Episode 17 of The Sailing Podcast is an interview about boat building with David Ryan who has constructed a James Wharram Design Tiki 38 in Montauk, NY. with modifications to meet the requirements for Code of Federal Regulations (CFRs).
David shares some of his passion for building boats and reassures us that the skills and level of ability to build a boat are within reach of the average person, and although there are often risks that you will make a mistake or do the wrong thing, the reward of success at the end at the end of your project far outweighs the minor setbacks you might experience during your boat building.
We discusses a few books during the interview such as:
Boats with an Open Mind: Seventy-Five Unconventional Designs and Concepts by Bill Bolger
Build the New Instant Boats by Harold Payson
Next episode is Solo Circumnavigation with Tobias Fahey
Show Notes
Sailing Montauk is where you can find David Ryan – www.sailingmontauk.com and you can find his boat building documented at www.sailingmontauk.com/concept/building-montiki/
You can also find him on Twitter – @CaptDavidRyan – and if you follow him there he will post updates to the progress on Mon Tiki
Please let me know if you have a boat building project underway or have some thoughts about boat building in general. If you have some photos to share just email me a link – email david@thesailingpodcast.com and I can add them to the website.
After talking to David I feel that he’d be a great host for a sailing trip or cruise out of Montauk and Mon Tiki should be well and truly ready for the summer sailing season so if you get a chance to visit Montauk please drop in and say hello to David and let him know that you enjoyed the interview.
Don’t forget to visit our facebook page – you can get there by just going to www.thesailingpodcast.com/facebook and if you click on the ‘like’ button you can stay up to date when episodes are released and I will post a few links to interesting sailing sites I find while researching the podcasts.
Transcript of the interview with David Ryan
Introduction This is The Sailing Podcast with David and Carina Anderson, episode number 17. We would love you to come and join us on our journey. Hello everyone and welcome to the 17th episode of The Sailing Podcast. Today I have an interview with David Ryan from Montauk, New York, who has just completed building a James Wharram design Tiki 38 with modifications to meet the requirements for the Code of Federal Regulations. David shares some of his passion for building boats and reassures us that the skills and level of ability to build a boat are within easy reach of the average person. And although there’s often risks that you’ll make a mistake or do the wrong thing, the reward of success at the end of your project far outweighs the minor setbacks you might experience during your boat building. We discuss a few books and websites including the Contiki voyage of Thor Heyerdahl and I’ve posted links to these and embedded the Contiki documentary at the show notes page which accompanies this episode. You’ll find that at www.Thesailingpodcast.Com forward slash boat building along with links to David’s website sailingmontauk.Com. Now here’s the interview.
David: Well, after talking to Jim Brown over the last couple of episodes, I wanted to explore the question of where have all the home-built yacht builders gone? I’ve been following David Ryan on Twitter for a while as he’s been posting photos and commentary on the progress of his construction of Montiki. It’s a very special Wharram-designed catamaran that he’ll be sailing in Montauk, New York. I’ve got Captain David on the line today. Hi David, and thank you for spending some time with me today to talk about building yachts.
David Ryan: Hello and hello to your podcast listeners.
David: I’d love you to explain for everybody where Montauk is. I hadn’t heard of it before and I looked it up on Google Maps. It looks like a fabulous location.
David Ryan: Montauk is the easternmost point in New York state. It’s at the very end of Long Island. For a long time it has been known as the Un-hampton. The thing that people sometimes say is it’s a drinking town with a small fishing problem. So it’s got a kind of laid-back charm. I moved out here myself because it’s got some of the best surfing on the East Coast. That’s what I grew up doing in Southern California in addition to sailing. So when I resettled on the East Coast and I found out there was a place where I could get wet and get a wave now and then, I made a point of making this my home.
David: That’s excellent. I’m right in saying that you are Captain David Ryan. You’re a licensed…
David Ryan: Yes, here in the U.S. Any kind of work for hire is regulated by the U.S. Coast Guard. There are different grades of captainship. Mine is actually, as things go, fairly low on the list because there’s captainship all the way up to being able to be in command of a thousand person cruise ship. I hold a U.S. Coast Guard master captain’s license which means that I can operate inspected passenger vessels. I also have a sailing endorsement. So I am a merchant mariner with a licensed captain and this is kind of a second career for me. That’s great. And how did you get into sailing itself?
David: You said you were a surfer. At some stage you swapped across to sailing?
David Ryan: Not so much of a swap as a compliment. Surfers like it when the wind is still or blowing offshore. So a lot of days that are lousy for surfing are great for sailing and vice versa. They compliment each other really, really well. What happened with me, one of the first children that I ever met on my own was about four years of age, a boy who lived around the corner and I just ran into him one day riding my scooter. Flash forward maybe half a dozen years, we’re both about ten. His mother and his family has moved north and she’s met and remarried a fellow who is a bit of a yachtsman. He had a 34-foot yaw and had in short order outfitted his new children, Jay’s older sister with a laser, and Jay at ten years of age with a Sabot, which is kind of that eight-foot punt that seems to exist everywhere in the world where children sail. I had taken the train up to visit him over the weekend and I came back knowing how to sail. I met the boys in an eight-foot punt and that’s pretty much all it took. I say, only in mock jest, that I probably learned everything you really need to know to make a boat go that weekend.
David: Yeah, well I mean a lot of people say that if you can learn how to sail a dinghy that’s the sort of best grounding you can get.
David Ryan: I would agree with that. I didn’t move to big boats until about five years ago. My family and I, we bought a 40-foot sloop and definitely although the sloop that we had was very, very responsive by the standards of the class, if you kind of pull the sails till they’re hard, the boat moves and off you go and you don’t have the kind of instant response, especially the instant response on the negative side. You’ve got so much weight, I think that boat weighed about a ton, that it’s going to keep going for a while even if you’re doing everything wrong, whereas a little dinghy stops right away the minute that you stop sailing properly.
David: And where did you sail in that boat? You’ve done a bit of ocean sailing?
