EP# 13 - Becoming One of the Hands

There’s a moment when a boat stops being just an object—and starts becoming something more.

 In this conversation, Tucker Piontek, lead instructor at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, reflects on how that shift happens. His path into the world of boats wasn’t direct. It moved through design, fabrication, and composites before a project on the schooner Adventuress changed how he saw the work—and his place in it.

What begins as a story about learning a trade becomes something deeper.

Tucker shares what it feels like to take apart and rebuild a historic vessel… to recognize the hands that came before you… and to realize that you are now one of them. He talks about the pride and weight of that work, and how it eventually led him to teaching—where the goal is not just to build boats, but to shape how people think. 

At its core, this episode explores what wooden boats give back.

Not just skills or craftsmanship, but presence, perspective, and a connection to something that carries forward through time—through hands, through care, and through shared experience.

Tucker Piontek is the lead instructor at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock, Washington. With a background in industrial design, fabrication, and composites, he brings a broad perspective to the craft—one that blends traditional skills with modern realities, and emphasizes problem-solving, curiosity, and the human side of making.

Find out more about the NW School of Wooden Boat Building:

https://nwswb.edu/about-us/

Beyond the Boat is an independent, listener-supported project.

Listener support helps preserve and share the stories of wooden boats, their caretakers, and the communities that surround them. Support sustains the listening, but it never steers the stories.

If you’d like to help keep the show afloat, you can contribute as a supporter or become a monthly member at:

www.buymeacoffee.com/beyondtheboat

There are no paywalls, no exclusive content, and no obligation to contribute. The stories will always remain free to listen to.

Special thanks to Todd Powell for ongoing monthly support, and to Peter McGraw, Charlie Syburg, and Jim & Margie Paynton for their generous contributions to the project.

Have feedback or know someone who should be on the show?  Email me at:

BTBoatPodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:13

There is a moment when a boat stops being an object and starts becoming something else. Not because of what it is, but because of what it's been through and the hands that have carried it forward. Today's conversation is about that shift. About what happens when you move from working on boats to realizing you're part of something larger. And how, somewhere along the way, the work stops being about the building and starts becoming about how we think, how we teach, and what we pass on. Welcome to Beyond the Boat. I'm Leroy Lewis. Today I'm joined by Tucker Pointec, lead instructor at the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building in Port Hadlock, Washington. Tucker's path into the world of boats wasn't direct. He came through design, fabrication, and composites before finding himself working on one of the most iconic schooners in the Pacific Northwest. But what's most interesting isn't just how he got there, it's what changed along the way. How working on historic vessels and later teaching others reshaped how he sees craftsmanship, learning, and what it really means to carry something forward. Before we get started, I want to take a moment and thank a couple listeners who have recently supported the show. Jim and Margie Payton, thank you. And Todd Powell, thank you as well. Your support helps keep these conversations going and allows me to continue sharing the stories behind the people and communities who keep wooden boats alive. If you've been enjoying the podcast and would like to support it, you can find link in the episode notes. Afternoon, Tucker. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 2:03

Thank you. Pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Tucker. One of the things that stood out to me in our earlier conversations is how boats seem to come in and out of your life. You were doing design, fabrication, filmmaking, all kinds of making. And then boats kept finding their way back. At some point, they stopped being just an interest and became a direction. I'd love to start at the beginning. How did boats first get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah. Well, I I have always, since I was even a little kid, was around boats. It was uh when I was younger, it was mostly just canoes and little fishing boats. Um grew up in the Willamette Valley right on a river that I I have memories when I was really young of watching canoes and kayaks do this annual race through our little river right in my backyard. In my later teenage years, I got into surfing and I uh was at Oregon State University in Corvallis for graphic design, which I thought was my calling. I kind of realized how big the world was and how all the different things that I could be doing. And um by sophomore year, I ended up leaving and I moved out to the northern Oregon coast, and I was living with an uncle, Uncle Rich. He had a whole big construction crew that built multi-million dollar beach houses out in Gearhart and Cannon Beach. And I joined his crew just to learn a trade, and so I was building houses with him and uh surfing a lot, and he had a boat, a Ericsson 35 MK2. He invited me to go do the Wednesday night beer can races, and that first race really just sunk its teeth in pretty deep. My life, for the most part, you know, pretty much changed. From that Wednesday afternoon, we were out in front of Warrenton, and it was a beautiful day. Spinnaker was up, freighter came up behind us, and when he passed us, uh a little squall hit us and the spinnaker exploded. We couldn't get it off quick enough, and we just screamed right towards the uh Young's River Bridge. And there's a big sandbar out there, and we hit the sandbar. We we ran aground on the sandbar. Not hard, but ran aground and spinnaker exploded in my you know, this is my first time sailing, and uh I was hooked. We did a bunch of racing and we would do the Oregon offshore race up the Oregon coast, up into Victoria, uh British Columbia, and we would come up and sail up here, up into the San Juans and cruise around, and that's actually when I learned about this school. And I thought, oh, that's a neat idea. But the idea that I would be working as a boat builder or anything, that was not in my mind at that point. I was just a sailor and a racer I guess got filed away in my brain somewhere. And one of the architects that we were building a house from suggested I look into industrial design. And as soon as I looked at that, that all made sense. Um I spent a lot of time making stuff with my hands and playing outdoors and you know being in a really creative headspace. So making stuff was just kind of natural to me. And so that really intrigued me. And uh so I I looked at a couple different schools and ended up at the Art Institute of Colorado.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

