Re: Bio of Phil B [Micro vs. Chebacco] sharp vs. round
--- "jmbell1" <jmbell@m...> quoted:
'roundish' Chebacco is not a
really excellent boat, but
simply to call attention to PCB's
eccentric attitude about sharp-form
boats, such as Micro, which is another
really excellent boat.
> ...I don't intend to argue that the
> Bolger feels that he has had more experience
> with sharpie types than anybody alive, ...
> "It's a thing I can doso I
> do it," he says, which expresses not
> half his belief in sharp-form,
> shallow-draft boats that go together
> simply and go against the ancient
> orthodoxy of round sections as the
> only able form for boats with seakeeping
> ability or even comfort in a bay chop.
> ...
'roundish' Chebacco is not a
really excellent boat, but
simply to call attention to PCB's
eccentric attitude about sharp-form
boats, such as Micro, which is another
really excellent boat.
--- Inbolger@yahoogroups.com, Harry James <welshman@p...> wrote:
Boat Designer, Gloucester, Massachusetts
By Joseph Gribbens
Nautical Quarterly 21, Spring 1983
When you call Phil Bolger on the telephone, the voice that answers
says "Bolger." It used to ask a pointed "Yes?" It is a curt, Boston-
accented voice, and there is an intimation of "What do you want?" in
the single word it pronounces, a thing that makes the caller feel
that he's interrupted something. He has. What he's interrupted is a
thought process that's been going on for 50 years, with many such
interruptions but with probably no real disturbance of its flow or
its complexity.
Phil Bolger is thinking about boats, an intellectual and technical
exercise whose ideal is a purity the designer seems to prize above
all thingsa rightness, an exquisite equilibrium that extends not
only to what he calls "designs that are right of their kind," but to
peripheral bits of perfection: the way the lines go down on paper,
the way the parts of his recent small boats come neatly out of 4' x
8' sheets of plywood, the way the designer spends his workday, the
way he expresses himself in person and in print.
Bolger is precise. He is also funny, self-deprecating, easy to
challenge on dogma, free with conversation when he's in the mood for
it, and oddly anti-precise in his libertarian tolerance of new and
strange ideas. Conversations with Bolger, when he gets rolling, skip
sideways from yacht design to politics, ancient history, the space
program, sex, money, any number of things. And they are full of
quotes and footnotes from H.G. Wells, Alexander the Great, Kipling,
Mary Renault, W.C. Fields, any number of people. Although he works in
a field that he claims is "really not worth the time of really able
people," be gives it his time every workday and, one suspects, pretty
much every instant, awake or asleep with dreams of an ultimate
portable daysailer or some dead-simple outboard workboat. Bolger is
inspired by thoughts of boats that will be pure and perfect, but
unbotheredso he saysby boats that incorporate the "crude solutions"
he cheerfully admits in a lot of his own work. "Some boats are better
than others; but it's not important that they be better," he says in
a conversation about the uses to which various types are put.
He means this "any sort of boat will do" in the general sense that a
boat roughly suitable to its purpose can achieve its purpose, and in
the social sense that it's good for people to enjoy themselves on the
water whatever they're in, so long as they don't get drowned. But in
a very thoughtful article he wrote for this magazine's ninth issue,
Bolger described L. Francis Herreshoff's H-28 as "a deliberate
mediocrity" in concept, but a boat that "if built exactly as designed
down to the last detail (and the details are defined on sheet after
sheet of large-scale drawings). . moves from mediocrity to a
universal prototype, original essence of small cruising boat. . .
It's a haunting and frustrating achievement. Generations of young
designers and boatbuilders have tinkered with it, trying to make it
faster, or roomier, or something. The result is always a mediocrity
that looks mediocre. In context, different means spoiled. There's a
lot to be learned from studying this design; but to apply the lessons
you have to start over with a blank sheet."
In several remarks in his latest book for International Marine,
Bolger illuminates his unique, austere approach to shaping boats.
Burgundy, his sharpie variation of the L.F.H. Rozinante, is able to
be built by Brad Story for less than a third of the cost of a
Rozinante on the shop floor that looks like a Stradivarius. "`There's
a catch," writes Bolger. "Rozinante is one of the all-time
masterpieces of art. For visual satisfaction, three Burgundys don't
equal one Rozinante Notwithstanding Brad's Yankee outrage (at her
cost to build), I think the Rozinante is worth what she costs. But
for somebody who doesn't have the price of a Rubens original, there
may be some merit in a Playboy centerfold "(i.e., Bolger's lovely
Burgundy).
In discussing Wisp, a canoe-form 20' sloop built by a man who gave
her the best of materials and finish, and didn't mind building three
trunks for a pair of bilgeboards and an inboard rudder, Bolger
notes: "This is a goldplater, something I'm seldom immediately
comfortable with.. I tend to go off and try to produce something
cheap and expendable that will do the same job." And writing about
the angled, shield-shaped transom of Fancy a lovely 15' gaff sloop of
Muscongus Bay inspiration, Bolger discusses the uselessness of such a
stern and concludes: "I've often thought of offering a reward for a
good reason why pretty girls shouldn't chew gum. A legitimate excuse
for a stern of this kind would be welcome in the same way, as it
makes me uncomfortable to draw something degraded in its action by
its aesthetics."
There is a tension here between perfect but elite little boats like
Francis Herreshoff's masterpieces and the boats for everybody that
Bolger has designed with inspired inventiveness for decades. It is a
creative tension for the designer. Bolger has drawn his share of
goldplaters, and some of them boats that were exquisitely right, when
he or the client gave the work few restrictions of time, money or
materials. But yacht design is a game for Bolger, and limitations of
time, money and materials are rules in the game. It is a game he
enjoys playing, and the goal is to achieve boats that are beautiful,
well-behaved, safe in a variety of mischances, and a pleasure to be
in. They should also be simple in structure and rig, undemanding in
maintenance, and easy on their personnel. These final qualities
define Bolger's version of the game. He has applied himself to
bringing simplified and frequently cheap boats closer to his own
ideals of rightness for nearly 30 years, and more than a few of his
433 designs to date have come close. A very few, in the designer's
careful judgment, have been close to perfect. But they are different
boatsthe title of one of Bolger's four books for International
Marineand they are products of different mental processes from those
which produce designed-around-the-rule IOR boats, competent copies of
traditional Yankee workboats, or even never-before-seen multihulls
and performance powerboats.
Bolger's grandfather was an inventor, which may account for his
grandson's inventive fervor in terms of genes. Among other
influences, it probably does account for his freedom and freshness of
vision. Thomas Patrick Bolger came to Boston from Prince Edward
Island, an eager immigrant who "was a plumber who turned into an
inventor," according to the designer. Grandfather Bolger invented
things to be made out of steel that had previously been made out of
wood, and his principal invention -"the one that made money"was the
steel icebox. Others were a very efficient ash sifter for coal
furnaces and a plant box that irrigated itself. "He was an ingenious
contriver," says his grandson, choosing his words precisely, and he
was a man who had a safe full of granted patents when he died. Phil
Bolger's father, William A., was salesman and business agent for the
family company that sold the steel iceboxes "all over the place," in
Latin America and Bermuda as well as in the U.S.
"My mother's people were master fishermen and vessel owners on both
sides," says the designer, "but not in my time." The Cunningham
family of Cunningham & Thompson of Gloucester owned the celebrated
fishing schooners Arethusa and Ingomar, among scores of others, both
built early in this century by Tarr and James in Essex,
Massachusetts, from designs by Tom McManus.
