Pleasure Craft: Stan Bishoprick follows his muse to make modern classics

Physicists theorize that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are "superstrings" — infinitesimally tiny particles that "vibrate" to give nature its form, as if the music from a violin string could create a flower or a galaxy.

Is this strange but oddly compelling idea why we respond so universally to music? Certainly quarreling humanity exhibits eerie agreement when it comes to sound, grace and beauty. Which culture isn't moved by a haunting folk song, blush of sunrise, or the slice of a sleek, spray-dappled hull lancing through a gleaming sea? Boats enchant some of us so strongly that "boatstruck" men liken their infatuation to the longing for women. And sailboats, designed to squirt forward between the opposing push of wind and water, are, in their theft of free energy, the most alluring boats of all. The swell of sail and hull and thrust of mast and line has the kind of romantic tension that can be ratcheted with turnbuckle or winch handle.

But which are the loveliest sailboats? Which come closest to universal music?

That's as easy to answer as best song, prettiest damsel or noblest building. Yet Stan Bishoprick, a Clark County businessman, opera singer, horse trainer and river dweller, contends sailboat design reached a peak early in the last century that today's more practical, cost-effective pleasure craft don't equal.

"There's something that people recognize as beauty," he declares while steering his classic 72-foot Radiance on the Columbia River, the teak deck cupped and curving with the geometry of a new leaf, the mahogany gleaming under a dozen coats of varnish. And to prove it, other boaters kept throttling down to take his boat's picture. We were riding a glamour queen, reincarnated from a design just about as old as the 65-year-old Bishoprick himself.

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LIKE AN ADOLESCENT who never forgets a pinup, hot rod or rock song that poignantly captures the most impressionable years, Bishoprick never forgot the graceful yet seaworthy sailboats designed by L. Francis Herreshoff that he saw drawn in 1940s issues of Rudder magazine.

Thumb-worn copies of the periodical, bound like Bibles by Stan's father, still line his living-room bookshelf.

He not only didn't forget, he decided to bring the designs into the 21st century. Bishoprick is the only builder in the world constructing classic wooden sailboats with modern techniques, carving out a narrow niche that has once more landed the boats in magazines: Déjà vu all over again.

Bishoprick was drafted into the boat-obsessed community as a teen. "When all my friends were going to football games I was drilling holes and putting in screws," Stan recalls. He spent seven years of his youth helping his father build a sturdy Herreshoff design they called Corahleen, a 52-foot, lifeboat-shaped motor-sailor that has served the family faultlessly for four decades. The name is taken from mother Cora and Bishoprick's three sisters, among them former U.S. Rep. Jolene Unsoeld.

Yet it was a longer and lovelier Herreshoff design in the pages of Rudder, the legendary 72-foot Ticonderoga, that stole Stan's heart. A sleek symphony of wood and varnish, it was a winner of 24 of its first 37 races, a setter of more elapsed-time records than any ocean racer in history, and utterly unobtainable.

Or, maybe not.

Even before he was married, Bishoprick started stockpiling mahogany and lead to build a replica. It was a "someday" project that persisted until, after 30 years, he ran out of excuses not to do it.

When the rest of the boating world had mostly given up wood for fiberglass and abandoned throat-catching sheer lines for sales-clinching interior room, Stan took time from his profitable but prosaic wood-preservative business to go back to the future. He decided not just to build Herreshoff's classic designs but to build them better, then sell them to a world that had forgotten just how perfect these melodies of the water could be.

His copy of Ticonderoga was named Radiance after Bishoprick saw a dazzling shaft of light hit the Columbia while driving the I-205 bridge, another invasion of modernity built almost directly above his parents' riverside home.

He founded a company called Legendary Yachts, launched his craft into the Columbia River, and found that his high-price market was in the East Coast and Europe.

And there lies the fascinating conundrum. In his independence and determination, Bishoprick is a quintessential Northwesterner who has bull-headedly built something that is perversely too elegant and traditional for Northwest tastes. He's Clark County in humble personality and Newport and Narragansett in soul, confident enough to bet on boats no one was asking for. "He felt that if it was his lifelong dream, there must be others out there who felt the same way," daughter Kelsi Pollard explains.

That conviction is still being tested.

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BISHOPRICK IS NOT so much an originator as an appreciator and improver, someone who thinks style is as important as seaworthiness, quality as much as quantity, and beauty as much as fun.