David Ryan: Yeah, we had been building boats up here in the northeast. The biggest one was a 25-foot schooner, but a small 25-foot schooner, such a thing exists, but had ambitions to sail further afield. And at the time, building a seagoing boat just didn’t make sense. We had a big run-up in commodity prices, and at the same time the economy was starting to really slow down and boats were getting very, very cheap. So we bought this 40-footer, well, 38 to be exact, and actually bought it down in Georgia, sailed it down the coast from Georgia to Florida and across the Bahamas with my family, back up to where we purchased it. Then we got back in our car and came home by car, and then I brought the boat up the coast about 1,000 miles from there back home to Montauk. I enjoyed it around here for a couple of seasons, but then everything came together in a way that I had the time to get away, so I sailed it down to the Caribbean via Bermuda.
So that was offshore about 1,500 miles and then stayed the winter down there and sailed it back. So we got good value out of that boat, very, very good value out of that boat. It also became the beginning of our business. I ran it as a six-pack charter last summer and then saw that there was demand here for a larger vessel and began making plans to make Montiki.
David: That’s awesome. I want to hear about Montiki in just a minute, but you were sailing as a family. How old were your children? Did you take them on those sailing trips?
David Ryan: Well, the family came with me when we first took possession of the boat, and then sailed down the coast, and ICW, Best Beginner Coastal Waterway, which is an inside water passage, and then some coasting down to central Florida, and then from central Florida across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas, and knocked around the Bahamas for a couple of months, and then back across the Gulf Stream and back home. When we did that, it was my older daughter at eight, my younger daughter at two, my wife, who had never been on a sailboat before, so bless her heart for being so game. And then just to make sure that no one would ever forget us, we also had a Newfoundland dog and a cat.
David: You’re okay to take them down into another country?
David Ryan: There’s some vaccinations and certifications of health, but it’s not that big a deal to bring them over. The thing about the Newfoundland dog is she weighs in excess of 100 pounds, and she’s shaggy like a bear, and so when she’s sitting on your foredeck as you scoot along, you’re a sight that won’t soon be forgotten.
David: Oh, that’s all right. Not too much problem with hairs everywhere?
David Ryan: No, complete problem with hairs everywhere, but we’re accustomed to it because that’s how it is in our house. Yeah, the scufflers were constantly clogged with long black hairs.
David: Oh, it definitely constitutes a family vacation then, with the pet.
David Ryan: Well, we actually made a point of telling ourselves over and over again that this isn’t a vacation, it’s an adventure, and I’d say more than that it wasn’t even so much an adventure as it was a kind of a boot camp. My daughter coined the maxim that she started talking about good days in terms of how many bad days they were worth. The very best day was a day when we were about 20 feet of gin-clear water with a pot of dolphins on our bow with our multicolor drifter up, and she rated that as being worth about 10 bad days. So by her calculation, the trip was probably about breakeven.
David: Oh, that’s a good currency conversion, I guess. That’s a good way to look at it, because I guess it’s not always plain sailing, is it?
David Ryan: No, no, I mean, a family on a boat for the first time in waters you’ve never been in before on a boat that you’ve never been in before. I felt confident handling the boat, but everywhere you’re going, you’re going there for the first time. A lot of draft on that boat, it was really a boat that was designed as an offshore racer that had kind of been reinterpreted as a family cruiser. Quite a bit of stress, quite a bit of stress. Like I said, there were some days that she rated as being worth three bad days, some days she rated as being worth five bad days, and the dolphins on the bow in perfectly clear water was worth 10 bad days, and I’d say overall the trip was a wash on her ratio. You know, unforgettable, wonderful, wonderful trip.
David: That’s awesome, and I think you’ve obviously done the right thing, and they’re keen to go out for a sail again?
David Ryan: Well, yeah, they are, they are. My older daughter worked with me when we ran the sloop as a six-pack charter, and she was very, very handy. Except in terms of raw physical strength, I’d rather sail with her than any green adult, because she’s got more judgment and ability to anticipate what needs to happen next than almost any adult that I’ve been with, and that’s, you know, awfully satisfying to a parent to see that kind of maturity in your child. But the other thing, you know, for any of your listeners that are thinking about, you know, giving this a try, there can be a lot of trepidation, a lot of fear that it won’t live up to your expectations. You just have to know going into it, what you find out when you’re in the middle of your first cruise and thinking, where are the palm trees? Where are the beautiful beaches? Where’s all the leisure and luxury? This is a struggle. This is work.
That’s how your first cruise is going to be. It’s how everybody’s first cruise is. And this is what you find out as you talk to people, as you are kind of getting commiseration from folks who have more experience. You find out that everybody’s first cruise is tough going, because you’re a tyro and you have to learn all the lessons the hard way through your own sad experience. But, you know, the only way you get to your second cruise is by taking your first cruise. Our second cruise, my family flew down and caught up with us, caught up with me in the boat down in the Caribbean, and we had a lovely time. We knew how to live on the boat. We knew how to enjoy being on the boat. We knew what to look out for and what to, you know, we made it. I picked them up at the airport and then making easy 40-mile crossing from St. Thomas to St. Croix with, you know, and a hard beat to boot. And it was fine. It was fine, you know, because we had paid our dues. We knew how the boat handled. We knew how to live on the boat. But the only way you can get there is to go ahead and take the beating that you’re going to get on your first cruise. So, you know, anybody who’s thinking about it, just step up. The quicker you take that beating and the harder a beating you take, the faster you’ll be on your way to your second and your third cruise, which will be much more enjoyable.
David: That’s definitely good advice. And now let me ask you about Mon-tiki. I mean, the first question I have is about the name. I think I read somewhere it referred to one of my favorite stories with Thor. I can’t remember his second name.