How did boats work their way back into your life?

SPEAKER_01 5:13

I met my wife there, and both of us were like, man, this state is amazing, but there's no ocean. So we were looking for a new adventure. We ended up back in Portland, Oregon. And uh at that point, boats still wasn't back in my life. Uh we were part of a sailing club in in Portland, so we did a lot of sailing. I uh at that point I started working for Leica, the stop motion animation film company. I was kind of the odd man out because the whole time I was there, I was looking at hotworld.com and constantly drawing boats. And my boss one day, Morgan Hay, he asked me, Why are you here? Why aren't you building boats or designing boats or sailing boats? Like right around that same time, my wife finished her, she was in grad school and she said, Hey, let's go have another adventure. Like, what about a school? Do you want to go do a cool program for a year or something? Pretty quickly, yeah, the the boat school popped back into my head from way back in the back of my mind. And so we came up for a tour and we loved Port Townsend. Laura had never been here before, so she was super stoked and she applied and landed as a job, and I uh I applied at the school, and everything just line we gotta we ended up with getting hooked up with a rental that looked over the Port Townsend Bay and looked at the cascades. Yeah, jumped both feet in to school here at the boat school. The school was split up into composite and then traditional. When I had to make the decision after the fall term of boat school as to whether to go into the composite, I chose the composite just because that's where I saw the future with the small boats. You know, like the fall term is all just like beginning woodworking skills, and the next nine months out of the after that, you know, you were working on boats. Probably by the spring is when I started realizing that maybe sticking around in Port Townsend, and so it made more sense to stay. Graduated on a Friday by Monday I was at work at Turnpoint Design doing really fun work, really cool, buried composite work, and then that was the beginning of my entry into the marine trades.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Okay. So you're kind of in the composite world. As I recall, you ended up drifting into the wood world at some point.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

To be honest, I was kind of tired of working in a Tyvek suit, to be just to put to put it bluntly, and looking for something new. And uh I called up Haven Boatworks and asked him, asked uh Blaze if you had any work coming up. I think that was in the fall. And he said, Yeah, we're pulling the adventurous out and we're gonna do a huge deck rebuild. And uh so I jumped at that. I just knew she was a beautiful, gorgeous schooner, which was, you know, a schooner was kind of a mystical thing to me. So I joined Haven, and on I believe it was on the first day of the job, she was hauled out, and we started building a huge shrink-wrapped shelter over her and demoing off her uh deck. So she's big, and seeing the the largest travel lift that the yard has pick her up out of the water and then bring her over to Haven and set her down on a bunch of blocks, and of course, the whole town comes out for something like that. So there's just a lot of energy in the air when a boat like that comes out of the water. So yeah, her that was a neat thing to see. But then pretty quickly, you know, as soon as the travel lift dropped her and got her in place, our job was to then erect a massive like five-layer tall scaffolding over top of her and then put a bunch of trusses up above and then cover the entire shelter and shrink wrap and build her winter shelter for the year. And I hadn't done much scaffolding work, so that was an interesting experience. You know, pretty hard labor pulling up scaffolding by rope and you're hovering up there and you're clipped in and you're the wind's blowing and and then building that huge structure, which you know, my years at Haven, we built a lot of those structures, and I think one of them at one point was the largest like temporary structure in the state or something like that. Oh wow. Yeah, so super cool to see those structures go up and to be part of the crew doing that. And then yeah, we were ripping her deck off, which was the capstone project of a like a 10-year refit. So she had had frames, a lot of her frames had been redone, a ton of planking, probably some backbone work, and then we were redoing the entire deck structure.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