He uses mahogany, teak, maple and fir to make something that isn't essential, and offers no apology for it. "If I were a tree, I'd like nothing better than to end up as a wooden boat," he says. "I think trees bring their souls with them, and that's why wooden boats are magical."

L. Francis Herreshoff, the cantankerous son of cantankerous Nathaniel Herreshoff (an America's Cup designer who built for Astors and Vanderbilts) was positively snobbish for wood. L. Francis dismissed fiberglass as "plastic," or worse, as "frozen snot," and called the modern boats of Marblehead Harbor "floating swill."

(As part and proud owner of a fiberglass sailboat, I'd like to go on record as being deeply hurt.)

Bishoprick has none of this snobbishness, but he knows what he likes, and moors it on the dock that juts from his comfortable but unpretentious cedar home on the Columbia River at Vancouver.

The ketch Radiance seizes the eye first, rearing at its moorings against a 3-knot spring runoff like a horse anxious to go riding. This ocean-capable yacht carried his family for 20,000 miles to Maine and back, its sea-kindly ride demonstrating the timeless common sense of Herreshoff's design.

Clipper-ship bow, jutting bowsprit, mahogany bent for an oval cockpit, carved killer whales on side rails, maple paneling, prism decklights, tan sails, gold-plated ports (most of the detailing made in Port Townsend) and its relatively narrow 16-foot beam all point to the boat's 1936 pedigree and spare-no-cost construction.

The light carbon fiber masts that help it balance better, modern framing that shaved 15,000 pounds of weight, power winches, state-of-the-art electronics and conveniences such as washer and dryer update Radiance for today. It took 30 months and 52,000 hours to build.

Cost for a copy? About $3 million.

If the big boat inspires awe, it's the 33-foot Araminta on the other side of the dock that adds heartache, a sliver of Alaska yellow cedar and teak almost too pretty to touch. It's finished like a piece of furniture and sails like a rocket, reports Chris Kluck, executive director of the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, who gave it a try. It also costs about $220,000, or nearly three times the price of a production fiberglass cousin with far more room and conveniences.

Both boats are wildly impractical for you and me. But oh, what songs they are.

And Stan? He's just a regular guy, who looks cocky as a 14-year-old when he straddles the helm station as if it were a pony and tacks Radiance on the Columbia River. Son-in-law Will Pollard happily handles lines and sails, but the wheel — well, that usually stays in Stan's hands.

"It wasn't until we were out in a storm that he really, really enjoyed it," daughter Kelsi recalls. "I came up from below and there were these 30-foot seas and I said, 'Dad, is this going to be OK?' And he said, 'It's fine, just fine.' And he was grinning! He loves storms. It isn't the destination for him, it's the getting there."

Which is pretty much the motto of sailors.

Pop culture sorts us into stereotypes these days: the pushy salesman, the ditzy environmentalist, the shallow socialite, the manipulative journalist, the dopey slacker. Hollywood loves this kind of shorthand, and reinforces it.

By stereotype Bishoprick is supposed to be the backwoods businessman, a Bubba who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

Doesn't fit.

Sure, on one level Bishoprick is just a Clark County boy who lives a half-mile from his parents' house and made his fortune by turning around Dad's money-draining wood-preservative division. If you've built a deck, there's a good chance you've used lumber from his Exterior Wood Inc., which incidentally earns pretty good marks from the Environmental Protection Agency and state Department of Ecology.

On another level, however, Bishoprick has made all kinds of interesting choices. He was studying to sing opera at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., when he fell in love with a girl named Nancy (who was in the chorus of "Aida") and decided to return to his father's lumber business and raise a family instead of risking it by pursuing the cruel competitiveness of the opera world.

And that might have been the end of it. Two sons, one daughter, a waterfront home and a millionaire's success after early hardscrabble years. His family is tight-knit: Kelsi lives behind him and son-in-law Will works in the business. Son Rick has helped on boats, lumber and the race horses; son Kiel has inherited his father's love of music and has a rising rock band called Debris.

But Bishoprick wasn't content simply to succeed.

"What's unique about Stan is he marches to his own drummer," says Robert Bailey, director of Portland Opera and a friend since both studied opera in college. Bailey has since recruited Bishoprick to head the opera board. "He epitomizes the independent spirit of the Northwest (and) is one of those people who by necessity have to be self-employed. He listens to himself."

