Construction Log: Getting Ready to Plank - June 1980

Your humble Scribe is back to continue the story of the building of Abrazo.  (See the last Construction Log chapter: "Framing with Steam-bent Ribs, May 1980” posted February 20, 2018.)


Richard completed the framing of the new boat by early June, 1980, and wrote to Manuel Campos with that news and a few photos.  As he told Manuel, he bent the white oak ribs with steam, instead of sawing them to shape as Campos’ drawings had indicated.  He used more frames as well, placing them closer together than Campos had called for.  


Now, with her backbone of gumwood and fir, yellow cedar harpin and sheer clamp, 88 white oak ribs, and the yellow cedar deck-framing, the exoskeleton of the boat was complete.  

Richard removed some of those temporary molds from the interior.  He would not construct bulkheads until after the boat was planked; but he built and installed hanging knees to strengthen the boat’s framing.  

In preparation for planking, Richard looked again at the boat’s shape, laying 7/8” fir battens stretched across the ribs like a plank to test for fairness. Depending on the way a rib is hammered into its socket, there might be a bulge in the upper curve, or a slackness to the lower curve. If the curves of the ribs are not perfectly fair, planks will not lay solidly against them. Richard dubbed the frames in the places indicated by his battens, looking for that perfect shape.

As a shipwright working for fishermen and yachtsmen in Bellingham since 1973, he had replaced many a damaged or deteriorating plank in wooden boats.  For those jobs he could make a “shutter plank” by taking measurements and bevels of the space to be filled with a new plank.  But planking a new hull from garboard to sheer strake was “a whole different movie.”  Needing expert advice, Richard consulted his mentor, Bill Modrell, by phone, until Modrell agreed to come to Bellingham to help line off the hull for planking.     

More about Modrell in a minute.  He and his wife, Kay, scheduled their visit to Bellingham for June 26-29, a full moon weekend.  Before then, Richard and I took off for a weekend tour of a half-dozen other boat-building projects, several of them on Guemes Island.  

At Dog Gone (Dog Island now) Boat Works on Guemes, we saw a loft floor under construction.  Like Richard, shipwright David Hartford was building a new boat while also working for a living on Other People’s boats.  Dave offered lots of information about mast and rigging bargains in the area, including the spruce mast he had salvaged when his beautiful sailboat, Vixen, was destroyed in a tammy lift disaster. (Photo story from the Port Townsend Leader)

 In 1982, Richard would come back for that mast, but on this summer weekend he was collecting ideas, and showing me the variety of boat-building efforts in the area.  

At another Guemes Island shop, Kenny had raised his molds for Sinbad, but he hadn’t carved a rabbet in the backbone yet.  There are as many different ways to build as there are boatbuilders.  

In the third shop we visited, Vic’s boat was all planked … an encouraging sight to my novice eyes.   

We caught the ferry back to Anacortes and found David Jackson’s yard; his boat was fully planked and decked.  Jackson used “East Coast” methods (and that’s all I’m gonna say about it).  

   

 In La Connor, we heard about construction of the double-ender, Black Bart. 

No one was home at Peter’s shop in Edison, but we could see that he’d made progress with his planking behind a wall of Pacific Northwest blackberries just like the one guarding Abrazo.  

This photo probably from 1981, as Abrazo appears to be fully planked behind that blackberry bramble.  Georgia Pacific Pulp Mill steams away beyond the boat.  

Back in Bellingham, our first wedding anniversary dawned on Saturday, June 21, 1980.  We celebrated our fortieth this past summer, 2019, with a very fine dinner at Guiseppe’s Al Porto overlooking Squalicum Harbor; but neither of us can remember how we celebrated that first year.   No doubt we reviewed boat construction progress and plans:  our lives were well-devoted to that boat.   

I think it’s valid to say that building Abrazo was like a pregnancy.  My husband … this intense, talented, opinionated, gnarly man …  was wholly absorbed in the growth of this boat, all of his resources, physical, emotional, and intellectual devoted to the new creation.  Building Abrazo in his mind, even when he was sleeping, he endured a complex process of assembly and growth going on 24-7. 