What did it feel like when you were got on her deck finally? We had a lot of work to get done.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

So it was one of those jobs where you just immediately tore into her, and you know, you attack it with you know, sledges and skill, you know, we were just taking skill saws. I I'm sure people looked at it and kind of grimaced because we were just tearing her apart. There wasn't a lot of delicate, you know, we're gonna save this part or whatever. Like we were taking everything off. She was getting a brand new deck and new bulwarks and I think the top two planks, too. So we were taking everything off. And so it was chainsaws, circular saws, sledgehammers, tuvet bars, you know, sweating hard. It was in October, so it was cold. All of us were in t-shirts because we were just working so hard, right? And you're lifting, you know, doing it efficiently. So you're cutting out sections of the deck that's made of big, huge deck beams that are like probably, I if I remember correctly, they were like six by sixes, and then all the decking on top of them, you know, and and we're pushing them through the hole that we've cut out in the side of the shrink wrap shelter onto a massive ramp that ends up down into a dump truck. And we're just pushing all of that debris down into the you know, the dump trucks making runs to the dump several times a day, a lot of demo. And also trying not to get injured in the process, because it's really, you know, that's an that's an easy thing to fall or to drop something on someone else. So working hard and fast, but also trying to be really safe. So it felt very uh it felt old school, to be honest with you. It felt like we were, you know, it felt like what it would work feel to work on one of those big boats back in the day. It didn't feel like a modern thing.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Right. If you had a black and white camera, you wouldn't have known the year.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

You know, it's kind of funny. He took a picture at the very I think it was when I can now I can't remember if we took it when the boat was all decked, the houses weren't on, I know that. But I can't I think the I think the we had laid the deck and we took a picture of all of us on the deck and somebody filtered it with like a sepia toned photograph and it looked perfect. It was like that's what it should look like.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

1929.

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah, I think we gave that to our boss. I think we gave that to Blaze, I think. If I haven't, he'll hopefully he he'll let me know and I'll try and get him a copy. But yeah, it was it was a cool, it was a a really fun process. And you know, it there was also like these moments working on that job where I mean there was a lot of different moments. You know, you and I talked about earlier that cutting into that boat, you know, there's a lot of history there. She was built in um Booth Bay, Maine, which it was i ironically a place that we stayed at when we honeymooned, and so it you know, I was like, oh, I remember that place. And uh and then sailed down through the Panama Canal. I no, I can't remember if she came through the Panama Canal or whether she went around the horn, but and then the boat ended up as one of the San Francisco um pilot boats that would deliver the pilots out to the schooners and and uh lumber schooners down in San Francisco, I believe. She had a fire at one point during that time, which we found, you know, there were still parts of the boat that still had that charred surface on them, somewhere near the galley. And uh, you know, pulling parts out of the boat, and you see names etched into the wood and yeah, you can just tell, you know, it's like going into those old houses. There's just so many stories that are in the walls, which is really neat.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Your work guys are working hard, like you said, but you're still noticing all this.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Well yeah, for sure. You can't help it.

SPEAKER_00 13:09

Yeah. And how how did that touch you?

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, I mean it's it connects you to in a couple different ways, right? It connects you to the historic side of the trade, that you're now one of these m you know, many shipwrights that have helped keep this vessel alive for the last hundred and almost twenty years. And so there's a rot, you know, there's some camaraderie there that you can feel like your name can now also be etched into the walls of that boat. That you know, that's really cool, especially when they're that old. And, you know, to think that this thing has been, you know, was was built out of sweat and tears, with really not that many modern at least how n how we view it now, not that many modern technologies, for the most part hand built. And the fact that even now, even when we're doing it, we're for the most part still using the same tools, you know, like none of it was 3D printed, none of it was laser cut, it was still run through a joiner, run through a planer, run through a bandsaw. You know, we were hacking out all those Carlin joints for all the deck beams with big chisels and mallets. We weren't doing it, you know, there was a little bit of router work, but not much. So basically building her for the most part the same way she was built originally. So yeah, you definitely walk away from that feeling pretty good. You know, there's a lot of pride there. There's a lot of pride.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Did that change the way you saw old boats?