David Ryan: Thor Heyerdahl. Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki. I had read part of the story as a child in school. It was part of a reader, and there was a chapter from his book that was a part of a reader, and it was the chapter with the whale shark that came visiting, I think. And then, what, 30 or 35 years later, I’m watching TV late at night, and I hadn’t realized that they had actually made a documentary, which was my business. I was a documentary filmmaker for about 15 or 20 years. And I’m watching the TV, and all of a sudden I’m on Kon-Tiki, and I’m watching this whole thing. There’s a film of the whole adventure, 1947. This is very, very exotic stuff. It hadn’t occurred to me that they had moving footage of it. They filmed the entire journey, and there they were on this beautiful balsa raft that they tied together with vines, and they floated halfway across the Pacific on it. And what really impressed me is that they didn’t just survive the adventure. They actually thrived. They really enjoyed their time at sea, and that really struck a chord with me. I also really liked his thinking. He had what has proven to be a completely wrong idea about Polynesia being settled from South America, and that’s been disproven by genetics. But at the time, people said, well, this is simply impossible because the technology that was available to the people living on the west coast of South America was incapable of making the journey. And he said, well, I can’t prove that my theory is right, but I can prove that you’re wrong, that their technology couldn’t make the journey. And he proved it by doing it. And that way of thinking, both, well, how do you prove this? By demonstration, but also having just the sheer balls to do it, really impresses me. And I feel like a lot of the things that have happened in my life have happened more than anything else by kind of being hardheaded and a little bit ballsy. So I admire that very much. And then because it’s a Tiki 38 is the name of the design, and we live in Montauk, it just seems like kind of a natural fit that this is Mon-tiki.
David: That’s a good story. I didn’t realize there was a documentary either. Now you mention it, I do remember in the book them talking about filming things.
David Ryan: Academy Award-winning, 1947. You can watch it on YouTube. It’s up there for free, perfectly licensed, not a pirated download. And it’s about 50 minutes long. I’ve got goose flesh just thinking about it. Because they really just had a grand time. Everyone thought they were going to die. They didn’t just make it. They didn’t just prove their point. They had a lovely outing.
David: Yeah, I’m definitely going to have to look that one up, and I’ll try and find the links and I’ll be able to put it maybe with the show notes in case other people haven’t had a chance to have a look at it.
David Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. But I have to caution your readers or your listeners that you’ll be done for. If you watch that documentary and you’ve been kind of teetering on the edge, it’ll push you over. Your life is going to change.
David: I mean, he had a pretty fascinating life himself, didn’t he? Because he wrote quite a few books.
David Ryan: He was trying to prove something about how the indigenous people lived somewhere. He and his girlfriend went to the islands. Well, but when they got there, they found out that all the people who already lived there had taken all the good spots, and they were just miserable getting rained on with nothing to eat. He was a little bit of a pipe dreamer and kind of naive. But in the end, his name rings in history just for sheer stubbornness and daring do. There’s something about that. There’s so many things that you can’t do because someone will stop you in the kind of terrestrial, civilized world. You’ve got to get permission or you’ve got to have the right credential or you have to get enough money. And this idea that there’s a world out there that will yield to your willingness simply to take the first step and then having successfully taken the first step, take the second step, and then just keep walking. There’s something about that that’s just very appealing to me.
David: And Mon-tiki itself, it’s a wharram design which sort of catches my attention because I have a wharram pahi. But you were telling me, and on your website, you’ve done some good documenting of the construction itself, which is sort of what got my interest in the boat. But you’ve had to make some changes to turn it into a commercial vessel, is that right?
David Ryan: Yes, the crux for us, we were running in Temperance, which is the name of our sloop that we bought. We’re running that as a six-pack vessel. In the US, there’s a bright line distinction between boats that carry six and fewer and boats that carry seven and more. Six and fewer, you’re subject to almost no regulation at all. The only difference between a recreational vessel and a commercial vessel carrying six and fewer is the commercial vessel is obliged to have type one life vests instead of type three life vests. That’s literally the only difference. And the operator has to have the lowest grade license, an OUPV.
David: I actually, sorry to interrupt, but when you said six-pack, I thought it was a term to do with drinking beer.
David Ryan: Well, they probably do go together. The genesis of it is when these, there was actually a terrible accident here in Montauk back in the 50s where a fishing vessel overturned. There was a loss of life, almost 50 people, including the skipper. Terrible, terrible tragedy had happened in about 1951. The vessel was named the Pelican. There are still people here. It’s living memory out here in Montauk. Prior to the Pelican disaster, vessels were regulated by their tonnage, and what this created was a perverse incentive for the smallest vessels to be overloaded and to be unregulated. So afterwards, when there was the big, how did this happen and what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again, the regulation shifted from tonnage, because the vessel that overturned wasn’t doing anything illegal. It was just being operated in a way that probably wasn’t a good idea, but it was not illegal. After this, the regulation shifted to tonnage, to passenger count, and the way that I put it, six-pack versus inspected passenger vessel or uninspected vessel versus small passenger vessel, up to six versus seven and up, is the Coast Guard went out, because unlike your country, I’ve had some experiences in your country and know that regulations tend to be tighter around more things. There is a little bit of a more libertarian streak in American politics. The Coast Guard actually went out and polled fishing boat captains, and they said, how many do you take out? We’re really not interested in overregulating small operators. So how many, what’s the most that you guys take out? And the fishing boat captains said, the most that we ever take out, you really can’t manage more than six guys. It just gets to be too many lines in the water, too much bait to cut, too much rigging. They said, fine, six and fewer be most lightly regulated. Then they went to the tour boat operators. That’s going to be the next classification. They said, what’s the most that you guys, we’re going to make some regulations for you guys, but they’re not going to be the same regulations for a ferry boat that carries 1,000 people, because there’s really two different scales of operation. And the tour boat operators said, we never take more than 49, because that’s how many the bus carries. And if you look at the Greyhound buses, the tour buses, they’re all 49 passengers and a driver. So that’s the next breaking point in the regulation, 49. And the way that I think of it in terms of the very, very light regulation of the six-pack boats is no matter how foolishly the things operated, no matter how bad the decision of the skipper, no matter how faulty the machinery because nobody’s keeping track of it, you’re only going to kill six people at a time. You’re just never going to have the kind of scale of tragedy that happened with the Pelican on a six-pack because there aren’t that many people on it. And I see that from an Australian point of view, that maybe seems kind of cavalier, but that is in keeping with the American ethos that if you’re dealing at a personal scale, a small scale, then go out and do what you want to do. But when you start saying, I can take 25 people, then you’re getting into something where you need to provide surety. That’s a lot of back story. We were running in temperance as an uninspected passenger vessel, so our legal limit was six people. And we were running a good trip. We’re good at marketing. And we were very quickly, we were getting more calls, either that we had more people on a day that wanted to go with us than we could take or groups were calling for eight or for 10 or for 12, which the boat could have safely carried. But it just didn’t make sense to go through all the regulatory hassle with that boat to make her legal for 10 or 12 or 15 because once you’re into that regulatory regime, it’s the same regulatory regime whether your boat is rated for 10 or your boat is rated for 49. So we began thinking about what would be the right vessel to take on that regulatory regime. And there are some things about the wharram vessel that make her a natural. As a catamaran, you’re going to get, because carrying capacity is a function of the boat’s innate stability, and then how much accommodations there are.