My job was Support Person, including preparing to host Bill and Kay Modrell during their upcoming weekend visit.  

Bill Modrell:  Mentor and Legend

 Richard’s friendship with Modrell began in 1969, when Richard lived aboard his schooner, Sea Lark, moored in the Duwamish waterway near Tripple and Everett Marine Ways.  Bill Modrell, working partner with Warren Everett since around 1950, became Baila’s go-to expert.  Baila hired Modrell to complete many of the repairs Sea Lark required … including removing and replacing rotten frames and planks.  Observing every move The Master made, assisting whenever he could, Richard learned everything Modrell had to offer about boat-building. 

 Modrell would have proposed innumerable topics of conversation while working, because that’s the way he was.  So when the topic of deer-hunting came up, and Modrell learned that his 23-year-old client owned a shotgun inherited from his grandpa, but had never gone hunting, he invited Baila to hunt the south end of Camano Island with him.   That led to weekend camping hunts, learning how to dress a deer, sharing venison scrapple made by Kay Modrell, and maybe sipping some of the fine elderberry wine Bill and Kay made in their West Seattle home.

 
Richard was working for Delta Marine Industries at that time, a little ways up the Duwamish.  He used everything he learned from Modrell, building molds including sheer clamps for fiberglass boats of every size, and then building the wooden interiors for those boats.  Delta Marine typically halted construction during summer months, while their boats were fished in Alaskan waters.  That’s when Richard could sail away from the Duwamish and out to Port Townsend Bay.  In the summer of 1971, Baila did some boat work in Port Townsend, including the cockpit of the S/V Keely Bogus, owned by Jim Daubenberger.  That September, Daubie and brother Joe, along with a motley crew of Port Townsend sailors, set sail on a great ocean voyage, riding wind and wave south to San Francisco.  Baila joined that crew.  

Sometime the next year, after Vicky Benford was unable to convince Baila to sell the schooner Sea Lark to her, her marine architect husband Jay Benford designed the sailboat Sunrise, to be built by Bill Modrell at Tripple and Everett Marine.  Richard had been hired off and on at Tripple and Everett, mostly to sweep up shavings and sawdust, but in 1972 Modrell wanted Baila to apprentice with him on construction of the Sunrise.  That plan did not work out for one reason or another.  
Construction was nearly complete on the Sunrise when Bill Modrell and his hunting partner Dennis McCandless endured a tragic road accident in Montana.  Modrell’s neck was broken, rendering him paraplegic.  Despite his disabilities, and powered by the fact that boatbuilding was the only thing he really knew, Modrell took work as a consultant.  He made appearances in a booth at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival:  Ask the Expert. 

            
Modrell came to Bellingham at least once during the seventies to help Baila work out repair problems on the F/V Rauma.  Richard remembers pushing Bill’s wheelchair over the wooden docks to get to the boat; and paying his consulting fee as part of the job.  

Now Modrell was coming back to Bellingham, this time to stay three nights in our apartment above Bob's Super Saw Shop.on Cornwall Avenue. I think our friend Jim Thompson was one of the guys we recruited to help haul Bill in his wheelchair up and down that flight of stairs.  (Remember those days of being utterly capable when it came to surmounting a physical challenge?)

How did Bill Modrell get to be such an expert in the construction of boats? He was an unstoppable storyteller when I knew him in 1980.  I’ll share a scene from his history he sparked in my imagination:

Two tall blond teen-agers stand on the banks of Seattle’s Duwamish (“the Dumwash”)  River, admiring a beat-up wooden dory eighteen feet long.  The year is 1936.  The brothers are twins, Bill and Bob Modrell, raised in West Seattle with a proud, Scottish heritage.  Both sport well-muscled backs and shoulders, recently earned during a summer of logging with the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps, part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to combat the Great Depression). 

“She’s floating,” says one twin.  “Uncle Jim could help us caulk her seams.”

“And she’s got a mast,” says the other.  “We could make the riggin’.” 

 A wry smile of satisfaction graces each face and the Modrell boys are launched on their boat-building careers.  They bought the skiff with nothing more than their willingness to work her over.  Salvage, barter, and part-time jobs got materials for caulking and rigging, while Uncle Jimmy sprinkled clues and guidance. 

