New blood is flowing for an old class of boats. David Nutt is building two new Boothbay Harbor One Designs at his shop in Edgecomb, Maine. These lovely boats were designed by Geerd Hendel in 1937 for the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club. The Club wanted a family boat, stiff enough to stand up to a summer northwester, easy enough to handle for the learners, but fun for adults and fast enough to race. A number were built over the years by Norman Hodgdon, Ervin Jones, Sonny Hodgdon and Rice Brothers. To keep up with the times, a number of fiberglass One Designs were built, but this ended when the molds were lost in a fire 27 years ago. Over the years, some boats sat in barns unused and others were not raced and neglected. Seven or eight were still racing last summer.
The Boothbay Harbor One Design Association has been promoting the class, and the time is right to re-introduce the design. In the fall of 2006, David made agreements to build boats for two new customers. To be competitive, fairly, the new boats must be exactly the same shape and weight as the originals. Robert Stevens at Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin made patterns by computer on sheets of mylar from Hendel’s original lines to eliminate possible errors in lofting. This also assures a buyer, regardless of who builds the boat, that each will all be of precisely the same design. He worked with Nutt’s plans for construction to be sure the weights would be the same, even to specifying the number of coats of finish paint.
On January 4, 2007, Nutt started getting out and setting up the molds. The boats were built upside down without keel or frames. Floor timbers cut to match with the mold were dropped in and each temporarily tacked to its adjacent mold. Three bulkheads were set in the same way. The boat was then planked with half-inch Alaskan yellow cedar, each edge-glued to its neighbor and to floors and bulkheads. A layer of fiberglass saturated with epoxy resin was then stretched over the whole structure and the boat, complete with floors and bulkheads, was lifted off the molds. There is no interior wooden stem. Where the planks come together at the bow, they are glassed together inside and out.
Short decks fore and aft are of plywood on fir frames covered with fiberglass and epoxy. The keels are made separately of African mahogany, ballasted with 900 pounds of lead and bolted up through lead, wood, planking and floors. Finished, each boat will be 21′ over all with a beam of 5’6″ and draft of 3’6″.
One of the boats will have a wooden mast and boom, and the other will have aluminum spars, each carefully adjusted to the specified weights. Sails will be made by Maine Sailing Partners in Yarmouth, both boats with roller furling jibs. A new boat will cost little more than rebuilding a neglected one.
When these two new boats face the starting line this summer, each will be exactly the same shape and weight as specified for the original Boothbay Harbor One Designs.
The builder is as interesting as his boats. David Nutt summered in the Boothbay area as a child and began building boats in the region in 1972 after graduating from Middlebury with a major in Geography. In 1987 he established his shop on Southport. The business included routine storage, major refits, and the design and construction of the Southport 30, a Maine lobster boat designed and built primarily for the recreational market. Perhaps this interest in boats is inherited from his father, Capt. David Nutt, who was skipper of the research schooner Blue Dolfin based in Boothbay Harbor. He carried scientific expeditions to the coasts of Labrador and Greenland from 1947 to 1956.
From 2000 until 2005, David and his wife, Dr. Judy Sandick, and their four children sailed around the world in Danza, a 60′ steel ketch, describing their experiences in dispatches to The Boothbay Register. Upon their return, David worked for a year at the former Samples Shipyard, now known as The Boothbay Harbor Shipyard, on the construction of a replica of Jamestown, Virginia’s Discovery before returning to his habit of self-employment. David Nutt is a seaman and an imaginative, skillful and creative craftsman.
Roger F. Duncan is co-author of A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast, A Maritime History of Maine, Eastward, Dorothy Elizabeth and other books.