There’s a very straightforward formula. 36 Inches of rail space per person, which is a fishing boat way. Everyone’s at the rail and they’re fishing. Or for a boat that’s operating as a ferry, so to speak, or a tour boat, either 18 inches of butt space or 10 square feet of deck space, and they can be used in combination. You can pick one or the other. Well, a wharram, which doesn’t clutter up the space between the hulls with all kinds of accommodations and saloons and cables and dining rooms and microwave ovens and the whole thing that catamarans have become, a wharram of a fairly modest size has vast legal carrying capacity. Where actually, in terms of how the boat measures, the boat would be legal for about 65 if you measure out all the space and say what is the ultimate legal carrying capacity. But that takes us into the next regulatory regime that is past 49. So we get, just as wharram was trying to do when he originally started, trying to get the most bang for his buck, and he settled on the catamaran design as being a way that put materials and manpower and money together in a very efficient way to make an ocean crossing vessel. Well, his solution that works so well for the kind of home builder also works very, very well for a small commercial operator. So that’s how we ended up with the wharram. But we did have to change the scantlings. The scantling requirements for wooden boats are fairly heavy if you’re going with traditional plank on frame. You basically couldn’t build a catamaran to the allowable scantlings. We build to the American Bureau of Shipping’s offshore racing yacht rule. And our stringers are probably, we probably have about 100% more wood. No, more than 100% more wood. So five stringers to seven stringers and doubled. Probably got about 225% more wood in our stringers. And then anywhere where the gap, we don’t have a gap between frames of more than a meter.
In the original design, there were fewer stringers, they’re smaller, and there are places where the gap between frames is as much as about six feet. So that was the change that we had to make to satisfy the Coast Guard. It means the boat is massively overbuilt. The Tiki 38 is proven as a passenger maker and will stand in any weather. The rule is the rule, and so we built to that rule so that we can run her in a way that lets us take out these larger groups. So you couldn’t just build a standard sort of plywood vessel.
David: Is that what you’re saying?
David Ryan: Well, that’s not exactly what I’m saying. In fact, where the plywood is used in this vessel, the frames and the skin, our skin is about twice as strong as it needs to be to satisfy the spec. We’re using 3 eighths inch or nine millimeter Moranti plywood as our skin. We needed to come in with a number. I don’t remember what the name is. It’s the shear modulus or the torsional radius, or I don’t remember what the engineering phrase was. But the number that we needed to have was about 5,200, and we came back with a number that was more like 12,000. So the plywood is the original composite material. Before there was fiberglass, before there was Kevlar, before there was carbon, before there was epoxy, plywood is the original composite material. Plywood is what the Mosquito, the night bomber that Herman Gehring of the Luftwaffe hated, was made by the British out of plywood using glues that were made from milk. But the reason that the British settled on that design is because they could turn their piano factories into war machines. They could turn wood craftsmen into war fighting machine makers. That’s the power of plywood. It’s a really, really underrated material in terms of the world of high test design. And I think part of what happens is because plywood is a popular material for home builders, it acquires a certain sort of reputation that’s unglamorous. And then perhaps even because there are home builders who are not so good, rather than the quality of the builder, the quality of getting the blame, the material itself gets the blame. But plywood is a phenomenal material to work with. It’s very, very strong. You don’t even need power tools. You can cut with hand tools if you have to. So that’s a little bit of a long and a little bit of a ranty answer.
The improvements in the design have nothing to do with the fact that the boat’s made with plywood. The improvements or the beefing up are there to satisfy a regulatory regime that runs through insurance concerns. And the plywood is not the weak link in that in any measure. It’s more the number of stringers, the thickness of the stringers, and the number of frames. And the plywood is kind of the part of it that makes it all possible.
David: I can definitely see, like I’ve looked at pictures of your boat that you’ve been constructing, and I look at my boat, and like you were saying then, I can see there’s a lot of difference in the workmanship that’s being done. I mean, when I look at yours, it looks fantastic. And I look at mine, and there were some sort of some average bits and things that I’ve had to repair over time. Where did you get your background in building? I mean, were you a carpenter or something?
David Ryan: No, not at all, not at all. My grandfather was handy. My grandfather actually worked in the shipyards in New Jersey. He was an Irish immigrant. And perhaps as a result of that, all of his children went on to be highly skilled professionals. My father was a physician. Another of his brothers is a lawyer. Another of his brothers actually ended up working in shipping, but very much in the upper level administrative capacity. And another brother was a cinematographer. None of them so far as I know are especially handy. I think that was kind of that reaction. My father came here working with his hands to give us a better life, and so we all went out and got college educations and beyond, and became people who worked with their minds. And so handiness was not a part of my growing up at all. My father did not change the oil on his car. Although I do remember he and my mother fixing up their first house, and that’s really how this kind of happened for me. We bought a house, became interested in having a boat, got turned on to fill bolter, started cutting plywood, started ripping two-by-fours and making bolter boats, and then started to kind of bounce back and forth between making improvements on the house and then taking skills that I learned making improvements in the house and bringing them back to the boat, taking skills that I learned making the next boat, bringing them back to the house and just kind of in this virtuous cycle of confidence and skill building. And then also, as I mentioned, I’m a documentary filmmaker.
Montalk, even as much as it’s the un-hampton, you still compete with the Hamptons for the tradesmen out here. So if you want to have somebody do something on your house, you pay top dollar for it out here. It’s just not something that my wife and I can afford, so there’s a lot of incentive to learn how to cut things. And also just finding out that you actually can cut to a sixteenth or even a thirty-second level of accuracy, that that’s not a superhuman skill, that it’s just a matter of learning to do it, that if you can edit a film down to the twenty-fourth of a second, if you can pay that much attention, that’s how many frames the film runs at, that that same level of attention you can bring to anything else that you do. And it’s mostly a matter of being willing to make some mistakes to learn, to be willing to take that first step and then take the second step and then keep walking.