William A. Bolger died suddenly in 1934, and it was a crisis for the
family, although Phil, then seven years old, doesn't recall hard
times. His mother, Ruth Cunningham Bolgerstill a vigorous woman at
89 who keeps the house in Gloucester that she helped design with her
husband and a perhaps overwhelmed architect, and still plants the
flower garden with its hedge of lilacscoped and carried on through
the Depression so that her younger son never noticed much
change. "She is a woman of strong character," says Bolger.
Phil's brother Bill, who he describes in contrast to himself as "a
competent type," took a hand in his upbringing, being a fatherly ten
years older, and gave the future yacht designer his first boat. "My
brother thought it would be interesting to build a boat out of
Masonite. . . It didn't work out at all well, so he gave it to me. He
had made a skate sail, which I took, and he taught me to make the
hardware for the sail and the boat in my grandfather's shop... It
didn't sail very well, but I can say that I had a boat with
leeboards, an unstayed mast and a wishbone boom 45 years ago."
Phil Bolger's "first real boat"although the Masonite contraption
would seem to be very real in terms of influencewas a 16' Chesapeake
catboat designed by Ralph Wiley and built by brother Bill, a legacy
to the younger brother when the older went off to war. "It was a very
exciting boat to sailbig rig and nose-heavy," Bolger recalls. It was
a boat that Bolger sailed until he followed his brother into the
Army. Phil Bolger is of that generation that had its adolescence
during World War II, and it is the generation that produced the
Hell's Angels and now-forgotten bouts of "chicken" on the highways as
games of courage to counter elder brethren who had experienced The
War. Bolger went to Bowdoin to study History, but he was soon seduced
by soldiering. "I called up a friend to see what he was going to do,"
Bolger remembers of that first summer after a year of college. "He
said he was going into the Army, and I made a snap decision to go
with ... . We were determined to be good soldiersinfantry soldiers
to do it right." Bolger and his friend were warned by the sergeant in
charge of the exams that if they didn't score well they would end up
up the infantry, so they "tried to figure out the wrong answers."
Part II
They didn't succeed. Bolger went to the combat engineers and his
friend went to field artillery. Bolger was in the 1st Cay, in the
Army of Occupation in Japan for a year, and he was, in his own
judgment, "extraordinarily incompetent," although a crack shot on the
rifle range.
"When I got out I went back to college on the G.I. Bill and wasted
three more years studying History," he says. He graduated cum laude
from Bowdoin, and he took with him not only laurels but a distaste
for what he indicts as "an academic establishment that is wrecking
American civilization." Bolger describes himself as "a card-carrying
Libertarian," and he feels that students who learn on their own, and
get good at something, should have the same access to professions as
students who have gone through the motions of acquiring an academic
ticket. Bolger soon sought a ticket in yacht design, a thing that,
true to his principles, seems to be granted on performance rather
than school credentials. When Bolger was back at Bowdoin, Lindsay
Lord published The Naval Architecture Planing Hulls, and Bolger wrote
him a letter that questioned some detail in the book. When he
graduated, he was invited up to Falmouth Foreside, Maine, to work as
a draftsman. Lindsay Lord was designing "very strikingspectacular
houses then," Bolger remembers. But it was a good apprenticeship in
boat design. "Doc is certainly a very brilliant man," says Bolger of
this versatile designer whose powerboats were very adventurous in the
1940s and 1950s. "No praise is too great for his generosity to me."
Bolger worked for Lindsay Lord for less than a year before Lord
recommended him to John Hacker in Detroit, a fast-boat wizard who was
busy with contracts for the U.S. Air Force. "It was, for me, a
gathering of confidence," Bolger says of his months with Lindsay
Lord, "and that was one of Doc's talents." With Hacker, Bolger needed
all the confidence he could get. The company that had contracted the
rescue boat for the Air Forcethe Huron-Eddy Corp. was what Bolger
describes as "a menagerie of boat designers." The boat was the
largest hull that Hacker had ever designed, a 90-footer, and it had
three Packard engines with vee drives and with the props under the
engines. Hacker had designed raceboats like this, and the project
should have been a piece of cake, but the old man seemed to be much
too responsible to the Air Force. "Jim Eddy, who was in charge of the
weights, would come in and tear his hair over the extra structure
that Hacker kept putting into it," Bolger remembers.
Bolger remembers a lot more illustrative things from his months with
Lindsay Lord and John Hacker, and from part-time work for Francis
Herreshoff as a draftsman when he came back to Gloucester from
Detroit in 1952, but the most significant things he took from these
short apprenticeships may have been attitudes rather than lessons in
structure or mathematics. Lord, Hacker and Herreshoff have all been
described as geniuses, and all three were independent men with
inventive turns of mind, eccentricities, and an indefinable ability
to work through a complex of requirements and possibilities to lines
on paper that represented more than a sequence of problems solved.
It would have been a stroke of luck for any student of yacht design
to have worked with one of these men; that Bolger worked with all
three is extraordinary. And it seems to have been luck"I went after
them," he says, "but it was luck that they held still for it." Yet
Bolger claims his brother, Bill, and boatbuilder Nicholas Montgomery
as his real mentors. "My brother brought me up to boat design, and
taught me to be critical," he says. Nicholas Montgomery, whose
boatyard in Gloucester is now run by his son and grandson, with Phil
Bolger as in-house designer, was "a thinker and an experimenter,"
Bolger says. Montgomery was an old school designer/boatbuilder who
worked with carved models, and Phil Bolger haunted his yard as a
boy. "I used to sit at his feet, and he would lecture me on boat
design," the designer says, smiling through his beard at the memory.
Bolger sent a design for a clean-lined 32' sportfisherman to Yachting
in the fall of 1951, and it was published in the January, 1952,
issue. This first published design elicited "a satisfying amount of
correspondence probably three letters," and it caused Bolger to set
up on his own in the house in Gloucester with stock designs
for "mostly powerboats, with a few rowboats." None of these early
designs showed obvious influence from Lord, Hacker or Herreshoff. The
powerboats were lean and angular; the rowing boatsamong them the
original of the Gloucester Gull rowing dorywere plywood versions of
dories and dory skiffs. They were original conceptions, and they were
typically simplified in line and structure.
In the middle to late `fifties, Bolger worked up some production
boats, two of which began to make his reputation and one of which
tore it down. Bolger freely admits mistakes and disappointments in
the boats he designs, and he does it in print. Mistakes are nature's
way of telling you you're still learning. He designed the first
Striker sportfisherman, and he learned some things about steel
construction from the builder. The first Striker was a 24-footer, and
Bolger, like Hacker with the Air Force boat, designed a complicated
frame structure to be covered with 14-gauge steel. The Nassau-Suffolk
Welding Company, which built the boat, used heavier plating for a
monococque structure and dispensed with the framing scheme except to
use it as a jig. The hull oilcanned in only a few places during its
shakedown run, and "the builder much improved the job," says Bolger.
Those first Strikers, with rakish, patrol-boat lines and clean planes
of steel and later aluminum, were very beautiful boats. "They didn't
sell very well because they didn't run very well," says the
designer, "but they looked wonderful."
Bolger had been designing sea-skiff types in the `fifties, too, and
in 1956-57 he designed a carvel-planked 31-footer for Egg Harbor that
was a thorough success. "My boast is that it was about two years
before any of them came on the used-boat market, and then they sold
for more than they had originally." After this, he says, "pride ran
before a fall." His friend Terry Kilborne came to him with a
scheme "to build boats in Japan where boats can be built cheap." The
result was the Out O'Gloucester 30, a "very radical design." It
produced what Bolger describes as "the worst day I ever had." When
launched, the first of these cruising/fishing powerboats "was 5
inches down in the stern, wouldn't steer, reached for the moon in
trim." Fortunately, Yachting came out that month with an article by
Ed Monk on shingles to correct trim problems in powerboats; we did
exactly what Monk recommended, and it worked."