The boys’ Aunt, noting their devotion to this boat, enrolled them in the Edison Vocational Boat School, a project the Seattle School System had just opened to prepare high school grads for real work.  The Boat School’s founders scoured the surrounding boatyards for professionals willing to teach, and in 1937 they hired famed Scotsman, 55-year-old James G.B. Chambers, trained in Scotland’s River Clyde Boat Works.   

What an industrious scene those first students at the Boat School experienced.  On the north shore of Lake Union, near the foot of Stoneway Avenue, the School rented the former Schertzer Boat Works, including a dry dock, equipment and machinery.  Vic Franck’s yard was next door.  Blanchard Boat Company operated at the foot of Wallingford Avenue.  [See History of Lake Union Boatyards]


According to Scott Chambers, his grandfather Jimmy was chosen to teach at Edison school because of his passion for lofting.  Jimmy was a genius in this field, a whiz at the math.  Other yards had him working with their new apprentices on the loft floors.

 
Scott goes on to say that that first class of students at Edison was the most talented by far.  Richard Baila remembers that Bill Modrell showed him a photo of that first class of boatbuilders, pointing out that several students went on to become marine architects who could draw plans much more friendly to the builders’ needs than the “funny papers” drawn by designers who had never had building experience.  One student, John Kelly, became the lead naval architect for Marco, and designed the Marco crabbers; Earl Wakefield, who later founded Admiral Marine on Lake Union, was a star pupil, and took over teaching at the Boat School before moving his family and his business to Port Townsend in the 1980s; Bill Modrell graduated to work in yards all over the lake before he partnered with Warren Everett in 1950; Bob Modrell would move to Sitka, Alaska to teach boatbuilding at Sheldon Jackson College; and Bill Garden, who would design the schooner Sea Lark, became a premier marine architect in the area. 

The first boat built by the Edison school was the S/V Kelitan, a 34 ½’ sloop designed by Ed Monk.  In a certain biography of Monk, Bio of Ed Monk, Hugh Garrett, the amateur builder for whom the Kelitan was designed, states that he had just about completed the lofting of the boat in 1936 when Ed Monk suggested to him that the newly-established Edison Boat School could build it.  Monk did all the negotiations with the school;  Modrell and his fellow students got a whole lot of hands-on building experience; and the Kelitan was launched after 18 months work. 

According to Bill Modrell, Jimmy Chambers incited such productivity in his students that along with building the Kelitan during that 18-month course, the school also completed a 30’ cruiser for a school teacher, several outboard boats, numerous repairs, and had a 34’ motor-sail boat half-planked when a fire at the school destroyed it ... along with a good part of Vic Franck’s boatyard next door. 

It was at the Puget Mill Company, where he worked with a crew starting again to build that 34’ motor-sail boat, that Modrell began to devise his own methods for doing things.  For instance, there was no painting the loft floor so you could use pencils – you had to use soapstone on lampblack and that pushed Modrell to develop the multiple batten method of lofting.  


Bill worked in Longview and Kelso, building Tollycraft boats.  He went to work for Vic Franck’s resurrected boatyard.  Franck then rented the molds for the Kelitan from Jimmy Chambers and built another boat, the Witauga.  This time, Bill recalled, they put all the ribands on the outside of the molds, the old-fashioned way, which led to a slack bilge and loss of shape. 

Bill worked at Jensen Motor Boat, at Grandy’s, at Drum and Ladderage where the lightest thing he did was shaping 4” x 12” fir guards for a scow repair.  He remembered “rammin’ lots of oakum” then “smearing the whole thing with cement.”  He learned a bit of blacksmithing when he had to make a metal fitting for a stem to pull the boat.  The acetylene torch is too slow.  You need a forge.

He took a week off in 1942 to marry Kay.  He took a year or so off to serve with the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during WWII. 