SPEAKER_01 14:33

I don't think it changed the way that I saw old wooden boats. I think what it changed was when you would view the job. It was just an added bonus. If the if it was a good job, right? Like there's some old wooden boats out there that are just so rotten and the owner doesn't have enough money, and it's just kind of a sad story, right? But if it's a good project, you're doing the hard work and you're tired, but you're also like there's this thing in the back of your head at the end of the day, when you stop and you stand around the burn bin with your colleagues and you look up at the boat, there's a definitely a portion of that that you can feel really good about it. And so it it's just a little nugget of extra joy that comes with every day working on those boats that have that much historical significance. Um, you know, the Carlisle II was one that I mentioned that was really special because of course it's the last remaining mosquito fleet vessel in the Puget Sound. Been delivering shipwrights from Port Orchard over to Bremerton to work in the Navy Yard forever. And uh we got to be the ones that fixed her all up and you know, helped her survive another 50 years or whatever. So it's stuff like that that definitely you're definitely not I I mean, personally, I was not thinking about that while I'm slamming a sledgehammer home, you know. I'm pretty focused at that point. But at the end of the day, every day, you know, you could take a breath and think about what you got done for the day and kind of gander at the boat and think about the historical significance of it. And it yeah, I mean it's a that's a pretty cool thing to be able to say you were a part of. And the other thing is like when you think of the number of people that are alive in like in like if I'm just gonna talk about you know, the people that are alive of my parents' generation and my generation, and maybe the generation younger than me in the entire world that have had the opportunity to work on these historic vessels, it's not that many people. Yeah. And uh to be able to make a living and to be a part of that community and a part of that story is pretty unique. Yeah. It's it makes you you know, it makes you at the end of the day maybe feel just a little bit luckier than the average person.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Yeah. Sounds like a lot of pride. Yeah. Totally. I mean that's a sense of accomplishment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Tangible, like tangible accomplishment. You know, you can see what you've done at the end of your eight-hour workday. You can feel it in your shoulders, and you can see it. And I think, especially in the modern era, there's a lot to be said for a job that gives you that.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

Yeah. How how long uh was that project?

SPEAKER_01 17:15

So we took her out, I believe, the very first week of October, and then she had, you know, she's got a cruising season, so she had to be back in the water probably like by June, I would imagine, or May. So yeah, like what is that, like eight months or something like that? Something.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

And what was it like when you launched her?

SPEAKER_01 17:31

Oh, pretty sweet, you know. It's always it's always a a really one the those big boat launches are pretty sweet. You know, usually the whole town comes out and the newspaper's there, and everybody's really stoked, and and uh the owners are are super excited, and everybody walks the boat down to the water while the while the lift puts her in and then they sail off. And uh you crack a beer and take a big sigh and slowly walk back to the boat yard and put your tools away and get ready for the one that shows up tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Yeah. Yeah. That sounds pretty exciting though. Yeah. I mean, with everybody there, it must be a lot of energy in the air.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

It's a lot of energy. And that's a huge I think, you know, that's a huge that's a really cool aspect of our town and Port Townsend, is that there's so many other people besides just the shipwrights that are interested in it. You know, I'm sure it's the exact same in Maine and New England and Connecticut when those big boats, brand new or historic, go into the water. There's a lot of pride and a lot of craftsmanship that everyone's very proud of and a tradition, a local tradition of sending these old or new vessels out for another season of sailing. And you know, there's a lot of people that fish, you know, there's a lot of people that worked on the water before they were shipwrights. So the being being uh, you know, a merchant marine or or a mare at least a maritime sailor or something, fisherman, there's a lot of overlap in the communities there with shipwrights, obviously. Easy, that's an easy association. So everybody's connected to the water, and so when something special like that goes in, there's yeah, like you said, it's there's a lot of energy, and it's it's really fun to feed off of that energy.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Beyond the boats themselves, what did working in the yard give you?