Bolger designed powerboats for Striker until the mid-1960s, and at
the same time he produced a series of power "dories" and "sampans"
for Captain Jim Orrell's Texas Dory Boat Plans. These were dead-
simple flatiron/sharpie types in lengths from 15' to 45' for cheap
and simple home construction in plywood, and they were exceptionally
well-behaved boats despite their shoebox shapes. They were built all
over the worlda slick 15-footer as a family boatbuilding project by
the keeper of the Eddystone Light in St. Helens, Tasmania 110 boats
from 18' to 30' built by native fishermen on Wallis Island in New
Caledonia; hundreds more built by handy and penny-pinching customers
in the U.S. A man in Rhode Island wrote Captain Orrell about his
Bolger-designed 17' "Sampan Express:" "In rough water, it is
unbeatable, and consistently puts the stock boats to shame in both
speed and handling. In three-to-five-foot chop, while others are
hanging on and hoping, we continue on at ¼ throttle. Surfing down the
big ones is quite a thrill, and with the tremendous bow buoyancy no
need to worry about digging in.
Bolger's interest in simple boats made from developable materials
such as wide planks of pine or sheets of steel, aluminum or plywood
goes back to that Masonite boat with the kite sail, although it has
been influenced by such academic and/or purposeful exercises as
Howard Chapelle's researches into sharpies and the worldwide success
of the Texas Dories. Bolger feels that he has had more experience
with sharpie types than anybody alive, experience that has included
crewing a Star boat for years; owning sailing sharpies. dories and
flatiron skiffs for decades; and designing hundreds of plane-
sectioned hulls that gave good service. "It's a thing I can doso I
do it," he says, which expresses not half his belief in sharp-form,
shallow-draft boats that go together simply and go against the
ancient orthodoxy of round sections as the only able form for boats
with seakeeping ability or even comfort in a bay chop.
Part III
Sharp-form boats nave their own orthodoxy in New England dories in
Chesapeake skipjacks, and in skiffs, garveys and flatirons built for
a hundred years from Maine to Florida, where Commodore Ralph Munroe,
pal of Nat Herreshoff, was a partisan of the type. Howard I.
Chapelle's Smithsonian Bulletin 228 describes them nicely (Chapelle
was another partisan) and notes that: "The sharpie's rapid spread in
use can be accounted for in its low cost, light draft, speed,
handiness under sail, graceful appearance, and rather astonishing
seaworthiness ... There is a case on record in which a tonging
sharpie rescued the crew of a coasting schooner at Branford,
Connecticut, during a severe gale, after other boats had proven
unable to approach the wreck."
Bolger is a 1980s-and-beyond sharpie partisan, principally because
these boats are able to be everyman's yacht, stuck together in the
backyard from plywood available in the local lumberyard, and also
because their performance can be exciting and their behavior
forgiving with proper design. His sharp-form boats have ranged from
the elegant Burgundy and Black Skimmer (shown in these pages) to the
Thomaston Galley and the controversial June Bug (also shown here).
June Bug recently raised the hackles of a from-the-first-issue
subscriber to The Small Boat Journal, who complained of "Phil
Bolger's box" and felt that the magazine had "lost sight of the
definition of a boat." June Bug is definitely a box with a pointy end
"an order of magnitude away," as Bolger might say, from an Edwardian
yacht tender of similar volume. But she's a lightweight, stable and
useful vehicle as designed, and Bolger anticipated the man's
arguments in 30-Odd Boats, his new book, by commenting on his sharpie
purism: "The purist approach results in a very good boat that looks
cheap and nondescript. So why not add just a little flare of side and
a corresponding rake of stem? Then the sheer could come out of a
straight-edged sheet and save at least one long saw cut and possibly
a sheet of plywood, i.e., she'd be cheaper as well as `look more like
a boat.' There's an attractive argument that a good boat will look
good, and if it doesn't, the designer hasn't made the best of his
requirement, or the requirement is too demanding to be prudent. May
be. But it also makes me uneasy to deliberately design in something
that I'm sure is wrong for the service, and in this case I decided
not to do it."
June Bug is a pointed box, but she's a more subtle creation than the
amateur flatirons that many of us remember from our first days on the
water. She rows nicely, sails tolerably well with her spritsail and
leeboard, weighs less than 100 pounds and carries 1000 in calm
conditions, and her decked ends enable her to be launched like jetsam
from a high-sided vessel without taking on water. She's practical,
but she's as ugly as an inflatable by yacht-tender standards. Bolger
admits as much, even though he carries
an experimental June Bug with a pair of dipping lugsails on the deck
of his Resolution. The letter to Small Boat Journal "really stung,"
he says, "because it's true." Nevertheless, he believes in both the
usefulness of his boxes and their technical credibility. "I started
designing boats of a type I was familiar with," he says. "I started
designing imitations of things like Amesbury skiffs that were
expensive to produce one-offbecause they had been designed
originally for production. Now I'm getting a better handle on
prefabricated shapesso that I eventually hope to be able to do some
very complex shapes... If you can visualize the geometry well enough
you can do it, and I think I'll get it if I persist. I don't intend
to abandon the boxes."
Harold Payson builds and sells plans for 14 of Bolger's
plywood "Instant Boats," some of them the inspired boxes, and all of
them able to be built without lofting or jigs in 40 unskilled hours
or less. Dynamite Nyson's covering letter for these small-boat plans
reads like the Charles Atlas ads, and the plain but efficient little
boats that result are as satisfying as adding 3" to the girth of your
biceps after a month of Dynamic Tension. Amy Payson keeps albums of
photos and letters from pleased home-builders, and Harold says of the
boats that "a lot of them look real damned goodthey look just like
they're supposed to." Harold Nyson is a man Phil Bolger describes
as "one of those people who don't overwhelm you with brilliance on
first acquaintance, but you gradually notice that, whenever you get
an opinion out of him, he always turn out to be right. I know two or
three other people like that, and I sometimes wonder if civilization
doesn't depend on them."
Payson has been building boats for 40 years, ever since his father
took an ax to the first one to keep him from being drowned, and he
was a commercial lobsterman in South Thomaston, Maine, until 1976. He
built traditional bent-oak-and-cedar lobstering skiffs until 1967,
the year he built the first of many light dories of Bolger's design.
Payson and Bolger have become a perfect, if improbable, team. Bolger
is, says Dynamite, "an intense sort of personI can feel that
intensity when he comes up here." Dynamite, despite the nickname, is
not an intense sort of person. He is, despite constant interruptions
by visitors to his shop, an intense craftsman who produces perfect
versions of Bolger's odd but simple ideas for small boats, and he's
the test pilot for their rowing and sailing qualities. He's not an
automatic believer. "I don't think this thing is going to work at
all," he said of an ultra-simplified, multi-chined plywood pram that
was the latest Bolger project in midsummer. In mid-August, after he'd
named it Nymph, tried it out, and decided to call it "the little
sticktogether boat," he was high in praise of it. "That Bolger is
amazing," he said, turning over the shapely little boat he'd painted
ivory white, "see here where the frames fitthere are waterways cut
in just where thechines have to have tapes of fiberglass all along
you can get them right in there."
