Forty-five years ago Peter Sellers was a young mathematics professor with a dream. Specifically, he wanted to build a boat with the lines of a Friendship sloop. The project would combine two of Peter’s favorite activities. As a youth, he loved the small boat sailing he had done during summers spent on the New Jersey shore. As a child he had also developed a love of woodworking, a skill nurtured by his father.
By 1970 Sellers was sufficiently established professionally to get started on his dream. With a wife and four young children, however, he realized that he was in for a long-term project. Sellers was nothing if not sanguine realizing that he would only be able to work on weekends and even then only during the winter, since he and his family spent their summers on Mt. Desert. He was, however, a patient man. “It would take as long as it had to take,” he observed recently.
He loved sailing and enjoyed woodworking, but Sellers admits he knew little about boatbuilding, especially constructing a craft as large as the one he had in mind. He was familiar with Howard Chapelle’s book, “American Small Sailing Craft,” which gave him the general principles to follow. “It became my Bible,” he said.
Sellers’ first step was to get in touch with Chapelle’s publisher, W.W. Norton & Co. He requested a set of plans Chapelle had made for a cruising boat based on the old gaff-rigged, Muscongus Bay workboats that plied the waters of Maine in the early 20th century. Sellers proceeded to scale the plans up approximately 40 percent (remember, he is a mathematics professor) for a sloop that would be 38 feet long by eleven and a half feet wide. This would just fit into the barn on his Bucks County farm, where he intended to build the hull. It took him the better part of a year to assemble the plans and building materials, and it was 1971 before actual construction could begin.
The initial challenge was to find a piece of white oak 25 feet long to serve as the keel. He found one at a nearby sawmill in Doylestown, but it wasn’t properly seasoned. His solution, literally, was to pickle it. “I packed it in rock salt and built a box around it. I left it in there for a year and you could see the water dripping out of the box.” This became the backbone of the boat and construction began. Following the guidelines in Chapelle’s book, Sellers then fashioned the ribs. “I made lots of small ones (called canoe framing) which were easier to steam and bend”. When the ribs were in place Sellers put African mahogany planks over the oak framework.
“Building a boat from scratch was a painstakingly slow process,” Sellers recalls. “There were lots of steps and I made lots of mistakes. Every day I had a new problem, but then I had lots of time.” For example, in 1975 he built a new transom after deciding that the original wasn’t a good fit. And then there was the day in February 1980 when he opened the barn door and found to his horror that most of his tools had been stolen.
At one point I asked Sellers what he used for fasteners and he told me he used bronze screws, which he countersunk and covered with wooden plugs. “My father-in-law told me he was ‘too old to help’ but he’d pay for the screws. There were literally thousands so this was a considerable expense.” The result, however, was a boat that is so tightly put together that it has never taken on water.
In the winter of 1982 the sloop was finally finished and appropriately named Lucy Bell in honor of Sellers’ wife, who had been his invaluable assistant throughout the project. Sellers had the hull hauled to the Brooklin Boat Yard, run by Joel White on Eggemoggin Reach, where the mast was stepped and the sails and rigging fitted. The sloop Lucy Bell was launched on June 21, 1983 to coincide with the Sellers’ 25th wedding anniversary. If you do the math (1983-2008) this is the Sellers’ 25th summer of cruising, and their 50th wedding anniversary.
Recently Peter showed me his notebooks. There are 13, one for each year that it took him to build the boat. Each notebook contains a log of what he did in a particular year from 1970-1983. Included are Sellers’ musings on his work, the challenges he faced, newspaper clippings, poems, letters and references to visits by friends, as well as thank-you letters from visiting schoolchildren. There are also numerous photos of the boat under construction, as well as pictures and postcards from family and friends. The result is a fascinating diary/scrapbook of the project from start to finish.
Peter and Lucy Bell Sellers have sailed the waters of Maine from Pemaquid to Pulpit Harbor and from Castine to Cutler, since 1983. In keeping with early Friendship sloops, Lucy Bell does not have a engine, thus the Sellers’ route depends on the wind and the tide. They may stop to see friends, although they follow no set schedule, as they seek to voyage free of commitments. Every afternoon around 3 p.m. they look around for a cove or harbor to spend the night before the wind dies down. The Sellers stopped to see us on Vinalhaven a few years ago. Who knows, perhaps we’ll see them again this summer?
Oh how I love to float on a gaff-rigged boat,
propelled by the wind and the tide.
If the breezes fail and I cannot sail,
I can scull or paddle or glide.
But I bar a motor whose unique odor
Is uncongenial to me,
And it’s not true sailing when one is trailing
An oily wake on the sea.
– Peter Sellers, 6/19/83