SPEAKER_01 19:11

It definitely felt like this is where I was supposed to be, but I also knew, you know, that it was gonna be it was gonna be a lot of hard work and it was gonna be hard on my body. You know, it might be smart to kind of think more longer term, like you know, it's like you don't really want to stay as the guy who's just constantly wrecks things out and and and planks, right? That's hard, hard work. You want to hopefully end up where you move up through the ranks and become a lead on a job, right? And you're because of your experience, you might then leave a little bit more of that heavy-handed work to the younger guys, younger ladies, and let them abuse their their their youth. And so, you know, that's just the where your head goes. And right around that same time, uh, I got offered an opportunity to come down here to the boat school. And it wasn't at that point, it was not a uh permanent job offer. It was, hey, why don't you come down and help us with this very specific project? Um, and then you can go back to the yard. Oh, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna go get to work on a brand new boat inside, in a warm shop, brand new wood, no rotten wood. And so I came down back to the boat school for that. Some things kind of fell apart, and that project basically had to be put on hold. And so then at that point, um, they had me doing drawings, which of course I had a lot of experience with technical drawing with my industrial design background for the lecture and trying to basically create a a collection of drawings that would be used for fur further, you know, curriculum down the line. And then they I got off and they said, you know, what if you work with at that point uh Sean Coman, who was the lead instructor and a good buddy of mine, and just kind of job shadow him while he teaches these students. Maybe you could end up being a teacher, and maybe this is a good way for you to test the waters and see if that's something you're interested in. And so I figured, well, what the heck, why not? I'd never really at that point I had never ever considered being a teacher. So I I didn't jump on that. I was like, eh, okay, I'll try it out. I'll I'll for a term or two, hang out with um with Sean and and and see how it goes. And uh so I did. It went a lot better than I thought, or than I than I thought it was gonna go. Um which was kind of a surprise to me. I had some friends who said, you know, that doesn't really surprise us because you've always been really well at explaining things. I was still kind of like, I don't know, it it's going okay. But as we kept going on and on throughout the year, it's it started making more sense. And that's when my son was born. And that was a pretty big event in my life and changed it changed my point of view on things quite a bit.

SPEAKER_00 21:57

It changed uh how you saw the students?

SPEAKER_01 21:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Did it?

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Yeah. When my son was born, and I once he gets a little bit older, and my son made it made made it very aware to me of just how like curious and intrigued a little human is coming into this world, my son made me a much more compassionate person. And so being a teacher thus became easier and a lot a lot more uh made a lot more sense. And that changed. And so now that my students that come through, whether they're 20 or they're 50, you know, to see them be curious about something and then to learn about it and then be good doing it, and to walk away like with like you and I were saying, with that tangible thing that they have accomplished, to see that confidence in them is a really awesome thing. And throughout the year, it's very easy to forget about that because we're so focused on like, okay, we want you to learn this skill, and we want you to learn this skill, and we gotta get this done on the boat, and we gotta get this done on the boat. But that at the end of the year, when we get when we do graduation, everybody's a lot more emotional, and the stories come out, and you all we all r remember why they're here in the first place, and the transformation that has happened from September to September. And so it gets it can get pretty emotional.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

Yeah. It must be very interesting to watch that transformation.

SPEAKER_01 23:21

Yeah, and it ramps up. It you know, there's it's not a linear thing. It's you know, we we do fall term and it which is a real crash course in then learning how to do all the hand skills, and that's a really steep learning curve. And then they go on Christmas break and they kind of come back, and that's usually when we start like getting more into the boats, and it takes a while to get those boats off the ground, and it really isn't until these last couple weeks of this winter term where you really start to see stuff starting to pick up, and then spring term, same thing, starts going faster and faster, and you see their skills getting quicker and quicker and better and better. And then by summer, you're telling them, okay, you gotta go do this, okay, and they're off and doing it. There's not a lot of hand holding and they're cruising, and then summer term is hopefully just spent refining and getting faster.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Oh, that sounds really good to watch.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Yeah, totally. And it's pretty cool to see a 19-year-old who has now found a passion and is just stoked on what their future can hold. And you can just see their abilities to problem solve. You can just you just know, like, man, when this kid's like 28 years old, like they're just gonna be a gunslinger. You know, like they're just gonna be able to be such a good job manager and problem solver and maker.