Bolger's inventive small boats have a believer in Harold Payson. His
larger projects have had a believer for 20 years in Stanley Woodward,
an independently wealthy man, and a connoisseur of small yachts, who
hire Bolger as the in-house designer for Majorca Yacht and Boat
Construction Association (MYABCA), the yard he established in Spain's
Balearic Islands. Bolger describes Stanley Woodward as an artist as
well as yachtsman who has the skills to carry clouds of sail on his
Bolger-designed boats with the aplomb of a Bully Waterman. Stanley
Woodward designed the fanciful sculpture incorporated, la
Ticonderoga, into the L. Francis Herreshoff Bounty ketches he built
in Majorca, and into several Bolgerdesigned boats built in the Med.
Perhaps the most spectacular is Moccasin, shown here on pages 72-75.
Moccasin started out with a request from Woodward for a Francis
Herreshoff Nereia ketch with slightly higher freeboard. By the time
Bolger finished thinking the project out, a whole new boat had
appeared on papera lovely long-keeled hull with shallow draft, big
centerboard, a New Haven sharpie's horizontal rudder, and an unstayed
cat-yawl rig with a log-canoe topsail and what Bolger describes as "a
masthead reaching jib-cum-spinnaker as well." Moccasin can set more
than 1200 square feet of sail in light air; and she's a fine example
of Bolger's eclectic style in rig and his favor for the powerful, low-
aspect sailplans which working vessels carried, sometimes as
singlehanders, in the past. As Bolger wrote in 30-Odd Boats in
discussing an owner's doubts about a traditionally rigged 20' Tancook
whaler type: "I reassured him about the rig, pointing out that the
gaff rig was driven out of racing because the Universal and
International Rules both penalized large sail area indiscriminately,
taking no account of the advantages of rigs whose shape allows the
boat to carry more sail without being knocked down. So it came to be
taken for granted that a small sail set high was `more efficient'
than a large sail set low. The logic of this, if any, eludes me. I
once saw a champion 5.5-meter beaten hull-down by a 50-year-old
Massachusetts Bay 18-footer (18-foot waterline, that is). They were
both the same length and weight as near as made no odds. The old boat
had half again the sail area, but her three-man crew worked less
strenuously, with much simpler and cheaper gear, than the same number
in the `modem' boat. If a big rig is cheaper and easier to handle
than a small rig, and heels the boat less, I'd be glad to hear
somebody try to justify giving the small rig a rating advantage."
Simple, unstayed, low-aspect rigs have been characteristic of
Bolger's work over several decades, as well as boats whose hull forms
have been designed to be shaped from flat-plane materials. The
sharpies and flatties, from the simple boxes to such rakish
conceptions as his Black Skimmer, cause Bolger some technical doubts
in particular but not in general Sharpie experience, from Commodore
Munroe through Howard Chapell to the owners of Bolger-designed boats
that perform and behave well endorses his faith in the
type. "Obviously something with hard corner will have some problems
with eddies," he says. "The flat ends, with the jagged angles, make
turbulence, so such a boat has to be relatively long... But there's
nothing wrong with a square midsection, per se." In a further
discussion of hull shape, Bolger says that "a bad type which is long
will beat a good type that is short." The Cape Cod catboat, he says
is one of the great conceptions because its midsection is so good
that it car be very short and still sail well. The British deep
cutter, he says, "is generally a bad type because it has too much
displacement for its stabilityand, as built, for its buoyancyand
therefore has to be long tc perform well." Almost any boat should be
flat in the middle, not at either of its ends, he says.
Bolger has designed an amazing range of boats that stretch from the
6'5" x 3'2" Tortoise, an ingenious rowing/sailing box, to the 114'l0'
replica of the 18th-century warship Rose, which was built to decorate
the Newport, R.I., waterfront. In between have been well-behaved
Whitehall boats, Friendship sloops, several ocean-crossing rowing
vessels, lobsterboats, a pair of kayaks, deep-draft cruising
powerboats, a bone-simple wing dory, the famous Folding Schooner
(discussed in NQl4), and fast owerboats that the Italians should be
building.
"I love to simplify things," Bolger says of his work. `And I think
this is a minority outlook. I think the majority impulse is to make
things more complicated." Even this statement is more complicated,
the spokesman notwithstanding. Bolger admires the work of a great
many other designers"there are lots," he says. He admires William
Garden's designs, "although I disagree with him on a great many
technical points." he has an inch-thick sheaf of correspondence with
Howard Chapelle in his files. He says he admires Olin
Stephens "intenselybasically because he Lever does anything freakish
unless he has tohe's always working back something recognizable as
a boat." Among successful boats, he identifies Bruce Kirby's Laser
as "a beautiful example of not trying to revolutionize anything, but
just to get it right. It's finished; it's definitive." Bolger feels
that Rod Macalpine-Downie's C-Class catamarans also fit his
conception of definitive. He identifies Ray Hunt's International 110
as "a very pure conception, but not perhaps defimtive...well, close
to definitive." He calls Francis Herreshoff's Bounty "the most
beautiful yacht ever designed or builta flamboyant thing with a riot
of sweeping, visting, converging curves, all set off with intricate
detail and ornament, [1 blending into a perfectly traditional effect
overall." He judges the Gokstad ship "perhaps the most advanced
wooden structure ever created by man."
Bolger has an intense personal and professional involvement with
definitive. It is a thing he's been thinking about all his life, but
with an independent point of view he once wrote about in these pages
in discussing Francis Herreshoff: "L.FH. thought himself a lesser man
than his father. . . He had no hesitation in imitating his father's
designs (but never those of Burgess). More often, though, there is
hardly a trace of his father's influence; the designs reflect an
entirely different line of thought. It's surely remarkable that after
27 years of exposure to such a man as Nathanael Herreshoff, Francis
Herreshoff remained so tranquil in mind that he strained neither to
be like his father nor to be different."
Phil Bolger is like that. His workinfluenced by mentors like Lord,
Hacker, Herreshoff, Nick Montgomery and Bill Bolger, and inspired
perhaps by the likes of Garden, Hunt and Stephensis very much his
own. It is nearly 450 different boats thusfar, nearly all different
from the work of others, and nearly all different from one another.
Bolger once designed a radical plywood daysailer for a sail-training
schemea 21' x 5'6" progenitor of the Folding Schooner with sponsons
along the topsides for reserve buoyancy, three spritsails with spars
light enough for boys to unship, leeboards, plenty of room to sprawl
around, and plywood carpentry straightforward enough for high-school
woodworking shops. The sponsor of the project took the drawings to a
number of people, including what Bolger describes in Small Boats
as "a very distinguished yacht designer." "They one and all told him
that the design was a disastrously bad one, would be slow and clumsy,
and would quickly break up. They also told him that Bolger was
notoriously irresponsible; wild ideas like this, they told him, were
what you got if you didn't hold his nose tightly down on some safe
and sane standard." The design was eventually built by another
client, and Bolger reports that "she proved a lively sailer, though
wet." She had no structural problems. As he wrote of the project in
Small Boats: "What they say about me has this much truth: I do love
unusual and extreme boats, and I was tickled at the thought of the
outrage the design would cause and how it would be silenced when she
was tried."
> I believe that there was a pretty good article/short bio inNautical
> Quarterly a long time ago. Nothing further resides in memory aboutit.
>Phillip C. Bolger
> HJ
>
Boat Designer, Gloucester, Massachusetts
By Joseph Gribbens
Nautical Quarterly 21, Spring 1983
When you call Phil Bolger on the telephone, the voice that answers
says "Bolger." It used to ask a pointed "Yes?" It is a curt, Boston-
accented voice, and there is an intimation of "What do you want?" in
the single word it pronounces, a thing that makes the caller feel
that he's interrupted something. He has. What he's interrupted is a
thought process that's been going on for 50 years, with many such
interruptions but with probably no real disturbance of its flow or
its complexity.
