Shipshape: From tip to stern, this boat's got family written all over it

I smelled trouble at the nametags.

Here we were, nearly a dozen families and couples, bunched together in the top floor of the Center for Wooden Boats, bracing for the uncertain task of building a small fleet of small boats.

My son picked up his pen, held it over his nametag and said, "How do you spell 'Spawn of Satan'?"

It wasn't enough that I had signed us up to construct a navigable sailboat in just four days as part of the center's fledgling family boat-building workshop. It wasn't enough that I dove into this with no particular woodworking skills outside of my birdhouse phase. But I also had to be doing it with, well, my family — my wife, Beth, she of the pained smile of forbearance; and my two children, ages 11 and 14, who dreaded the thought of Two Lost Weekends to Dad's boat obsession.

Beth had gamely prepped the kids with chipper talk about how this would be a fun thing to do together. Molly, 11, had been bribed that morning with bacon and fresh bagels and the prospect of naming the boat "Bessea" and painting it to look like a cow. My son, let's call him Spawn, felt the boat should be named "ISTWCWBAIGWTSB," as in, "I Spent Two Weekends at the Center for Wooden Boats and All I Got Was This Stupid Boat."

To be fair, these poor people have been through a lot with my boat thing.

First I toyed with the idea of converting Beth's canoe into a sailboat. My idea was to find a way to get on Lake Washington and sail past Bill Gates' house. Here he has all this money, I could say, but we both get the same view.

I even bought plans, but then bought a real sailboat, a 30-year-old fiberglass sloop that lived up to every boat's promise of being a hole in the water into which you throw money. Two outings, involving lackluster wind and a motor that wouldn't work, along with Molly getting hit in the face as I pulled on the starter cord, convinced the kids that Dad had once again gone bonkers over something, and they didn't need to be part of this.

Then I saw the boat. It was on the balcony of the Seattle Boat Show, squirreled off in a corner. The Lake Union Skiff was mahogany, maybe 10 feet long, with three seats and a sailing rig. Bob Perkins, executive director of the Center for Wooden Boats, explained that he imagined families building an entire fleet and sailing them as a low-key regatta. Like the center itself, the boat would become the focal point of a small community built around wooden boats.

And each boat would cost $500, sail included.

Not only did that make this the least-expensive boat at the boat show, it was the rare breakthrough concept that might wrest a small corner of the sailing world away from the rich.

Filled with the romance and foolhardiness best known to lovers of wooden boats, I signed up. So did 10 others.

"The price is absolutely perfect," Debra Lee, another workshop participant, later told me. "Five hundred bucks and you have a boat at the end of the day? You can't beat that."

Only one problem: You have to build it. The shores and garages of Puget Sound are littered with half-done boat projects of hundreds of well-intended dreamers. A four-day workshop under the guidance of trained professionals promised better results — in fact, Perkins promised we would all sail on the last day — but I had my doubts.

We moved to the nearby Naval Reserve building on South Lake Union, gathering in a large room with stacks of mahogany transoms, bottoms, sides, stems, tillers, gunwales and centerboards.

We glued and drilled the plywood sides to the stem, the curved timber that forms the leading edge of the bow. We bent the sides around a center mold and attached them to the transom, the heavy plank across the stern. Using copper wire, we literally sewed together two bottom pieces, then sewed them to the sides.

It was at this point that I noticed that we had wrestled the two-dimensional world of pre-cut boat pieces into a very real three-dimensional boat.

It was a revelation.

"This is one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life," I said.

Center dock master Patrick Gould and a team of volunteers guided us through each step, rendered spot assistance for broken screws and tackled the sticky job of mixing the different epoxies to seal and glue the boat's joints.

On Sunday, my son, who is really named Tim, found he could swing into discrete challenges like cutting and pulling the wire stitches from the bottom. I worked on the boat all four days; the rest of the family rotated in and out to keep appointments with Little League, soccer and a birthday party.

Other families took to the process in different ways. Some older children were hanging right in there on every task, from drilling to sanding. Younger kids would help with glue or other small tasks or simply peel off and take to running around the reserve building's basketball court.

On the morning of Day Four, we were actually ahead of schedule. Gould talked about sailing Sunday afternoon. Our temporary boat shop was redolent with sawdust and shavings. Eleven solid skiffs, broad of beam and with elegant sweeping gunwales of red cedar, sat proudly on their sawhorses.

That morning's Seattle Times had a story of mine on the science behind the challenge billionaire Craig McCaw has mounted to win the America's Cup yacht race. His two new boats were costing tens of millions of dollars. We had 11 new boats for less than one-10,000th of the cost and none of the science.

"There's no math in this boat," said Brad Rice, who designed the boat off the top of his head.

Then we hit a glitch. The shape of our sails was off. They would have to be reordered.

But we did have oars. Late Sunday, we carried our boats to the center docks. At Perkins' direction, we attached a sprig of green to our boat, so it would know to return to land, splashed some Martinelli's sparkling cider on the hull, named it and rowed off.

It floated, rowed straight and turned like a happy beach ball. And like every proud family with a new baby, we could boast she was ours.

Eric Sorensen: 206-464-8253 or esorensen@seattletimes.com.