SPEAKER_00 24:39

You said when we met earlier that I thought was really important that the school may teach boat building, but what it's really teaching is how to think, yeah. How to solve problems. You just touched on that. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01 24:55

Yeah. So, you know, the the school was founded by Bob Protrow with the idea of it being a school of craftsmanship. It wasn't a school of boat building. Boats were just the way that Bob thought he just thought that boats were the best way to teach that. And that's still the same. You know, for all of us that teach here, we're all crazy about boats. And of course, we all think that they are the pinnacle of wooden um fabrication and and and being able to take a round thing that grows in nature in a cylinder, winding, twisting cylinder, and then break it down into rectangular parts and then reassemble it back into an organic shape like a boat hole. Now that's about as complicated as it gets. And so to do that, you really have to have a three-dimensional thinking mind. When you're on a team, being able to communicate in 3D with drawings and being able to explain yourself well and explain to others how to do make something or how it should look or how it's going to fit together. You know, we really curriculum is really heavy in teaching them all of the traditional ways that boats were put together. But the idea there is not so much because we think they need to know every step along the way of how to build a traditional boat. It more has to do with the fact that those boats were built that way for problem-solving reasons, considering the strength and density and rot-resistant characteristics of a certain wood species being needed to be considered for certain parts of the boat that make sense above the water line versus parts that don't make sense below the water line. All of that is thinking about material sciences, it's thinking about repairability, it's thinking about choosing the right thing for the right job, how you're gonna make it, all of these things that you're considering in the wood science, in the approach, all of that is to make you a better thinker. Now the boat school is we've combined the traditional and the contemporary because we just don't feel good about kicking a boat builder out without knowledge of composites. In the world we live in now, you have to know composites. And there's a bunch of composites that aren't even in the marine world. And we've had people go into aerospace after going to school here. It's more about just knowing about all the different um things that you need to consider when you're making something. And so we hope that the curriculum that we have not only prepares people for the marine trades, I mean, we know it does that, but really it's more about the way they're thinking and approaching the work. You know, time and time again I talk to the people who hire our students, and predominantly the guys that I'm talking to are local when I ask them, you know, if you're gonna hire my student, what are the most important things that they need to have under their belt? They're looking for I want somebody to show up with the soft skills like work ethic and showing up on time. Like those are the things that every employer, no matter what trade we're talking about, wants. But more importantly, they say, uh, you know, I want them to be problem solvers. I want them to have shop etiquette type thinking, team thinking, working on a team and working well on a team, being curious about how other processes and techniques are done to try and improve their own ability to have lots of different solutions to the same problem. So they're really looking for like curious thinkers. They're not looking for a technician that we're trying to create thinkers via wooden boat construction.

SPEAKER_00 28:35

Is there any classes that really help with that 3D thinking?

SPEAKER_01 28:39

We teach drafting and lofting. That's a big part of their fall term. We really live by the code of if you can draw it, you can build it. As the instructor, like what's your mark that you're gonna leave behind? And for me, it's the drawing part um and the 3D thinking part. And uh so the the lofting, so if for those of you that don't know what lofting is, you know, it's basically just drafting a boat in three different views the top view, the way a bird looks at it, the plan view, the profile view, which is looking at it from the side, like when you are standing at the dock looking at the boat, and then the body curve or cross-section view, if you will, at the boat with a chainsaw all the way through every five feet or whatever, and open her up and look at the cross section of the boat. We're gonna see the curve of the hull and we're gonna see all the interior. So you you build the boat in those three different views: the body curve, cross-section view, the profile view, and the plan view. And you draw them in full scale, all on top of each other, sharing the same grid so that it all makes sense, and you cross-check all of those different views with each other, and there's very few straight lines besides the grid. Everything is curved otherwise, and you do that to make the boat fair, and then you use those lines to create molds. So I pull mold curves off of that drawing and actually trace them onto wood to make the molds that I then cut out and assemble to wrap the wood around. So that process is long, it's painful, it's a really big push for people who haven't done anything like that. It's a really big challenge in teamwork because we have the students pair up on that. And yeah, it's painful. But you know, we tell them, you know, if it hurts, that's a good sign. That means you're learning. Right. Um, we've got to get them thinking three-dimensionally, and we have to get them to learn how to use a table saw and how to sharpen their chisels. So there's a lot to get done in fall term. And the three weeks of lofting is the best way we know how to get you to think in 3D in as quick amount of time as possible. Uh-huh. The best advice that some of our alumni have given is immediately after graduating, go loft another boat again to like kind of revisit that process all over again and really establish it. And Sean comen telling me that he had reached out to Eric Blake of Brooklyn Boatyard back in Maine. What are some things now that we're teaching that we definitely should always teach? And this is Eric who who is one of the leads there at Brooklyn Boat Yard, and they're a cold molding place. Their bread and butter is making beautiful, brand new, cold molded wooden yachts. Those boats are are all designed in AutoCAD. They're laser-cutting molds and things like out of temporary um fiberboard. So that's a real high-end design job. That's, you know, that's the a modern way of building boat. They're not lofting, but that teaches such a huge fundamental skill on how you think and three-dimensional that Eric was like, yeah, never stop teaching lofting. Never stop teaching it because it gives the shipwrights a brain, the boat builder a brain that thinks in that 3D view. And then we're just harping on that for the whole rest of the year, really pushing them to always like draw what you're gonna build. Or, you know, if I'm trying to explain something to them of how I want them to build a particular part of the boat, I'm drawing it over and over and over again and having them draw it as well if they can.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Do you ever feel that tension between working to preserve something that's older or preparing the students for the work that is more available on the market?

