How to Build a Boat
A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Part ode to building something with one’s hands in the modern age, part celebration of the beauty and function of boats, and part moving father-daughter story, How to Build a Boat is a bold adventure.
Once an essential skill, the ability to build a clinker boat, first innovated by the Vikings, can seem incomprehensible today. Yet it was the clinker, with its overlapping planks, that afforded us access to the oceans, and its construction has become a lost art that calls to the do-it-yourselfer in all of us. John Gornall heard the call.
A thoroughly unskilled modern man, Gornall set out to build a traditional wooden boat as a gift for his newborn daughter. It was, he recognized, a ridiculously quixotic challenge for a man who knew little about woodworking and even less about boat-building. He wasn’t even sure what type of wood he should use, the tools he’d need, or where on earth he'd build the boat. He had much to consider…and even more to learn.
But, undaunted, he embarked on a voyage of rediscovery, determined to navigate his way back to a time when we could fashion our future and leave our mark on history using only time-honored skills and the materials at hand. His journey began in East Anglia, on England’s rocky eastern coast. If all went according to plan, it would end with a great adventure, as father and daughter cast off together for a voyage of discovery that neither would forget, and both would treasure until the end of their days.
How to Build a Boat celebrates the art of boat-building, the simple pleasures of working with your hands, and the aspirations and glory of new fatherhood. John Gornall “tells the inspiring story of how even the least skilled of us can make something wonderful if we invest enough time and love” (The Daily Mail) and taps into the allure of an ancient craft, interpreting it in a modern way, as tribute to the generations yet to come. “Both the book, and place, are magical” (The Sunday Telegraph).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British journalist Gornall beautifully documents the year he spent building a wooden boat for his young daughter. After being an absentee dad to his grown son, the 58-year-old hoped one day to teach his two-year-old to navigate, believing that "the sea is the sworn ally of imagination." Owning almost no tools and having no woodworking skills, Gornall, living on England's eastern coast, gave himself a crash course in boatbuilding from books and experts and bought what seemed at first an "utterly indecipherable" schematic plan with the hopes that he could finish the project in a year. Gornall's prose is amusing, personal, and informative as he weaves in the history of boat building, especially the style first developed by the Vikings that inspired his boat. With self-deprecating humor, Gornall tells of his own failed attempts to row across the Atlantic, including one that he survived "thanks to sheer dumb luck and a great deal of highly motivated thrashing about." When his boat is finally seaworthy nearly two years after he began the project, Gornall acknowledges he has "created a vessel of a father's love, a gift to inspire his daughter." The very same can be said of his book, a testament to hard work and a soft heart.