So I just bounced back and forth for about fifteen years between building boats and fixing our house and improving our house and building boats and just arriving at the point we’re taking on the 38, the Tiki 38, did not seem particularly daunting.
David: And by doing it yourself versus hiring somebody to build, did you find that was a good cost saving?
David Ryan: For sure. I’ve hired a crew of builders. On this build I functioned as both project manager and lead carpenter. I’ve hired people at different skill levels. I had a couple of carpenters working with me who were good house carpenters and it was pretty easy to transform them into shipwrights. And I had other people who had no experience, but a week of working with them with the epoxy, they became pretty good epoxy monkeys pretty fast. So there’s been a fair amount of training and working with people and that has speeded up the process considerably. But this is a commercial undertaking for us. We had every intention of making this our family business. So hiring people to help us get it done is an investment in getting it started sooner and getting it on the burning side of the climb sooner.
David: Yeah, and I’ve seen pictures of the boat recently with masts up and sitting in the boat yard. I’ve got two questions. One was, because you did some of the work at home, because you built the hulls at home, didn’t you?
David Ryan: Well, no. I rented one of the spaces you have out here on the east end of Long Island. This used to be a big potato growing region. Not so much anymore. Most potato fields have been converted to very high end suburbs with five and ten thousand square foot homes. But the potato barns remain. And so if you go out and you just knock on doors and ask around, you can find these spaces. You’re in competition with artists and sculptors and other people that are out there for the taking. But again, the price was right on the space that we got and furthered our ends. We went ahead and hired a space and paid monthly rent for that for six months.
David: OK, and so you built the two hulls there and then you brought them to a shipping yard to assemble the whole boat together?
David Ryan: Yeah, we at one point were looking at doing final assembly on the beach because we fit into the slings at the shipyard by only about two inches to spare. She’s 21 feet wide, which makes her for width one of the biggest boats in Montauk. But I just didn’t feel we couldn’t find a space on the beach where, you know, years and years ago, boats were built on the beach in Montauk. But Montauk was a lot further away. And I just ended up feeling like we would, you know, we’d be out there too long. I didn’t have enough control over everything that I needed to get done. And I worried that that would go from being a kind of a novelty to a bit of a nuisance. But we’re in a shipyard and, you know, trying to get the finishing touches on her and get her in the water this year.
David: And what’s that time schedule looking like? When do you think you’ll be able to launch?
David Ryan: Well, I’m basically saying I think I’ll be able to launch a week after I get the engines. This is one of the things that’s proved to be very, very frustrating. I thought the engines would be as simple as writing a check, but it turns out, you know, just something that I never even would have guessed at. The design very cleverly mounts two engines on sleds inboard of each hull. So you kind of have the best aspect of twin inboards that you’ve got differential thrust for steering. The sleds rise and fall so the engines can be pulled completely clear of the water. So now you don’t have the issues associated with inboards of prop resistance and prop shaft running through the hull. You also don’t have the regulatory overhead of having an engine and combustion sources inside the hull. That gets into a whole other thing with this inspected passenger vessel that is really you’ve got to have automatic fire suppression, all kinds of things. When you keep the gasoline and the motor outside of the hull, building a boat to the inspected passenger vessel spec, there’s a lot of equipment there, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of equipment that needs to be purchased and then maintained that you don’t need because you’ve got all your flammable stuff outside of the hull. So I thought, well, this is going to be easy. But it does require that the engine have remote throttle and gearbox. And it turns out the two manufacturers that make engines that offer the remote throttle and gearbox will not just sell these to any idiot off the street.
David: Really?
David Ryan: You’ve got to be a dealer. And so we’ve had to go through all the paperwork overhead of becoming a dealer. And this is one of the things that I thought, well, when it comes time to do this, it’ll simply be as easy as writing a check. And it’s actually proved to be one of the more, it’s been more paperwork to secure our engines than it was to actually get the boat approved by the US Coast Guard.
David: Well, that’s amazing. And how far down that track are you?
David Ryan: Well, after sending them a certified check at the end of July and understanding that that was going to get engines in about a week. And now here we are in the second week of September. I’ve just sent them another check. Now that I’m a dealer, it doesn’t need to be a certified check. They’re willing to take a check from my business. So they’re going to get that on Monday, tomorrow. And hopefully that means they’re going to dispatch the engines in the end of this week. It’s the way it is when you take on something for the first time, sort of like that first cruise. You’re going to run into things that you never would have imagined were going to be a problem.
David: Well, it must be nice. There’s light at the end of the tunnel and you’ll be able to get, what sort of tours are you planning to run?
David Ryan: Well, what seems to be, on the basis of our experience last year, you know, modern life and we’ve got time for anything. And so what it looks like people want the most is the two hour tour. And it makes a little bit of sense. People come out here for a week. They don’t want to spend too much time doing any one thing. Movies are two hours. Apparently the most popular boat trip is also two hours, which to me just feels like barely getting going. But if that’s what people want, I’m happy to provide it. My experience with our sloop was that at the end of that people say, oh, we should have taken the four hour tour. Well, but people can only find that out by finding that out. And then that will be, you know, that’s kind of a walk on format. The boat will have a legal capacity of 49. We’ll probably cap it at about 20 because we want to provide a really sumptuous experience for people. So we’ll sell a regular schedule with a soft limit of about 20. We’re not going to turn away a group of three if we’ve already got 18. And then the boat’s also available for private charter at an hourly rate. And then people can stuff as many people as they want on there as long as I’ve made it clear to them that once we get above about 25, that the boat will start to feel crowded. It’ll feel like, you know, which could be a lovely cocktail, lovely, busy cocktail party. Crowded isn’t necessarily bad if that’s what people want. If they want to have a cocktail party on the water, then, you know, then let’s load her up and have a good time.
David: Sounds lovely. I’m just thinking next. How far are you from New York? I was just going to say next time I get the excuse to travel to New York, which I’ve only ever been there once.
David Ryan: Depending on the mode of transportation and the conditions of traffic, we’re anywhere from two to four hours from the city.
David: That’s still OK for a day trip, isn’t it?
David Ryan: Yeah. You can, if you time everything out properly, do a day trip out here without it being tedious.