SPEAKER_01 32:10

There's no arguing. Like big timbers are just becoming harder and harder to find. And it's just gonna get harder and harder for us to build these big, huge traditional boats at the school and in the trade. There's a part of me that's like, yeah, that's a bummer. That resource is going away. But on the other hand, maybe it's more sustainable. The other reality is with composite woods, I don't have to buy a purple heart timber from Africa or South America. I don't need to grab these resources from another region and have them go through this ridiculous import-export. But if you're combining that with composites, you don't have to use nearly as much wood, and you can use more regionally sourced wood. Right. You know, on one hand, I think you I like the way that com the composite world has kind of is kind of taking over in that. Does it mean that we lose that historic side of the industry? For sure. There's no question there. And that's, you know, the day, the day that the last wooden fishing boat of the Pacific Northwest gets chainsawed up in the yard because she's too far rotten. That'll be a sad day, you know. And we see it all the time here in Port Townsend, you know, there's there's a you know, the boatyard of broken dreams, you know, there's there's just these old boats, and they nobody can really afford to put them back together, and and eventually, you know, the port has to just bring in a backhoe and bust them up, and it's a sad day. And there will be people who will will come in and like spray paint on the side of the boat, you know, please don't destroy. This is a part of history. It's yeah, like that's a hard, that's a hard decision and a hard thing to see. As a teacher, preparing people going into the industry and seeing that. I just try and be as honest as possible. If you're lucky, once in a while you'll get to work on some really cool projects like that. But the other reality is, you know, the c like I said, like the composite boats that are coming, the wood composite boats that are coming out of Brooklyn Boatyard and Lyman Morris, like they're gorgeous and just as beautiful. And yeah, there's they're cold molded, but that's you know, it's still wood. The how you know the cabins are all immaculate wooden joinery, you know, the deck beams can be composite or not, but it's still, you know, at the end of the day, it's still phenomenal craftsmanship. The quality of the work is still through the roof. It's just it's just that the wood got there a little differently.

SPEAKER_00 34:34

Right, right. One of the things I keep hearing from people is that old wood boats can feel strangely alive. Something shaped by many hands, many decisions over many years of care. You've used it too in our earlier discussions. What do you think gives the boat that feeling?

SPEAKER_01 34:53

I I think that we might, as humans, be able to look at something and have a little more connection to it when we know that it it got pushed through a human's hands. Like the only reason it has that shape is because someone picked it up and used their hand tools to make it into that shape versus it being like a car put together by a bunch of robots or made by a CNC cutter or it was injection molded or whatever, right? Like it's processes that don't have a whole lot of human-hand interaction versus it having a lot of things in it that have obviously been installed and made by a person's hands. Now, that being said, like if you think about an old fiberglass boat or even the new ones, it's kind of the still the same thing. Like a human's hands had to make this boat. You know, you go into a brand new Benito and they're very modern inside, but they don't have that, they don't have that feel. I know what you're getting at, and I don't yeah, I don't know what that is.

SPEAKER_00 35:53

There's a lot of different ways with cold molding to build a hull. But you get inside, there's a lot of different woods you can use, very traditional ways to everything's dovetailed, the drawer drawers are all dovetailed, it all fits. So I just I wonder if that will keep that feeling inside because there will be hours of hands working on the inside of the boats. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

It used to be in the 70s and stuff that even production line boats were doing a lot of like dovetail joinery and things like that for the cabinetry and building corner posts where where the cabin sides and bulkheads come to come together, which are really beautiful wood details. Production line boats these days aren't doing much of that. It's all pretty what I like. I mean, no offense to uh to IKEA, but it all kind of looks like it's IKEA inside. But for any of the custom boats out there, which I feel like the majority of the people that come out of our program, they're not normally going to like a production lined boatyard. They're going to boatyards that focus on a lot of repair or custom. And once you get into that custom world, the client uh wants what you've just described. And so I think that's always gonna be there. The shortages of wood are not, or the scarcity or or hard to find woods are not in that type of wood. We're talking about the big timbered stuff that's harder and harder to find. So I don't see that going away. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:22

