Re: [bolger] Part 3 of an article from Nautical Quarterly 21 (last one)
At 06:46 PM 11/29/00 -0600, you wrote:
name to this group. I'd just love to have a reason to meet him!
Kilburn's boat is indeed built to a very high standard: occume plywood, all
mahogany trim, lots of brightwork. It is a very nice smooth water cruiser
for a couple (which is what it was intended to be.)
My boats look positively amateur by comparison.
JB
>John, thanks for digging this up.You're welcome. I really enjoyed the life story of the man who give his
name to this group. I'd just love to have a reason to meet him!
>Great picture of Kilburn Adams' "Skiff America 20" in WBoat "Launchings"I was on the scene at the Midwest Messabout when that picture was taken.
>this month - a higher finish than I'm shooting for, but much the same idea.
Kilburn's boat is indeed built to a very high standard: occume plywood, all
mahogany trim, lots of brightwork. It is a very nice smooth water cruiser
for a couple (which is what it was intended to be.)
My boats look positively amateur by comparison.
JB
John, thanks for digging this up.
The wacky Florida election and a new granddaughter have really knocked me
off the SweetCaroline project, but a couple of warm days had me "gluing and
screwing" again. All my hardware came in from Defender, and I have
installed the 24 gallon fuel tank (running out of room fast aft!) and fitted
the splash box above it forward of the transom.
Fabricated two flat water tanks of 'glassed ply, totalling about 12
gallons - this will be "wash and maybe cooking water", will drink bottled
jug water. Also fabbed a hardtop bimini of doug fir stringers and 1/4 luan
ply.
I have experimented with several fairing mixes, settled on epoxy thinned
with tolouol (sp?), then thickened with talc. I'm spreading it on the large
surfaces with a drywall trowel, will sand with 80 grit, then fair again with
WEST Microlight in epoxy. I tried the Microlight for the first coat, but it
wants to melt and pill up with aggressive sanding using a random orbital
sander.
Can't believe I started this over a year ago, planning on six months! Oh
well, maybe Cedar Key 2001... No new pictures for now, will post some to
the web when the hardtop is on.
Great picture of Kilburn Adams' "Skiff America 20" in WBoat "Launchings"
this month - a higher finish than I'm shooting for, but much the same idea.
Don Hodges, not frozen but too chilly for epoxy the next couple of days...
The wacky Florida election and a new granddaughter have really knocked me
off the SweetCaroline project, but a couple of warm days had me "gluing and
screwing" again. All my hardware came in from Defender, and I have
installed the 24 gallon fuel tank (running out of room fast aft!) and fitted
the splash box above it forward of the transom.
Fabricated two flat water tanks of 'glassed ply, totalling about 12
gallons - this will be "wash and maybe cooking water", will drink bottled
jug water. Also fabbed a hardtop bimini of doug fir stringers and 1/4 luan
ply.
I have experimented with several fairing mixes, settled on epoxy thinned
with tolouol (sp?), then thickened with talc. I'm spreading it on the large
surfaces with a drywall trowel, will sand with 80 grit, then fair again with
WEST Microlight in epoxy. I tried the Microlight for the first coat, but it
wants to melt and pill up with aggressive sanding using a random orbital
sander.
Can't believe I started this over a year ago, planning on six months! Oh
well, maybe Cedar Key 2001... No new pictures for now, will post some to
the web when the hardtop is on.
Great picture of Kilburn Adams' "Skiff America 20" in WBoat "Launchings"
this month - a higher finish than I'm shooting for, but much the same idea.
Don Hodges, not frozen but too chilly for epoxy the next couple of days...
----- Original Message -----
From: John Bell <jmbell@...>
To: <bolger@egroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 25, 2000 8:40 AM
Subject: [bolger] Part 3 of an article from Nautical Quarterly 21 (last one)
> Last part of the 1983 Nautical Quarterly article on Bolger:
Last part of the 1983 Nautical Quarterly article on Bolger:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
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-off-because they had
been designed originally for production. Now I'm getting a better handle on
prefabricated shapes-so 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 good-they 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
person-I 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 fit-there
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 paper-a 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 stability-and, as built, for its buoyancy-and
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 "intensely-basically because he Lever does anything
freakish unless he has to-he'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 built-a
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 work-influenced by mentors like Lord, Hacker,
Herreshoff, Nick Montgomery and Bill Bolger, and inspired perhaps by the
likes of Garden, Hunt and Stephens-is 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 scheme-a 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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
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-off-because they had
been designed originally for production. Now I'm getting a better handle on
prefabricated shapes-so 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 good-they 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
person-I 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 fit-there
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 paper-a 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 stability-and, as built, for its buoyancy-and
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 "intensely-basically because he Lever does anything
freakish unless he has to-he'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 built-a
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 work-influenced by mentors like Lord, Hacker,
Herreshoff, Nick Montgomery and Bill Bolger, and inspired perhaps by the
likes of Garden, Hunt and Stephens-is 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 scheme-a 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."