David: Now, I told you that I was discussing with Jim Brown in the last couple of interviews I did. You know, he’s obviously famous for his boat plans and there was a boom in home-built yachts, I’d say, in the late 60s and things. And so the question in my mind was, you know, is anybody building their own boats anymore? And having seen your website and pictures of you building your boat, I called you up to say, you know, to try and find out maybe what your take is. Are you finding, are there many people out there still, I guess, still building their own boats?
David Ryan: Well, I don’t know. I tend to kind of get off in my own world, so I can’t really speak to what other people are doing. When I got into it, it was also kind of the dawn of the Internet. I came into it through Phil Bolger, who has really, you know, he’s done God’s work, as far as I’m concerned, developing plans that any idiot, meaning me, can go at. My first boat was a Bolger keel, which is a 12-footer, and I had to develop shape in about an afternoon. And that really, that kind of encouragement, and not doing anything, I don’t think I had to cut one curved line. I think everything to that point was a straight line. And then through his aesthetic sense and his sense of material usage, oh, my God, I’ve got something that’s got springy sheer, it’s got flair, it’s got curve, it’s a boat. How did that happen? So that’s how I got pulled in, and for a time I was very, very active on the Bolger, I guess it was a Yahoo group? It might still be a Yahoo group, and sharing information and sharing excitement. But as I’ve kind of moved on, I haven’t spent so much time there. I’ve been kind of focused on my own. I’ve kind of, enough fuel has been added to the fire that I’m sort of self-sustaining at this point.
A side note, our project engineer, to take wharram’s boat, and then integrate the new scantling structure that satisfies the Coast Guard, our engineer is Jim Brown’s partner, John Marples, partners in the Sea Runner line in the Constant Camber concept of building. And so there’s one step removed between this boat and Jim Brown, and that step is his partner, John Marples, who’s a really, really wonderful man, and has been kind of a fairy godmother through this whole project. He’s been excited about it. He asked, well, why don’t you build one of our boats? The Sea Runner boats are already certified, and I explained my reasons, and he said, those sound like good reasons, let’s go and do this. He’s been a joy to work with.
My take as to why there was such a flowering of self-built stuff in the 60s and the 70s, I think more than anything is demographic. You’ve got the baby boomers. They’re young. They’ve got energy. They’ve got enthusiasm. They want to believe in that, through a sheer act of will, you can change your life, kind of idea that is so much a part of the self-built ethos. And then, of course, cutting the other way, the thing they don’t have is money, and so you have someone like a Jim Brown, or you have someone like a Phil Bolger, or you have someone like a James Wharram saying, look, you’re looking at that sailing magazine, and you’re going, well, wait a minute, I don’t have $50,000. I don’t have $100,000. I remember seeing the original catalog for the boat that I got in Temperance, the Catalina 38, still had some of the original paperwork with the original prices. That boat in 1979, by the time I priced out all the options that the boat had, it was like a $65,000 boat in 1979.
David: Yeah, it’s still a lot of money.
David Ryan: A young documentary filmmaker with two young children doesn’t have $65,000 to go sailing. But if you’re in that era, when I was 13 and not thinking about these things, but if you were 23 or 33 in that time, and then someone like Jim Brown comes along and says, well, yeah, I know, but just listen, relax your mind a little bit. If you’re willing to spend some money, but how about $10,000? How about $15,000? And work, but not at anything that you can’t do. This is all stuff that can be done. It’s not black magic, and it’s not like kind of mysterious, steam-bent, exotic, rolling bevel, chisel, shipwright. This is plywood. This is epoxy. These are skills that you can learn. I’ve got a book. It shows you step by step. Give me your best effort from $10,000 or $20,000, and you’ll have a boat that you can sail around the world on. That’s a come-on that at that time has a huge market. And I don’t mean come-on as like a fraud. It’s true. It’s absolutely true.
But at that time, there’s a huge, huge market that is eager to receive it. And so there’s this – and if you look at the canonical work, if you look at the copyright dates on the Bolcher books on his partner, Dynamite Payson, and the instant book books that he wrote, if you look at the copyright date on Dior’s book, you can see where these things – you can kind of chart the scope of the investment, the scale of the ambition, and where the copyright date hits vis-à-vis the age of the Baby Boomers. And as the Baby Boomers kind of age out of being where they kind of get captured by real life and they get into their late 30s and 40s, you can just see the canonical works just like nobody’s made. The next book that ought to stand in that line, the literature kind of stops because as you go from the Baby Boom to the Baby Bust, and meanwhile the yachting market kind of chases the Boomers. You can see the development in commercially available craft chasing the Boomers because that’s where the money is. And that’s what I think has happened, that you just simply don’t have enough young, scrappy people. And now we’re in an age where everything is so accelerated that people don’t even think that sailing is possible. No one feels – here in the States, people don’t even take a week off.
David: That’s right.
David Ryan: You can’t really enjoy a seagoing boat if you can’t take at least a couple of weeks at a time, you enjoy it. Yeah, well, we all feel time pressured, don’t we? It’s hard to sort of run on something as unscheduled as a sailing trip. Yeah, which is just different. When I look back and I read about the kinds of trips the families were taking in the 60s, these kind of formative experiences, the eldest of the Boomers would have been their late teens at that time. They’re living in a different world in terms of what the time pressures were, how long people could be away from work. It’s just a different world. So there may be people who are out there building little dinghies. The boldrists are very, very active and a lot of enthusiasm on there. But in terms of projects that have real scope, I just don’t know how those kinds of projects fit into the demographics and the time pressures of the world that we live in. I’ve made kind of a point in my life of having some time because it’s important to me because there are things that I want to do that are not remunerative that require time, and that’s been part of how I’ve organized my life. But you have to make a point of it. I just don’t know that there’s that big a pool of people out there who have the kind of right set of circumstances to want to make their own 40-footer and then having made it to be able to enjoy that boat in a way that you really need to be able to make the scale of investment worth the effort.
I think the interesting thing is that to build a boat yourself, and this was the message back in the day when they were putting out all those plans, it’s not really beyond the scope of a normal person, is it, to construct one of these?
David: No, it really isn’t.