Phil Bolger is thinking about boats, an intellectual and technical
exercise whose ideal is a purity the designer seems to prize above
all thingsa rightness, an exquisite equilibrium that extends not
only to what he calls "designs that are right of their kind," but to
peripheral bits of perfection: the way the lines go down on paper,
the way the parts of his recent small boats come neatly out of 4' x
8' sheets of plywood, the way the designer spends his workday, the
way he expresses himself in person and in print.
Bolger is precise. He is also funny, self-deprecating, easy to
challenge on dogma, free with conversation when he's in the mood for
it, and oddly anti-precise in his libertarian tolerance of new and
strange ideas. Conversations with Bolger, when he gets rolling, skip
sideways from yacht design to politics, ancient history, the space
program, sex, money, any number of things. And they are full of
quotes and footnotes from H.G. Wells, Alexander the Great, Kipling,
Mary Renault, W.C. Fields, any number of people. Although he works in
a field that he claims is "really not worth the time of really able
people," be gives it his time every workday and, one suspects, pretty
much every instant, awake or asleep with dreams of an ultimate
portable daysailer or some dead-simple outboard workboat. Bolger is
inspired by thoughts of boats that will be pure and perfect, but
unbotheredso he saysby boats that incorporate the "crude solutions"
he cheerfully admits in a lot of his own work. "Some boats are better
than others; but it's not important that they be better," he says in
a conversation about the uses to which various types are put.
He means this "any sort of boat will do" in the general sense that a
boat roughly suitable to its purpose can achieve its purpose, and in
the social sense that it's good for people to enjoy themselves on the
water whatever they're in, so long as they don't get drowned. But in
a very thoughtful article he wrote for this magazine's ninth issue,
Bolger described L. Francis Herreshoff's H-28 as "a deliberate
mediocrity" in concept, but a boat that "if built exactly as designed
down to the last detail (and the details are defined on sheet after
sheet of large-scale drawings). . moves from mediocrity to a
universal prototype, original essence of small cruising boat. . .
It's a haunting and frustrating achievement. Generations of young
designers and boatbuilders have tinkered with it, trying to make it
faster, or roomier, or something. The result is always a mediocrity
that looks mediocre. In context, different means spoiled. There's a
lot to be learned from studying this design; but to apply the lessons
you have to start over with a blank sheet."
In several remarks in his latest book for International Marine,
Bolger illuminates his unique, austere approach to shaping boats.
Burgundy, his sharpie variation of the L.F.H. Rozinante, is able to
be built by Brad Story for less than a third of the cost of a
Rozinante on the shop floor that looks like a Stradivarius. "`There's
a catch," writes Bolger. "Rozinante is one of the all-time
masterpieces of art. For visual satisfaction, three Burgundys don't
equal one Rozinante Notwithstanding Brad's Yankee outrage (at her
cost to build), I think the Rozinante is worth what she costs. But
for somebody who doesn't have the price of a Rubens original, there
may be some merit in a Playboy centerfold "(i.e., Bolger's lovely
Burgundy).
In discussing Wisp, a canoe-form 20' sloop built by a man who gave
her the best of materials and finish, and didn't mind building three
trunks for a pair of bilgeboards and an inboard rudder, Bolger
notes: "This is a goldplater, something I'm seldom immediately
comfortable with.. I tend to go off and try to produce something
cheap and expendable that will do the same job." And writing about
the angled, shield-shaped transom of Fancy a lovely 15' gaff sloop of
Muscongus Bay inspiration, Bolger discusses the uselessness of such a
stern and concludes: "I've often thought of offering a reward for a
good reason why pretty girls shouldn't chew gum. A legitimate excuse
for a stern of this kind would be welcome in the same way, as it
makes me uncomfortable to draw something degraded in its action by
its aesthetics."
There is a tension here between perfect but elite little boats like
Francis Herreshoff's masterpieces and the boats for everybody that
Bolger has designed with inspired inventiveness for decades. It is a
creative tension for the designer. Bolger has drawn his share of
goldplaters, and some of them boats that were exquisitely right, when
he or the client gave the work few restrictions of time, money or
materials. But yacht design is a game for Bolger, and limitations of
time, money and materials are rules in the game. It is a game he
enjoys playing, and the goal is to achieve boats that are beautiful,
well-behaved, safe in a variety of mischances, and a pleasure to be
in. They should also be simple in structure and rig, undemanding in
maintenance, and easy on their personnel. These final qualities
define Bolger's version of the game. He has applied himself to
bringing simplified and frequently cheap boats closer to his own
ideals of rightness for nearly 30 years, and more than a few of his
433 designs to date have come close. A very few, in the designer's
careful judgment, have been close to perfect. But they are different
boatsthe title of one of Bolger's four books for International
Marineand they are products of different mental processes from those
which produce designed-around-the-rule IOR boats, competent copies of
traditional Yankee workboats, or even never-before-seen multihulls
and performance powerboats.
Bolger's grandfather was an inventor, which may account for his
grandson's inventive fervor in terms of genes. Among other
influences, it probably does account for his freedom and freshness of
vision. Thomas Patrick Bolger came to Boston from Prince Edward
Island, an eager immigrant who "was a plumber who turned into an
inventor," according to the designer. Grandfather Bolger invented
things to be made out of steel that had previously been made out of
wood, and his principal invention -"the one that made money"was the
steel icebox. Others were a very efficient ash sifter for coal
furnaces and a plant box that irrigated itself. "He was an ingenious
contriver," says his grandson, choosing his words precisely, and he
was a man who had a safe full of granted patents when he died. Phil
Bolger's father, William A., was salesman and business agent for the
family company that sold the steel iceboxes "all over the place," in
Latin America and Bermuda as well as in the U.S.
"My mother's people were master fishermen and vessel owners on both
sides," says the designer, "but not in my time." The Cunningham
family of Cunningham & Thompson of Gloucester owned the celebrated
fishing schooners Arethusa and Ingomar, among scores of others, both
built early in this century by Tarr and James in Essex,
Massachusetts, from designs by Tom McManus.
William A. Bolger died suddenly in 1934, and it was a crisis for the
family, although Phil, then seven years old, doesn't recall hard
times. His mother, Ruth Cunningham Bolgerstill a vigorous woman at
89 who keeps the house in Gloucester that she helped design with her
husband and a perhaps overwhelmed architect, and still plants the
flower garden with its hedge of lilacscoped and carried on through
the Depression so that her younger son never noticed much
change. "She is a woman of strong character," says Bolger.
Phil's brother Bill, who he describes in contrast to himself as "a
competent type," took a hand in his upbringing, being a fatherly ten
years older, and gave the future yacht designer his first boat. "My
brother thought it would be interesting to build a boat out of
Masonite. . . It didn't work out at all well, so he gave it to me. He
had made a skate sail, which I took, and he taught me to make the
hardware for the sail and the boat in my grandfather's shop... It
didn't sail very well, but I can say that I had a boat with
leeboards, an unstayed mast and a wishbone boom 45 years ago."
Phil Bolger's "first real boat"although the Masonite contraption
would seem to be very real in terms of influencewas a 16' Chesapeake
catboat designed by Ralph Wiley and built by brother Bill, a legacy
to the younger brother when the older went off to war. "It was a very
exciting boat to sailbig rig and nose-heavy," Bolger recalls. It was
a boat that Bolger sailed until he followed his brother into the
Army. Phil Bolger is of that generation that had its adolescence
during World War II, and it is the generation that produced the
Hell's Angels and now-forgotten bouts of "chicken" on the highways as
games of courage to counter elder brethren who had experienced The
War. Bolger went to Bowdoin to study History, but he was soon seduced
by soldiering. "I called up a friend to see what he was going to do,"
Bolger remembers of that first summer after a year of college. "He
said he was going into the Army, and I made a snap decision to go
with ... . We were determined to be good soldiersinfantry soldiers
to do it right." Bolger and his friend were warned by the sergeant in
charge of the exams that if they didn't score well they would end up
up the infantry, so they "tried to figure out the wrong answers."