When you when you look at the students who leave your program now, what do you most hope they carry forward? Not not just in the skill, but in the attitude or the way of seeing the world.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

Yeah, good question. I was always struck by the technology in the 1930s, maybe even maybe not even the nineteen, nineteen twenties, nineteen thirties, industrial revolution era, because there was not much digital electronical technology, right? And so everything was mechanical, which meant that everything had to be designed and made by a human. And look at what they were able to accomplish. Look at all of the complexities of machinery and architectural marvels that humans were able to do. That appreciation that I've always had for that um period of time in how the thinkers of that generation made all the things that they made. I hope that the students leaving here have some bit of that so that they understand the power of what their brains can achieve. My goal is for them is when they leave that they are a maker now. They know how things go together and how to think through assembling things or manufacturing things, and hopefully they're functional things that have a purpose and are also a joy to interact with, which I think is why boats draw so much of us in, because they not only are the most beautiful sculptural thing, but they have an incredible functional ability. And so if they if the students can leave with not with that understanding of of creating a thing of beauty and of function, and know that as a with a beautiful human mind, they are capable of designing and making those things, hopefully it makes their their life a more enjoyable experience.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

That's a good goal for them. So I'm curious, what do you think uh wooden boats have given you that you might not have found anywhere else?

SPEAKER_01 39:28

Well, so boats gave me the gift of having a moment where you you're not thinking about anything except being where you are at that moment on the boat. So a presence of mind, being present, not being distracted by all the things that we get distracted by. That's a pretty huge gift in the modern world. And that and so that's just coming from boats. I don't care if it's wood or fiberglass. That's just being out on the water on a boat. Add in the wood aspect of it, where if it's if it's a historical boat, now you've got all this historical story, this thing that's been this hundred-year-old boat that's been through so many different hands of shipwrights, of owners, of families. How many bottles of wine have been cracked open on that boat and laughter, right? The stories if the walls could talk. Add in that, and you know, it's a pretty as a boiled down thing, it's a gift of experience. And I feel very, what's the word, privileged to immerse myself in that world as someone who does it recreationally, but also as someone who does it for a career. It's a it's a privilege to be able to still have such a genuine human experience in the modern era.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

It's surprising to me how many people come to this school having never been sailing or they've only been on like a little aluminum skiff, and somewhere around in that year, they get out on a wooden boat, and then the next thing out of their words out of their mouth is, Oh, I just want to sail around the world. Here at the school, we kind of laugh, we call it boat therapy. Everybody we talk to just loves wooden boats, and of course, that's a skewed view, but it is true, I think it has less to do with the boat and more to do with the freedom that it signifies, in that you can just pull up anchor and go out and experience something, and it you don't have to spend an arm and a leg doing it. People have been messing around on boats forever since they were floating, and it's a easy way to put a smile on your face. And when you find a community like that where everybody is just so stoked to be out and able to just be out there on the water and enjoy each other and enjoy these vessels, and yeah, it hits somewhere deep. I don't know if it's just in us water people or whether you you can take somebody from Kansas, no offense, Kansas people, but if you can take someone who's never been on a boat, it'd be a good experiment. See how many non-boaty people can we take out and see if it gets them hooked or not. I think it'd be a pretty high beat.

SPEAKER_00 41:54

Well, that's what this podcast is about. Is it's it is beyond the boat. There's something there that we're just trying to give a voice to, and I think you did a great job.

SPEAKER_01 42:04

Well, it's my pleasure, Leroy.

SPEAKER_00 42:06

Well, Tucker, thank you so much for being part of the show today. I really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 42:11

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for listening to Beyond the Boat. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and share it with a friend so they can come aboard too. If you believe these voices matter and you want to help keep the show afloat, you can support an episode or set up a small monthly contribution via the Buy Me Coffee link in the episode description. If something in this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear from you. These stories grow stronger when they're shared. Send your comments and feedback to BTBPodcast at gmail.com. That's btboatpodcast at gmail.com. I'm Leroy Lewis. See you next time.