David Ryan: For anyone who’s listening to this podcast and thinking, can I really do it? I’ll tell you, I got to that point. I got Phil Bolger’s Boats with an Open Mind, and I start looking at some of his larger instant boats like the Veloos Moose II, Bob and Sheila Wise’s boat, or the Breakdown Schooner, which is built by Bill McGibbon, I think, which is a 46-foot inch-fore schooner. They were using the same construction techniques that I had learned building the smaller instant boats. I remember sending off email to Bob Wise and saying, I’m looking at this, is it really this easy? This looks like it’s nothing more than the boat that I’ve already built, just more of it. He wrote back, he said, that’s really all it is. It’s the same joinery techniques, it’s the same fiber glassing techniques. Everything about it is the same. If you can build the teal, you can build a 38-foot passage maker. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re going to do it.
In terms of the Tiki 38, there are 10 sheets of drawings, but then I think one of the things that’s kind of brilliant about the wharram is that in addition to the 10 sheets of drawings that give you all the shapes, all the plywood, how it gets cut out, virtually, no detail left unattended, then there’s even about a 20-page comic book that actually shows the boat being built step by step. Now you’re going to do this, now you’re going to do that, now you’re going to do this. I think it’s easier for me, having come to the project with some experience, having built about a half a dozen boats before, but none nearly of this scale. The heaviest boat that I built prior to this was about 800 pounds. This boat’s about 8,000, 10,000 pounds, and that’s a good measurement of the difference in scale and scope. But I don’t feel like, as I look at this, I think it’s all there. I think someone who didn’t know anything about building a boat could build this boat. Just recognize that you’ll end up throwing away more plywood, that you’re going to make more mistakes. But that’s like the first cruise. You’ve got to make those mistakes. There’s no way around it. You’ve got to make those mistakes. When I began this project, I said I know there’s going to be a time when I say, is this the right cut? Yeah, this is the right cut. You’re sure this is the right cut? Have you measured? OK, measure again. No, it’s the right cut. And then fire up the saw and then realize that what I just did cost me $10,000, because that’s the scale of the project. There’s a $10,000 mistake in a project like this, and you just have to be ready for it. But the vessel, even with a $10,000 mistake, is a good value proposition.
David: I was thinking about it when you were talking about how you can actually just, if you’ve got the wharram plans and that little book that goes with it, that that’s actually pretty much all the instruction you need. And I wonder whether having the Internet available as well almost makes people procrastinate longer as they search around for more and more. And there’s so much information out there, and perhaps it’s good to turn the computer off.
David Ryan: It’s definitely a double-edged sword, because you get in that mode where you don’t want to do the wrong thing. And so you can always try to get…
There’s a fellow that I sailed with. He helped me bring in Temperance, the Sloop that we bought, the Kettlinger 38 factory-made Sloop. He helped me bring it back from Georgia. He was in his mid-60s. He didn’t have a lot of sailing experience, but he always wanted to do something with a little adventuresome. So he and I brought that boat back up, and we had a great time. It turned out to be a really amazing, interesting man. His name is Ken Young. I couldn’t even begin to tell you all the Ken stories that I know from sailing with him. And then he also, a couple of years later, helped me bring that same boat down to the islands for Bermuda. And dream come true for both of us, me in my early 40s and he in his now mid or late 60s, getting to finally make a substantial ocean passage was a really wonderful thing. But as we were outfitting in Temperance for the big ocean passage, and we were manufacturing something to hold the wind generator up or fixing the boom bang or doing different things where we get to the point where there wasn’t anything left to do except put blade to material and start cutting. And I wish I could remember the phrase that he had, but the feeling of that phrase was, the only way you’re going to learn anything more at this point is to cut. You’ve done as much figuring as you can. You’ve reached the point where you’re at vastly diminishing returns to try and figure it out anymore. You’re doing it for the first time. You can’t know everything. The only way to find out if what you’ve reasoned out at this point is to cut the material. So go ahead and cut the material. And if you made a mistake, then you’ll fix it. But don’t get paralyzed and don’t waste any more time. And I can still remember being in the cockpit of that boat and having a piece of aluminum pipe. And it’s kind of hard to source where we live. And if I cut it wrong, it was going to be a big pain in the ass. And there I am with a saw and thinking, well, I can’t think of any reason why I’m going to do here is wrong. But I don’t feel confident with metal the way that I feel with wood, even though aluminum cuts just like wood. And him saying that for about the 15th time in one situation or another and then just cutting it. Of course, it was just right. But because I was working with material, I don’t feel the confidence. I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want to feel foolish. And he had this way of putting it. It’s like you’re not foolish to move forward. Making the mistake moving forward is not foolish. It’s just a mistake.
And even now on this building this boat, I’ve had some times where I’ve just had to kind of conjure up Ken’s voice in my head and say, well, you’re not going to find out whether or not you’re doing the right thing until you do it and find out if it’s right or wrong. So get on with it. So I guess there’s a risk involved, but you’ve got to not let that sort of put you off actually taking that first step. It’s sort of like with lots of things in life, isn’t it? You’ve got to take the chance. And I think there was somewhere I read about the guy from IBM. I think he had a saying along the lines of if you want to increase your success rate, double your failures or something. That’s something that I accept. One of my own mantras is in life, there’s no batting average. There’s only runs batted in.
David: That’s right.
David Ryan: But nobody’s keeping track of what your ratio to success or failure is. It’s just how many runners have you put across home plate? I don’t even play baseball, but it’s an idea that works for me because you feel like, oh, well, if I fail so many times, then I feel foolish. But nobody’s keeping track of the number of times you fail. The only thing that life is keeping track of is the number of successes. And the successes are going to be – now, some people are very good at having a high ratio of success. But again, the ratio ultimately doesn’t matter. What matters is the sheer volume of success, and the best way to push that up is to try more.
David: That’s good advice. I mean, I was thinking about my boat. And having had my boat and seen how it’s constructed now sort of in hindsight, I think it would be awesome to build my own boat. I mean, like I say, if I could find the time and the place, I think it would be just a fantastic thing. But what would your advice to somebody who’s thinking they’d like to try building their own boat, but is there somewhere they should start? I mean, what sort of a project should they look at first to get the success on the board, I guess?