Part II
They didn't succeed. Bolger went to the combat engineers and his
friend went to field artillery. Bolger was in the 1st Cay, in the
Army of Occupation in Japan for a year, and he was, in his own
judgment, "extraordinarily incompetent," although a crack shot on the
rifle range.
"When I got out I went back to college on the G.I. Bill and wasted
three more years studying History," he says. He graduated cum laude
from Bowdoin, and he took with him not only laurels but a distaste
for what he indicts as "an academic establishment that is wrecking
American civilization." Bolger describes himself as "a card-carrying
Libertarian," and he feels that students who learn on their own, and
get good at something, should have the same access to professions as
students who have gone through the motions of acquiring an academic
ticket. Bolger soon sought a ticket in yacht design, a thing that,
true to his principles, seems to be granted on performance rather
than school credentials. When Bolger was back at Bowdoin, Lindsay
Lord published The Naval Architecture Planing Hulls, and Bolger wrote
him a letter that questioned some detail in the book. When he
graduated, he was invited up to Falmouth Foreside, Maine, to work as
a draftsman. Lindsay Lord was designing "very strikingspectacular
houses then," Bolger remembers. But it was a good apprenticeship in
boat design. "Doc is certainly a very brilliant man," says Bolger of
this versatile designer whose powerboats were very adventurous in the
1940s and 1950s. "No praise is too great for his generosity to me."
Bolger worked for Lindsay Lord for less than a year before Lord
recommended him to John Hacker in Detroit, a fast-boat wizard who was
busy with contracts for the U.S. Air Force. "It was, for me, a
gathering of confidence," Bolger says of his months with Lindsay
Lord, "and that was one of Doc's talents." With Hacker, Bolger needed
all the confidence he could get. The company that had contracted the
rescue boat for the Air Forcethe Huron-Eddy Corp. was what Bolger
describes as "a menagerie of boat designers." The boat was the
largest hull that Hacker had ever designed, a 90-footer, and it had
three Packard engines with vee drives and with the props under the
engines. Hacker had designed raceboats like this, and the project
should have been a piece of cake, but the old man seemed to be much
too responsible to the Air Force. "Jim Eddy, who was in charge of the
weights, would come in and tear his hair over the extra structure
that Hacker kept putting into it," Bolger remembers.
Bolger remembers a lot more illustrative things from his months with
Lindsay Lord and John Hacker, and from part-time work for Francis
Herreshoff as a draftsman when he came back to Gloucester from
Detroit in 1952, but the most significant things he took from these
short apprenticeships may have been attitudes rather than lessons in
structure or mathematics. Lord, Hacker and Herreshoff have all been
described as geniuses, and all three were independent men with
inventive turns of mind, eccentricities, and an indefinable ability
to work through a complex of requirements and possibilities to lines
on paper that represented more than a sequence of problems solved.
It would have been a stroke of luck for any student of yacht design
to have worked with one of these men; that Bolger worked with all
three is extraordinary. And it seems to have been luck"I went after
them," he says, "but it was luck that they held still for it." Yet
Bolger claims his brother, Bill, and boatbuilder Nicholas Montgomery
as his real mentors. "My brother brought me up to boat design, and
taught me to be critical," he says. Nicholas Montgomery, whose
boatyard in Gloucester is now run by his son and grandson, with Phil
Bolger as in-house designer, was "a thinker and an experimenter,"
Bolger says. Montgomery was an old school designer/boatbuilder who
worked with carved models, and Phil Bolger haunted his yard as a
boy. "I used to sit at his feet, and he would lecture me on boat
design," the designer says, smiling through his beard at the memory.
Bolger sent a design for a clean-lined 32' sportfisherman to Yachting
in the fall of 1951, and it was published in the January, 1952,
issue. This first published design elicited "a satisfying amount of
correspondence probably three letters," and it caused Bolger to set
up on his own in the house in Gloucester with stock designs
for "mostly powerboats, with a few rowboats." None of these early
designs showed obvious influence from Lord, Hacker or Herreshoff. The
powerboats were lean and angular; the rowing boatsamong them the
original of the Gloucester Gull rowing dorywere plywood versions of
dories and dory skiffs. They were original conceptions, and they were
typically simplified in line and structure.
In the middle to late `fifties, Bolger worked up some production
boats, two of which began to make his reputation and one of which
tore it down. Bolger freely admits mistakes and disappointments in
the boats he designs, and he does it in print. Mistakes are nature's
way of telling you you're still learning. He designed the first
Striker sportfisherman, and he learned some things about steel
construction from the builder. The first Striker was a 24-footer, and
Bolger, like Hacker with the Air Force boat, designed a complicated
frame structure to be covered with 14-gauge steel. The Nassau-Suffolk
Welding Company, which built the boat, used heavier plating for a
monococque structure and dispensed with the framing scheme except to
use it as a jig. The hull oilcanned in only a few places during its
shakedown run, and "the builder much improved the job," says Bolger.
Those first Strikers, with rakish, patrol-boat lines and clean planes
of steel and later aluminum, were very beautiful boats. "They didn't
sell very well because they didn't run very well," says the
designer, "but they looked wonderful."
Bolger had been designing sea-skiff types in the `fifties, too, and
in 1956-57 he designed a carvel-planked 31-footer for Egg Harbor that
was a thorough success. "My boast is that it was about two years
before any of them came on the used-boat market, and then they sold
for more than they had originally." After this, he says, "pride ran
before a fall." His friend Terry Kilborne came to him with a
scheme "to build boats in Japan where boats can be built cheap." The
result was the Out O'Gloucester 30, a "very radical design." It
produced what Bolger describes as "the worst day I ever had." When
launched, the first of these cruising/fishing powerboats "was 5
inches down in the stern, wouldn't steer, reached for the moon in
trim." Fortunately, Yachting came out that month with an article by
Ed Monk on shingles to correct trim problems in powerboats; we did
exactly what Monk recommended, and it worked."
Bolger designed powerboats for Striker until the mid-1960s, and at
the same time he produced a series of power "dories" and "sampans"
for Captain Jim Orrell's Texas Dory Boat Plans. These were dead-
simple flatiron/sharpie types in lengths from 15' to 45' for cheap
and simple home construction in plywood, and they were exceptionally
well-behaved boats despite their shoebox shapes. They were built all
over the worlda slick 15-footer as a family boatbuilding project by
the keeper of the Eddystone Light in St. Helens, Tasmania 110 boats
from 18' to 30' built by native fishermen on Wallis Island in New
Caledonia; hundreds more built by handy and penny-pinching customers
in the U.S. A man in Rhode Island wrote Captain Orrell about his
Bolger-designed 17' "Sampan Express:" "In rough water, it is
unbeatable, and consistently puts the stock boats to shame in both
speed and handling. In three-to-five-foot chop, while others are
hanging on and hoping, we continue on at ¼ throttle. Surfing down the
big ones is quite a thrill, and with the tremendous bow buoyancy no
need to worry about digging in.
