The optimist says the cup is half full; the pessimist says the cup is half empty, and the engineer says the cup has twice the required capacity. I’m not sure which way I feel about our first couple weeks in the boatyard.

We started moving aboard, but there are still about a dozen boxes in the van. (Yes, the storage locker is full, but maybe we can stack it a little higher) We’ve done a few projects, but they nearly all require re-doing, un-doing, or just doing more. So far, we’ve uninstalled far more than we’ve installed.

It started with the head, holding tank, hoses, and macerator pump. All that is gone, leaving just two through-hull fittings and a deck fitting. Now we need to find somebody who wants to take it all away. We installed a Nature’s Head composting toilet, which is working well enough (on the hard!), but we still have to make a permanent installation for ventilation. The big job is that the head floor needs to go down something like six inches, which means cutting a hole and fabricating a new fiberglass platform. That part will probably wait until we want to make a big mess … again. (Grinding out the fiberglass supports for the holding tank made the boat uninhabitable and sent us running to Sears for a shop-vac.)

Installing the “new” stove went really well, once we managed to lower the old one down and haul the new one up. If only the brackets didn’t need to be moved so it could gimbal! Ah well, we won’t be heeling the boat until we launch, so that one can wait. Along with the head floor project.

The next job we wanted to do was remove the bow pulpit because we could see that it needed to be re-bedded (badly!) Unfortunately, my shoulders didn’t fit into the anchor locker. Meps’ shoulders fit, but her upper torso (aka boobs) did not. (For the confused, a reminder: We have a cat ketch rig, with the mainmast located about two feet aft of the bow, and a bulkhead about three inches behind the mast.)

So in comes the crane, and out go the masts. OK, that makes it sound easy, but it wasn’t quite that easy — the spartight compound where the masts go through the deck wasn’t willing to let go of either the mast or the deck. The mizzen mast bound up, then made a mighty jump of about a foot before binding up again. When we did the mainmast, we spent an extra hour trying to break it free with hammers, wedges, and other implements of destruction, while the crane operator waited patiently in his cab, at $150 per hour, alternating between smoking a cigarette and chewing on a toothpick.

Today’s job was cutting, drilling, fitting, painting, glopping, and bolting down plywood “lids” to cover the mast holes in the deck. We wisely used the bolts that held the mast collar in, so we can’t lose them between now and when we need to put the masts back in, which may be months.

Waiting for the paint to dry, I scraped barnacle remnants off one side of the rudder. Now there’s some real, visible progress.

And of course, plumbing projects continue–I constructed a filter to (we hope) make the local water drinkable. Then I had an argument with the convoluted set of hoses and pipes between the sink drain and the through-hull fitting. I lost the first part of the argument: “There has to be a way to do this without so many !@#!@ junctions which could leak.” Now I understand why they are all needed, and I just want to make a version that doesn’t leak. I dunno when I’ll have a better plan or how many more two-dollar plumbing parts that will take.

And then there is the bit where the cup is definitely half-empty: Communications out here in the boonies.

This boatyard is remote enough that broadband internet is unavailable, and most cellphones do not work. (Ours gets signal here so rarely that we both jump up with excitement when it suddenly announces a voicemail — then loses signal to actually retrieve said voicemail.) I just ordered a powerful wifi bridge and antenna that I hoped would be able to get signal from someplace nearby and distribute it to our computer(s). After cabling it up and firing up the computer, no luck.

So I asked Meps to pick up family-sized can of soup at the grocery store. With that, and some electronic parts on order, I’m going to make a directional wi-fi “can-tenna.” And if that finally works, then the cup, or the can, will be half-full!

Crossing the border from the United States to Canada last week, the border guard asked the standard questions. What nationality are you? May I see some identification? What is the reason for your visit?

Answering that last question, Barry said, “Goin’ to see a man about a boat.”

After the border crossing, there was a long wait for the ferry to Vancouver Island, then a one-and-a-half-hour ferry trip, a long drive to Nanaimo, and another ferry to Gabriola Island. Why all this effort, when we have boats and designers right here in our local area?

Blame it on the Demotivators.

For almost ten years, Barry and I have been planning to build our own boat, from scratch. It’s a huge, daunting project, but it’s not impossible. It requires a number of skills, ranging from drafting to woodworking, fiberglass, plumbing, wiring, upholstery, rigging, and sail-making. Over the years, we’ve dabbled in most of those areas, and we think we can figure out what we need to know. We’re nonconformists, and we like things that are different.

The problem is, for almost ten years, we’ve been ridiculed, teased, and abused about the notion of building a boat. Total strangers think it’s their duty to convince us not to build a boat. People we thought were our friends think it’s cute to make fun of us. It’s happened over and over again, and I’d think I was hallucinating some of these horrible encounters, if Barry wasn’t right there experiencing it with me.

So I came up with a name for these people: Demotivators. They are the people who don’t want to see us succeed, they want us to fail.

