appeared, and oh, how green the corn! Only those who have seen the Azores from the deck of a vessel realize the beauty of the mid-ocean picture. Joshua Slocum – Sailing Alone Around the World

I could have bought a cheap boat—possibly bought one which had been abandoned in the Azores where so many paper sailors become terrified and refuse to clamber back aboard—but I was more interested in building my own. I knew from the canoe trip that I needed to learn a lot. That was most of the reason I wanted to sail. I’d learned what I could on land, I told myself. I needed to experiment with an entirely different type of travel, although I’d also heard the warnings.

I’d heard rumours about the boatyards of the Azores and Hawaii. Some say that retirees who’d spent their working life dreaming of sailing would sit at their desks gazing a wooden model of a yacht until the fantasy became a certainty and their bank account was emptied into a hole. Then, these would-be sailors would set out, usually from the western or eastern coast of North America. They would gladly set to sea, waving as their friends saw them off from where the boat had sat in dock, and they would sail into the beautiful weather of their imagination.

Once at sea, the drudgery would set in, but they would courageously turn their soft hands to the task of coiling rope and