Bolger's interest in simple boats made from developable materials
such as wide planks of pine or sheets of steel, aluminum or plywood
goes back to that Masonite boat with the kite sail, although it has
been influenced by such academic and/or purposeful exercises as
Howard Chapelle's researches into sharpies and the worldwide success
of the Texas Dories. Bolger feels that he has had more experience
with sharpie types than anybody alive, experience that has included
crewing a Star boat for years; owning sailing sharpies. dories and
flatiron skiffs for decades; and designing hundreds of plane-
sectioned hulls that gave good service. "It's a thing I can doso I
do it," he says, which expresses not half his belief in sharp-form,
shallow-draft boats that go together simply and go against the
ancient orthodoxy of round sections as the only able form for boats
with seakeeping ability or even comfort in a bay chop.
Part III
Sharp-form boats nave their own orthodoxy in New England dories in
Chesapeake skipjacks, and in skiffs, garveys and flatirons built for
a hundred years from Maine to Florida, where Commodore Ralph Munroe,
pal of Nat Herreshoff, was a partisan of the type. Howard I.
Chapelle's Smithsonian Bulletin 228 describes them nicely (Chapelle
was another partisan) and notes that: "The sharpie's rapid spread in
use can be accounted for in its low cost, light draft, speed,
handiness under sail, graceful appearance, and rather astonishing
seaworthiness ... There is a case on record in which a tonging
sharpie rescued the crew of a coasting schooner at Branford,
Connecticut, during a severe gale, after other boats had proven
unable to approach the wreck."
Bolger is a 1980s-and-beyond sharpie partisan, principally because
these boats are able to be everyman's yacht, stuck together in the
backyard from plywood available in the local lumberyard, and also
because their performance can be exciting and their behavior
forgiving with proper design. His sharp-form boats have ranged from
the elegant Burgundy and Black Skimmer (shown in these pages) to the
Thomaston Galley and the controversial June Bug (also shown here).
June Bug recently raised the hackles of a from-the-first-issue
subscriber to The Small Boat Journal, who complained of "Phil
Bolger's box" and felt that the magazine had "lost sight of the
definition of a boat." June Bug is definitely a box with a pointy end
"an order of magnitude away," as Bolger might say, from an Edwardian
yacht tender of similar volume. But she's a lightweight, stable and
useful vehicle as designed, and Bolger anticipated the man's
arguments in 30-Odd Boats, his new book, by commenting on his sharpie
purism: "The purist approach results in a very good boat that looks
cheap and nondescript. So why not add just a little flare of side and
a corresponding rake of stem? Then the sheer could come out of a
straight-edged sheet and save at least one long saw cut and possibly
a sheet of plywood, i.e., she'd be cheaper as well as `look more like
a boat.' There's an attractive argument that a good boat will look
good, and if it doesn't, the designer hasn't made the best of his
requirement, or the requirement is too demanding to be prudent. May
be. But it also makes me uneasy to deliberately design in something
that I'm sure is wrong for the service, and in this case I decided
not to do it."
June Bug is a pointed box, but she's a more subtle creation than the
amateur flatirons that many of us remember from our first days on the
water. She rows nicely, sails tolerably well with her spritsail and
leeboard, weighs less than 100 pounds and carries 1000 in calm
conditions, and her decked ends enable her to be launched like jetsam
from a high-sided vessel without taking on water. She's practical,
but she's as ugly as an inflatable by yacht-tender standards. Bolger
admits as much, even though he carries
an experimental June Bug with a pair of dipping lugsails on the deck
of his Resolution. The letter to Small Boat Journal "really stung,"
he says, "because it's true." Nevertheless, he believes in both the
usefulness of his boxes and their technical credibility. "I started
designing boats of a type I was familiar with," he says. "I started
designing imitations of things like Amesbury skiffs that were
expensive to produce one-offbecause they had been designed
originally for production. Now I'm getting a better handle on
prefabricated shapesso that I eventually hope to be able to do some
very complex shapes... If you can visualize the geometry well enough
you can do it, and I think I'll get it if I persist. I don't intend
to abandon the boxes."
Harold Payson builds and sells plans for 14 of Bolger's
plywood "Instant Boats," some of them the inspired boxes, and all of
them able to be built without lofting or jigs in 40 unskilled hours
or less. Dynamite Nyson's covering letter for these small-boat plans
reads like the Charles Atlas ads, and the plain but efficient little
boats that result are as satisfying as adding 3" to the girth of your
biceps after a month of Dynamic Tension. Amy Payson keeps albums of
photos and letters from pleased home-builders, and Harold says of the
boats that "a lot of them look real damned goodthey look just like
they're supposed to." Harold Nyson is a man Phil Bolger describes
as "one of those people who don't overwhelm you with brilliance on
first acquaintance, but you gradually notice that, whenever you get
an opinion out of him, he always turn out to be right. I know two or
three other people like that, and I sometimes wonder if civilization
doesn't depend on them."
Payson has been building boats for 40 years, ever since his father
took an ax to the first one to keep him from being drowned, and he
was a commercial lobsterman in South Thomaston, Maine, until 1976. He
built traditional bent-oak-and-cedar lobstering skiffs until 1967,
the year he built the first of many light dories of Bolger's design.
Payson and Bolger have become a perfect, if improbable, team. Bolger
is, says Dynamite, "an intense sort of personI can feel that
intensity when he comes up here." Dynamite, despite the nickname, is
not an intense sort of person. He is, despite constant interruptions
by visitors to his shop, an intense craftsman who produces perfect
versions of Bolger's odd but simple ideas for small boats, and he's
the test pilot for their rowing and sailing qualities. He's not an
automatic believer. "I don't think this thing is going to work at
all," he said of an ultra-simplified, multi-chined plywood pram that
was the latest Bolger project in midsummer. In mid-August, after he'd
named it Nymph, tried it out, and decided to call it "the little
sticktogether boat," he was high in praise of it. "That Bolger is
amazing," he said, turning over the shapely little boat he'd painted
ivory white, "see here where the frames fitthere are waterways cut
in just where thechines have to have tapes of fiberglass all along
you can get them right in there."
Bolger's inventive small boats have a believer in Harold Payson. His
larger projects have had a believer for 20 years in Stanley Woodward,
an independently wealthy man, and a connoisseur of small yachts, who
hire Bolger as the in-house designer for Majorca Yacht and Boat
Construction Association (MYABCA), the yard he established in Spain's
Balearic Islands. Bolger describes Stanley Woodward as an artist as
well as yachtsman who has the skills to carry clouds of sail on his
Bolger-designed boats with the aplomb of a Bully Waterman. Stanley
Woodward designed the fanciful sculpture incorporated, la
Ticonderoga, into the L. Francis Herreshoff Bounty ketches he built
in Majorca, and into several Bolgerdesigned boats built in the Med.
Perhaps the most spectacular is Moccasin, shown here on pages 72-75.
Moccasin started out with a request from Woodward for a Francis
Herreshoff Nereia ketch with slightly higher freeboard. By the time
Bolger finished thinking the project out, a whole new boat had
appeared on papera lovely long-keeled hull with shallow draft, big
centerboard, a New Haven sharpie's horizontal rudder, and an unstayed
cat-yawl rig with a log-canoe topsail and what Bolger describes as "a
masthead reaching jib-cum-spinnaker as well." Moccasin can set more
than 1200 square feet of sail in light air; and she's a fine example
of Bolger's eclectic style in rig and his favor for the powerful, low-
aspect sailplans which working vessels carried, sometimes as
singlehanders, in the past. As Bolger wrote in 30-Odd Boats in
discussing an owner's doubts about a traditionally rigged 20' Tancook
whaler type: "I reassured him about the rig, pointing out that the
gaff rig was driven out of racing because the Universal and
International Rules both penalized large sail area indiscriminately,
taking no account of the advantages of rigs whose shape allows the
boat to carry more sail without being knocked down. So it came to be
taken for granted that a small sail set high was `more efficient'
than a large sail set low. The logic of this, if any, eludes me. I
once saw a champion 5.5-meter beaten hull-down by a 50-year-old
Massachusetts Bay 18-footer (18-foot waterline, that is). They were
both the same length and weight as near as made no odds. The old boat
had half again the sail area, but her three-man crew worked less
strenuously, with much simpler and cheaper gear, than the same number
in the `modem' boat. If a big rig is cheaper and easier to handle
than a small rig, and heels the boat less, I'd be glad to hear
somebody try to justify giving the small rig a rating advantage."
