DOING IT YOURSELF

Not many events in life are as emotionally convoluted as when the plans for a sailboat arrive at the amateur builder’s home. The plans flutter out on the dining table, and quickly there arise intertwining shivers of heady anticipation and well-founded fear. If there are 10 pages of plans promising breathtaking beauty, within them are 100 things the prospective boatbuilder does not know how to do, ranging from water-sealing the deck hardware to somehow turning a 25ft spruce mast. Beyond the technical issues, the awestruck amateur rightly wonders: Do I have the character—the perseverance, the capacity to surf the waves of elation and despair—for the year or three or 10 this magnificent creation will demand?

There’s never been a better time to find out. As many production builders have evaporated from the under-30ft class, a tide of professional designers and naval architects has flooded the void with sophisticated plans for amateur builders. Modern materials—plywood, fiberglass and epoxy—make it possible to build lightweight, rotproof and prodigiously strong composite hulls through several techniques, most of them simpler than traditional plank-on-frame. In just the last few years, many designers have also started producing kits consisting of a building jig and all the hull panels and bulkheads through thealignment, and the panels are perfectly cut to plan. This eliminates one of the amateur’s prime trepidations—birthing a twisted banana of a hull—and erases many hours of front-end labor.