Or "thinks outside the box," as his daughter put it. Bishoprick has trained his horses on a treadmill to simulate uphill running in hopes the conditioning will eventually give them an advantage on a level track. He's experimenting with a wood-preservative idea that might eliminate chemicals altogether. And he's taken a family backyard boat project and turned its lessons into a unique product.

It started with Corahleen, built during high school. Bishoprick's tea-totaling mother christened it with a bottle of milk and the family joined a race to Hawaii. The clan came in dead-last because Mom was so nervous about sailing in the dark that she made them take the sails down at night.

Oh, well. Each summer, they'd take the boat up to Canada.

And in all those decades of churning out treated lumber and building family, Bishoprick's artistic restlessness never withered. He drew. He photographed. He sang. He climbed mountains. He bought race horses. Eventually, he rejoined operatic productions.

And finally he plunged into that cut-throat, romantic and opinionated lunacy called the boat business, combining dream with family. When Bishoprick finished Radiance in 1996 (christened once more with milk that accidentally showered a TV cameraman) he left for a two-year voyage not just with Kiel and Kelsi, but with her new husband and newborn baby Dori. The child learned to walk at sea at age nine months, and has retained an uncanny sense of balance.

In a classic match-up, Radiance met, raced and sometimes beat the original Ticonderoga, which is once more back on the East Coast after having been briefly owned by Portland's Robert F. Johnson in the '60s. "It wasn't until we raced her that we really learned this boat," Bishoprick says.

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LEGENDARY YACHTS takes Herreshoff designs and builds them, saving weight by using galvanized steel frames, which are covered with a sandwich of overlapping wood layers bound by glue and finished with epoxy. The result is a plywood-strong, steel-tight, fiberglass-smooth finish that retains the classic lines of wooden boats but eliminates their seams and keeps the bilge bone-dry.

Wood tends to be quieter, warmer and more forgiving of bumps than competing materials, and if taken care of can last almost indefinitely. Ticonderoga cost $15,000 when it was built in 1936 and, regularly updated, recently sold for a hundred times that.

"I can't see why Radiance shouldn't last a hundred years," Bishoprick says. Indeed, Seattle wooden-boat enthusiast Scott Rohr's insurance company has a policy on a working wooden tug built in 1889.

Radiance has been followed by such Bishoprick yacht-magazine cover girls as Bounty, Mistral and Araminta. Yet cost has kept demand for the traditional designs low, and so, since sailboats typically make up only 15 percent of the boating market, Bishoprick is branching into classic powerboats.

It turns out that New Englanders and Europeans have a longer sense of history, and that's where Legendary Yachts tend to sell. Locally, where wealth is new and boat-building history is based on what's useful for working folks, even rich buyers sometimes don't get it. If you can get a fat, floating, fiberglass RV powerboat with sliding-glass doors and satellite TV for a third the price, why shell out for a real boat like Radiance?

This regional difference in tradition, taste and sense of time is so intriguing that the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival is hosting a day-long seminar about it on Sept. 5. "What is the maritime culture of our region?" asks the director, Kluck. "There's no tradition here of families owning one boat and transferring it from one generation to the next." What Easterners consider an heirloom, we label an extravagance. Who's right?

Wood-enthusiast Rohr, the seminar organizer, would seem to be a Legendary Yacht sympathizer. Yet he may aim some fire Bishoprick's way. Why, he asked, must a western Washington builder re-create the East Coast's oft-imitated Herreshoff when great Northwest yacht designers such as Ted Geary are ignored?

Because of teenage passion and a 30-year dream, not reason or geographic loyalty. Bishoprick saw, he built, he sailed. Similarly, he based his living-room addition on Frank Lloyd Wright designs. The Herreshoffs, in influence and arrogance, are arguably the Frank Lloyd Wrights of boat design.

It's all about emotion. When Bishoprick started on his replica of Ticonderoga, craftsmen came from as far away as Florida and didn't want to finish. Will Pollard had to set a completion date because, "These boat guys are artists. They never want to stop."

Herreshoff understood that. Not everyone can own a Radiance, but everyone can fall in love.

Bishoprick puts it this way. "If you can't anchor in a harbor, go ashore, light a campfire for a dinner on the beach, look back at your boat and not have your heart jump, then you haven't experienced boating."

William Dietrich is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff reporter.