Simple, unstayed, low-aspect rigs have been characteristic of
Bolger's work over several decades, as well as boats whose hull forms
have been designed to be shaped from flat-plane materials. The
sharpies and flatties, from the simple boxes to such rakish
conceptions as his Black Skimmer, cause Bolger some technical doubts
in particular but not in general Sharpie experience, from Commodore
Munroe through Howard Chapell to the owners of Bolger-designed boats
that perform and behave well endorses his faith in the
type. "Obviously something with hard corner will have some problems
with eddies," he says. "The flat ends, with the jagged angles, make
turbulence, so such a boat has to be relatively long... But there's
nothing wrong with a square midsection, per se." In a further
discussion of hull shape, Bolger says that "a bad type which is long
will beat a good type that is short." The Cape Cod catboat, he says
is one of the great conceptions because its midsection is so good
that it car be very short and still sail well. The British deep
cutter, he says, "is generally a bad type because it has too much
displacement for its stabilityand, as built, for its buoyancyand
therefore has to be long tc perform well." Almost any boat should be
flat in the middle, not at either of its ends, he says.
Bolger has designed an amazing range of boats that stretch from the
6'5" x 3'2" Tortoise, an ingenious rowing/sailing box, to the 114'l0'
replica of the 18th-century warship Rose, which was built to decorate
the Newport, R.I., waterfront. In between have been well-behaved
Whitehall boats, Friendship sloops, several ocean-crossing rowing
vessels, lobsterboats, a pair of kayaks, deep-draft cruising
powerboats, a bone-simple wing dory, the famous Folding Schooner
(discussed in NQl4), and fast owerboats that the Italians should be
building.
"I love to simplify things," Bolger says of his work. `And I think
this is a minority outlook. I think the majority impulse is to make
things more complicated." Even this statement is more complicated,
the spokesman notwithstanding. Bolger admires the work of a great
many other designers"there are lots," he says. He admires William
Garden's designs, "although I disagree with him on a great many
technical points." he has an inch-thick sheaf of correspondence with
Howard Chapelle in his files. He says he admires Olin
Stephens "intenselybasically because he Lever does anything freakish
unless he has tohe's always working back something recognizable as
a boat." Among successful boats, he identifies Bruce Kirby's Laser
as "a beautiful example of not trying to revolutionize anything, but
just to get it right. It's finished; it's definitive." Bolger feels
that Rod Macalpine-Downie's C-Class catamarans also fit his
conception of definitive. He identifies Ray Hunt's International 110
as "a very pure conception, but not perhaps defimtive...well, close
to definitive." He calls Francis Herreshoff's Bounty "the most
beautiful yacht ever designed or builta flamboyant thing with a riot
of sweeping, visting, converging curves, all set off with intricate
detail and ornament, [1 blending into a perfectly traditional effect
overall." He judges the Gokstad ship "perhaps the most advanced
wooden structure ever created by man."
Bolger has an intense personal and professional involvement with
definitive. It is a thing he's been thinking about all his life, but
with an independent point of view he once wrote about in these pages
in discussing Francis Herreshoff: "L.FH. thought himself a lesser man
than his father. . . He had no hesitation in imitating his father's
designs (but never those of Burgess). More often, though, there is
hardly a trace of his father's influence; the designs reflect an
entirely different line of thought. It's surely remarkable that after
27 years of exposure to such a man as Nathanael Herreshoff, Francis
Herreshoff remained so tranquil in mind that he strained neither to
be like his father nor to be different."
Phil Bolger is like that. His workinfluenced by mentors like Lord,
Hacker, Herreshoff, Nick Montgomery and Bill Bolger, and inspired
perhaps by the likes of Garden, Hunt and Stephensis very much his
own. It is nearly 450 different boats thusfar, nearly all different
from the work of others, and nearly all different from one another.
Bolger once designed a radical plywood daysailer for a sail-training
schemea 21' x 5'6" progenitor of the Folding Schooner with sponsons
along the topsides for reserve buoyancy, three spritsails with spars
light enough for boys to unship, leeboards, plenty of room to sprawl
around, and plywood carpentry straightforward enough for high-school
woodworking shops. The sponsor of the project took the drawings to a
number of people, including what Bolger describes in Small Boats
as "a very distinguished yacht designer." "They one and all told him
that the design was a disastrously bad one, would be slow and clumsy,
and would quickly break up. They also told him that Bolger was
notoriously irresponsible; wild ideas like this, they told him, were
what you got if you didn't hold his nose tightly down on some safe
and sane standard." The design was eventually built by another
client, and Bolger reports that "she proved a lively sailer, though
wet." She had no structural problems. As he wrote of the project in
Small Boats: "What they say about me has this much truth: I do love
unusual and extreme boats, and I was tickled at the thought of the
outrage the design would cause and how it would be silenced when she
was tried."
I believe that there was a pretty good article/short bio in Nautical
Quarterly a long time ago. Nothing further resides in memory about it.
HJ
Peter Lenihan wrote:
Quarterly a long time ago. Nothing further resides in memory about it.
HJ
Peter Lenihan wrote:
>You're going to have to be a bit patient and wait until he is dead
>for something really thorough.In the meantime,Woodenboat number 92,pg
>42 to 51 is the closes I know of. A bit of a rehashing by Dan Segal
>if you know "nothing" about Mr.Bolger at all.
>
>Sincerely,
>Peter Lenihan
>
>
>
>
--- "Peter Lenihan" <ellengaest@b...> wrote:
1989 three paragraph 'bio'
of PCB orginally published
in the Small Boat Journal
magazine at URL:
http://www.hallman.org/bolger/
> rehashing by Dan SegalI reprinted the Dan Segal
1989 three paragraph 'bio'
of PCB orginally published
in the Small Boat Journal
magazine at URL:
http://www.hallman.org/bolger/
You're going to have to be a bit patient and wait until he is dead
for something really thorough.In the meantime,Woodenboat number 92,pg
42 to 51 is the closes I know of. A bit of a rehashing by Dan Segal
if you know "nothing" about Mr.Bolger at all.
Sincerely,
Peter Lenihan
for something really thorough.In the meantime,Woodenboat number 92,pg
42 to 51 is the closes I know of. A bit of a rehashing by Dan Segal
if you know "nothing" about Mr.Bolger at all.
Sincerely,
Peter Lenihan
--- Inbolger@yahoogroups.com, "fanthonywhite" <medipak@e...> wrote:
> Surely, someone in this group of Bolger Boat builders and would-be
> builders knows where I can go to read a biography of Philip C
Bolger!
Surely, someone in this group of Bolger Boat builders and would-be
builders knows where I can go to read a biography of Philip C Bolger!
I tried entering his full name in Google, and had an enjoyable time
wandering through the first 5 pages of listed links, but I failed to
find a bio of Bolger. Please help!
Thanks.
builders knows where I can go to read a biography of Philip C Bolger!
I tried entering his full name in Google, and had an enjoyable time
wandering through the first 5 pages of listed links, but I failed to
find a bio of Bolger. Please help!
Thanks.