The Builder

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        Bill Smith built his first boat at age 10. It was a crude plywood affair, no more than six feet long. In Bill’s mind, it was meant to ply oceans.

        “Florida doesn’t have a lot of natural waterways, “Bill says, “so I put it in a canal down the street. I put my sister in ti to test it out. It immediately filled with water and went right to the bottom. I don’t think I put anything in the seams. I just nailed it together.”

        His next attempt was a canoe that he fashioned of corrugated aluminum siding. He pinched the ends together and put a seat into the middle, making a thwart. This time, he pressed blackjack tar into the seams. Eureka, the canoe floated! He made another canoe, and he and his friends spent hours in them, engaged in ferocious sea battles and Indian wars.

        When he was 19, Bill built a 14-foot flat-bottomed skiff with a little pointy bow, his own design. He put a 10-horsepower Johnson on it. It was constantly darting this way and that. So Bill but the bow off and made a pram of it. It acted a little better, but the boat still darted.

        “One day,” Bill recalls, “a buddy and I are out in the inlet and a big yacht goes by. I’m coming up behind it, coming on the huge wakes, going full speed. The first wake caught the blunt bow and threw us out of the boat with he motor wide open. It was chasing us all over the place, half filled with water. I finally managed to grab on to it. After that I gave the boat away. Didn’t want anything more to do with it.

        Then Bill discovered sailing. He went out in a Snark and was hooked. He began to borrow Hobies and other small boats from a dealer who was a friend. He decided he needed a boat of his own, and since he couldn’t afford one, he bought a set of plans for a 19-foot design by Bruce Roberts. It took him a year of working on it, putting in time during weekends and in the evenings after his job as an electrician welder at the nuclear power plant.

        Following that, yearning for a bigger boat with space for a cabin, he built a 20-foot sloop that slept two people. It was the first time he built a boat that called for a launching party. He named it Windy Lee, after his wife Wendy, and sailed it along the ICW in and around Fort Pierce for the next five years.

        When Bill met Reuel Parker in 1984 it marked the beginning of an unofficial partnership that continues to this day. Parker, noted for his traditional sailboat designs and cold-molded boats, asked Bill to help complete a 44-foot sharpie cat schooner named Teresa. And although the two men are opposites in countless ways, the combination somehow clicked. Over the years they have built a number of boats together in between their own separate projects. Most of these joint efforts have been cold-molded boats. The biggest was the 60-foot shoal-draft schooner Leopard.

        “I’m friends with everybody that I built a boat for,” Bill says. “And after I’m through building that boat, I check back on them. I keep in tough. How are you doing? How’s the boat? I want to see if any problems have developed with the boat. I’m not a hard-core bottom-line profit kind of person. I look at these projects as an adventure, as a chapter in my life. I want to maintain a relationship with these people and their boat.”

“These are long projects,” he says, “and three-quarters through one, I’ll hit the wall. It’s an effort to go on. But when you get through that, and she’s sitting their looking good, and you’re down to rigging her, that’s when you start getting satisfaction.”

        As always with Bill, the future is hazy. In his profession, projects come and go. There are gaps in the stream of income. And there are health concerns. Building boats, doing the hands-on work, is a toxic job. There are lots of chemicals—urethane paints, epoxies, glue, even wood dust is considered a likely carcinogen. Bill doesn’t always put on gloves, doesn’t always wear a respirator. When it’s 95 degrees in Florida, the last thing you want to do is cover your face and breather your own hot air. So Bill faces a dilemma. How does a boatbuilder build boats and stay healthy?

        He thinks about this a lot. “If I could ever figure out how to build boats and have other people do the work, if I could just run the operation, then it would be a lot easier.”

        But that’s when the water meets the bilge. It’s hard to find enough steady work to afford a facility and a permanent work crew. Failing boatyards are the norm, long-lasting ones the exception.

        “Most of the time in repair work, you’re just chasing rot. You have to practically chain saw the boat apart and I’m not into that. I’m also not into fiberglass. What I really like is creating something from scratch, working on all aspect—wood-working, electrical, welding, the rigging, the spars. I like wood, the traditional art. I like taking a pile of materials and making something out of it. That pays me more than the money. The satisfaction.

        Bill Smith is mild mannered, soft-spoken, humble to the core. For fun, he plays lead guitar in a band. For relaxing, he sails his 28-foot Egret, a sharpie design he built a few years back. It’s usually twilight. He holds the tiller in one hand, a cool drink in the other. Inside the laid-back placid exterior beats the soul of a true boatbuilder.

        “I can’t draw it,” he says, “but if you can draw it, I can build it.”

So he keeps on building them, and they depart for faraway places. And they make it safe, too. Bill never ever forgets to fill in the seams.