With doom, gloom, layoffs and float rope being the topics of conversation along the working waterfront this spring, it appears the students at Rockland’s boat-building Apprenticeshop are having an inordinate good time.
Instructors and students are weeks away from the launching of two identical 28-foot sail-training luggers. The boats meld together traditional lapstrake construction with carbon fiber spars, state-of-the-art sails and aerodynamic dagger boards. The whimsy has been in the design-as-you-go approach between owner, designer, instructors and apprentices.
Commissioned in October of 2008, the boats found their conceptual origins with Frank Blair, who is on the Board of Directors of the Atlantic Challenge Foundation, which oversees Apprenticeshop. Blair is a former pilot, lifelong sailor, and twenty-year instructor with the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.
While surfing along in the Southern Ocean during a two year circumnavigation aboard the schooner Maggie B, Blair dreamed of a boat whose crew would have the unique ability to quickly shift their rig to essentially every combination of masts and yards.
“I was highly interested in not getting broached in 45-foot seas,” says Blair. “I realized that there were a bunch of things I knew about sailboats and a lot of things that I didn’t know.”
Blair further explains, “In my training as a pilot I could fly a glider in the morning and an F-15 in the afternoon. I could try out different attributes and controls. People are drawn to different boats for very different reasons, their look or history. Every sailor knows about center pressure and center resistance, whether it is an Optimus pram or an America’s Cup yacht, but few understand how different boats work-schooner, ketch, sloop, let alone, a brig or a cutter.”
From this epiphany came the idea of two vessels of equal size and weight, using human ballast, but with four mast steps, lightweight carbon fiber spars and variable dagger board positions. The boats would carry calibration devises to record changes of speed and angle documenting both wind and underwater factors.
Blair’s vision captured the imagination of British naval architect Nigel Irens, designer of the 60-foot Maggie B, and renowned for trimaran designs that broke circumnavigation speed records in 1998 and again in a solo effort in 2005. Irens’ vessels, at the cutting edge of go-fast technology, are also noteworthy for their traditional elegance, simplicity, and efficiency. (See http://www.nigelirens.com/FRAMEracing.htm.)
The boats under construction at the Apprenticeshop are modeled after training vessels Irens designed for the Gordonstoun School in Scotland. The boats will each be equipped with 800 square feet of sail-from classic Marconi rigs to proper square sails. (Traditional luggers are small fishing or pleasure boats of Irish origin rigged with a lugsail.) Open boats without decking; they can be sailed by two, to as many as eight, crewmembers.
Apprenticeshop is incorporated under the umbrella of the Atlantic Challenge Foundation which hosts a bi-annual international rowing and sailing competition as well as a community-based youth and adult sailing program.
The twin double-enders will be used as part of an advanced sail-training course where, as Blair imagines, students could “study the history of sailing, from Norse long boats to Arabian feluccas to Maine-built coastal schooners, but then go out and test these theories shoulder-to-shoulder in Penobscot Bay.”
With four other smaller projects going on in various parts of the shop, the “Spar Wars” twins lie side by side on the ground floor, each with its own crew of one instructor and four apprentices. While the original design called for plywood construction, the Apprenticeshop boats exemplify the elegance of traditional construction. Woods include white oak and locust backbones, white cedar planking, white oak frames and inwales, and fir stringers. Without their rigging, ballast, or flotation, the boats are currently weighing in at 1,200 pounds.
According to instructor Kevin Carney, “It has been an exciting project by the fact that we did not have a concrete set of plans and that the idea came about in a relatively short amount of time. Frank and Nigel have welcomed everybody’s input. We work to a point where we don’t know how to go about the next step. The apprentices and I say ‘this is what we are thinking…’
Senior apprentice Josh Anderson adds, “It has been a very fun, but tricky project, trying to incorporate such things as foil-shaped dagger boards into a boat with traditional lines. It has been pretty challenging, we are all looking forward to sailing them and trying them out.”
Blair intends to offer the boats use to other schools as well as yacht and sail designers. “My biggest hope is to encourage experimentation, get out of the box. I like to think of these boats as the sailing Swiss Army Knife.”
The luggers are due to be launched along with the four other completed projects in the shop at a public waterfront celebration on June 19. Along with the much anticipated sea trials, it will also be graduation day for the senior apprentices.