Barry and I have studied the problem until we’re cross-eyed, wondering why there’s such vehemence. Mostly, it’s people who own plastic production boats. Perhaps they’re afraid some non-conformist will challenge the status quo and their Tupperware will lose value? Sometimes, though, we’ve been harassed by people who have built their own boats. Maybe they’re afraid they won’t be so special if we do it, too?

Regardless, it’s gotten us down. So we decided to make a trip to Canada and get motivated. We scheduled a consultation with Ted Brewer, who has designed lots of lovely traditional sailboats, many of them capable little ocean cruisers. We also scheduled a visit with Collin Wynne, who’s been working on a Benford dory in his backyard for the past ten years.

Our appointment with Ted was on a Monday morning, and despite the lack of electricity on Gabriola Island, which he and his wife assured us was a common occurrence, we covered a lot of ground. Ted looked at the specs for the boat we’re considering and gave us an evaluation “by the numbers.” He said it looked like a safe offshore boat with a reasonable capsize screening factor, but he had reservations about the flat dory bottom and the junk rig.

Ted also felt that the Benford dory would be an odd boat, hard to resell. He said a strip-planked or cold-molded hull, something with compound curves, would both perform better and have more market value. Even a plywood boat with a V-bottom or a multi-chine design would be more efficient and preferable to the flat-bottomed dory, as far as he’s concerned.

It was a good visit, and we came away with a lot of thoughts about hull shapes, rigs, keel and rudder designs. One of the biggest things, though, was the confirmation that we are not crazy, we can build a reasonably-sized boat in a couple of years and sail it around the world. Ted Brewer has known lots of people who’ve done just that over the years.

Ted Brewer is a Motivator.

From Ted and Betty’s house, we headed, on their recommendation, down to the south end of the island, where the marinas are. In addition to docks full of interesting boats, there is a boatbuilding school there, the Silva Bay Shipyard School. We wandered over to the office and tapped on the door, hoping for a tour.

Luckily for us, Les Jackson was in, and he answered lots of questions and took us around the school. It’s a small facility, with 16 students completing a 6-month program. The students divide into teams of 3 or 4 people, and each team builds a complete wooden boat, about a 12-footer, from lofting to completion, using traditional methods. It’s the only program of its kind, where the projects are selected so that students can complete an entire boat in one session.

Silva Bay gets students from all over the world, men and women who want to learn traditional methods of boatbuilding. We watched two fellows cooperating to sand down a spar, while another fellow came and went from the tool room, carefully notching a piece of wood to fit around the stem of a lapstrake sailing dinghy.

Afterwards, we hung out in the office and talked with Les about boats, boatbuilding, the school, the island, and life. Les is a former journalist who left that field and made a living building lots of things, including many small boats. He’s recently completed a house on Gabriola and bought a small cruising boat, so he can explore the local waters. He struck me as a nonconformist do-it-yourselfer, like us, and he offered a lot of encouragement to our backyard boat-building dream.

Les Jackson is a Motivator.

A few days later, we drove up to Collin Wynne’s house near the shore of Vancouver Island, north of Victoria. At first, I only had eyes for the big tarped object in the backyard: A 37-1/2 foot Benford dory. The hull, masts, and rudder are done, and he’s working on the interior. He plans to put the deck on this summer.

We clambered all over the boat, examining Collin’s craftsmanship. We sat for a long time in the cockpit, imagining her out on the ocean. We poked our noses in the spice cupboard and inspected the ceiling (which is actually the side). We examined portlights and lockers and squatted underneath to inspect the keel. We ran our hands over the topsides and had to walk all the way across the backyard to take in the whole thing. It’s a huge project for one person.

Afterwards, we sat in the house with a pot of tea, looking at the plans and photographs. I asked Collin, as tactfully as I could, what kind of experience he had in doing this sort of project. He’s retired, and I wondered whether he’d worked in some field that gave him boat-building skills.

No, he admitted he hadn’t done much along those lines. He modestly told me that he’d built the house we were sitting in, along with his previous house. And he’d built a sailing dory when he was a young lad. It was evident that Collin, like us, just decided that he had enough skills and enough smarts to figure it out. Along the way, he’s found help and encouragement from others, such as a fiberglass boat builder down the road and an esteemed wooden boat expert, Hugh Campbell, in Sidney.

We spent over six hours with Collin, which I consider extremely generous on his part — after all, he has a boat to build. He also told us to stay in touch and feel free to contact him with further questions as we get into our own boat-building project.

Collin Wynne is a Motivator.

When we came back across the border to the U.S., the guard asked us the usual questions, plus a number of questions about what we’d been doing and what we were bringing back from Canada. Any eggs or chicken? Meat? Produce?

“No, just a bit of bread,” answered Barry, truthfully. What we really brought back from Canada is not something that can be taxed or measured. What we brought back, this time, is the knowledge that there are three people who want us to build our own boat. What we brought back, this time, is motivation.