By 1945 he was back at Grandy’s building, lofting, forging.  In 1950, Earl Wakefield told him that Warren Everett’s partner, Donald Tripple, had bailed out, and Warren had a boat to build.  Bill did not have capital to invest, but he had an impressive bank of skills and muscle.  Everett accepted him as a full partner.  Boats produced at Tripple and Everett Marine Ways  

Bill built Bristol Bay set net skiffs, gillnetters and seiners for the Alaska fishing trade.  He devised a production-line style for both frames and planking.  He devised a jig on the floor for building pilot houses.  He preferred to build a boat right-side up, but he could do it the other way, too.  In 1964, he built seven V-bottom boats in six weeks for Geographical Services.  

Modrell’s motto came from Nathaniel Herreschoff:   “Strive for perfection within the time allowed.”  

Lining-Off the Planking with Ram Lines


Modrell often shared the idea that he’d had no compunction during his career about plagiarizing a trick or a tool; "otherwise you did not survive."  As an expert consultant, he freely poured forth his observations and advice along with whatever historical background or amusing diversion came to his mind during the two days he spent with us in Bellingham.


The first stage of planking, “lining off” is a process of dividing the hull into three sections with “ram lines.” Use two flexible battens, wider than they are thick.  Lay them as naturally as possible to divide the hull into three sections:  bottom, bilge and topsides.   

Then there are all kinds of considerations:  Is the boat going to have a guard?  If so, how wide a guard?  This will determine the width of the sheer plank, i.e. the top plank. The portion of that top plank exposed, after the guard is in place, should match the width of the other topsides planks.   (The topmost batten in the above photo shows the bottom of the sheer plank.)


How many topsides planks?  Too many, and the ends become too narrow for fastening correctly.


How wide are the strake ends?  Some of the bilge strakes will show above the water line; these ends should be the same width as the ends of the topside strakes.  


And then there’s the wood pile consideration:  what are the widths with which one has to work?


Abrazo’s design carries the beam far aft.  That means the shape of the stern presents a need for wider material nearer the top.  


Abrazo’s shapely bilge made it important to keep the ends of the bottom planks up, particularly in the stern.


In extreme circumstances one plank may have to turn into two toward the stern. Extra planks in the stern are called “stealers.”

“Keep the ends up,” says Modrell. 
You see that mug of water with a straw on his tray.  His wife Kay had her own mantra designed to maintain her husband’s health:  “Keep the liquids going in.”  


While Modrell and Baila studied Abrazo’s hull, balancing design factors and discussing every strake, I enjoyed delightful and instructive domestic time with Kay Modrell upstairs in the apartment.  She was a great knitter, hands always busy on one project or another.  She talked about her family; her daughter Chris, her son Patrick.  She talked about the trauma of dealing with Bill’s accident, which came two years after her own car accident and drastic hip repair that left her limping.  Kay had plenty of wisdom to impart on the topic of keeping an active boat-builder strong and happy; and she and I were already on the same page as far as home-cooking went.  I would have put my strawberry-rhubarb pie up against hers without a flinch! 
But what an inspiration she was to me after all:  strength of spirit, strength of generosity, strength of ingenuity.  To be a true Support Person to a boat-builder, you better have your own Wholeness Deep Within.  

Richard had installed the garboard plank before Modrell's visit.  The bottom-most plank, the garboard is a wide plank that "latches on to everything."  Fitted to the rabbet in the deadwood, it is  critical to tying the hull together.  

Once Bill and Kay had gone home to West Seattle,  Richard paused the planking process to make a bed for the engine.  

Here you see the stern end, and a hole in the deadwood to accommodate the engine shaft:

The line of the shaft is established by that string you can barely see stretched down the side of the deadwood to a cross board.  The portside engine bed is in, to be fastened through frames and floor timbers.  Two molds aft of a notch in the deadwood will stay in place a while longer. 

Note that three bilge stringers on the port side are fastened through every other frame, bolts staggered to maintain the integrity of the stringer.  The temporary ribands between the stringers are not fastened and will come out soon.  Ribands below the bottom bilge stringer have already been removed.

Jay Taber holds the overhead electrical wires out of the way, while an expert crane operator lowers the Volvo diesel engine through the gap in deck framing where the cabin will eventually be built. 

Next up:  Planking, Part Two:  Including Choice of Fastenings.