David Ryan: I can’t speak highly enough of the Phil Bolger-Dynamite patient collaboration, The Instant Votes. And I think now there are three books. There’s The Instant Votes, The New Instant Votes, and then there’s a more kind of comprehensive book that I kind of think puts those all together. And any of those books, they have all kinds of things that can be learned in terms of using epoxy, cutting wood, working with plywood, working with tools. And the original Instant Votes, a lot of the material is even out of date. Like they’re talking about using polyester resin instead of epoxy. But if you go on the Internet and you can kind of get with people and kind of take the essence of that information and update it to the modern materials, epoxy is vastly superior to polyester and it’s also vastly less toxic. So there’s some shifting there. There’s some new water-based paints that are much easier to work with and easier to clean up with than the old oil-based paints. So there are some improvements that have happened. And this is what I mean about that like that next generation of book hasn’t come along, that to take all of these ideas that were first put out there by wharram, by Bolger, by Jim Brown, and then kind of bring them up to speed with what’s happening now. If you go on Amazon and you start buying those books, Amazon is going to recommend you, because everyone who’s come before you has been down the same path. We’ve all ended up with the same library. It’s Ruel Parker, it’s George Bueller, it’s Bolger, it’s wharram, and a couple others that I can’t – but those are the ones that not only have the technique but also have the inspiration.
And if you build that library and read those books, there’s so much information there that crosses over and overlaps. And then if you supplement that with what’s available on the Internet in terms of what’s happening now with materials, you’re going to have a very, very strong foundation of what’s possible. And in terms of building something, like I said, I started out with a 12-footer. I built a Bolger teal, 12 feet long, one mast. I went, oh my God, this is amazing. And then the next boat that I built, I built that one because it seemed like it would be easy. The next boat was a boat of ambition. It was double the size, about 24-footer. It was a Bolger light schooner. But it was that thing where I was like, oh, everything I need to know to build the larger boat, I already learned building the smaller boat. And once that larger boat was done, then I just felt like I could build anything. It was just a question of having the time and the space to do it and knowing what boat I wanted to build, which I think loops back to your experience with your pahi. In a way, the plastic boat that we bought, the factory-made plastic boat, was kind of like, oh, I kind of always dreamed that this was all going to come together as a product of my own hands. But just in the kind of the spirit of just getting on with it, I was like, well, look, these plastic boats are so cheap right now that it just makes sense to just go ahead and do this and just get on with the sailing. Because in the end, it’s the sailing experience that I want, and the building is a route to that sailing experience. It’s not that I don’t enjoy building very much. I do. But I build to sail.
And having that boat, being on that boat with my family, finding out what we liked about that boat, what we didn’t like so much about that boat, being able to put some mileage under the keel, and being able to do it right away was invaluable in trying to figure out what our next boat would be like. Because there was the possibility of buying an inspected passenger vessel, for about $200,000, which against what we believe the business could make, would be a pretty good deal. But we already knew that the way that that boat was laid out was not going to suit our family’s needs. Even though what we understood about our family’s needs was being in a monohull, it still was incredibly educational. As our family all told in the 48 months that we had that boat, lived inside of her for about 15 months. We really got a sense of between myself on my own trips and then when my family was with me. And we really came to understand what we wanted out of a boat. That was one of the things that drew us to the wharram. The wharram is very, very big on people having personal space. You don’t have the vast interior spaces of a bridge deck in Catamaran. But you do have each person has a cabin with a private opening that is theirs and theirs alone. And our experience on the Sloop was that it became a little bit tedious that everyone is crossing each other’s path all the time because you’ve got this central area that everyone has to pass through. And so you’re bumping elbows off each other’s heads, if not literally kind of figuratively, and it’s a little tedious. The boat seems even smaller than it already is. We haven’t proven that the wharram is a superior solution for our family, but at least it got us pointed in that direction. So we’d like to try that and see how that works out. That seems like that will be appealing as our children are getting older and they want, when they’re little, they don’t care. They’re four years old and they’re always underfoot no matter what, in any event. But as they’re older, they want to have a place that’s their own, even between the two of them. You get out of my bunk. Now you get out of my… So anything that you do, even if it doesn’t end up being the ultimate answer, provides information for the next step. That’s a great way for me to look at my boat at the moment, because there’s things I wouldn’t have learned if I hadn’t taken that step. I wouldn’t know what I needed really. What I really wanted was this, and that’s all part of the journey. I think people who are kind of at that precipice are worried about, they’re worried that they only have one chance. They’d better get it exactly right, and that becomes a real sticking point. When in fact, taking that first step, even if it’s totally in the wrong direction, actually makes it more likely that you’ll take the next step, rather than sitting and trying to make sure the first step is exactly perfect. So again, if you kind of resign yourself, like the $10,000 miscut, oh wow, I just set us back $10,000 in three months, just like that, after measuring twice and thinking it and checking with another guy, and wow, too bad. If you just kind of resign yourself to that, that that’s just going to be a part of the process. That you’re just going to be like, wow, if I had known ahead of time how mismatched this aspect of this boat was with what I want, if I had known ahead of time that I could have built this instead of that, then I would have, but you can’t, that’s the whole point. You can’t know ahead of time. The only way you can acquire that knowledge is to make the mistake. So just get on with making the mistake so then you can get on with the, it’s not going to be fatal. Having the kind of the wherewithal, the courage, the commitment to put yourself in a position of making that mistake puts you one step closer to being on the other side of putting the knowledge that you gained from that mistake to work, to doing whatever the next thing is.
Even if that’s just realizing that, oh, one of the things that I thought about when we finally, okay, the dream come true, a passage-making vessel, what if I don’t like it? What if it’s not everything that I hoped it would be? Well, then you can stop daydreaming. Maybe you want a house in the mountains instead, maybe that’s the next thing. But you’ll know instead of just kind of, you know, I mean, I was like, until we got that boat, you know, I built the 12-footer, I built the 24-footer, I built some beautiful pulling boats, I built a little punt for my daughter. But I was like a lovesick schoolboy about the idea of sailing a boat at sea. It’s all that I thought about all the time. And almost to the point of distraction, you know, like having a crush on a girl in the next grade up, you know, trying to get the nerve up to talk to her. What it turned out is it wasn’t just everything that I ever dreamed of. It was more than I would have, never mind dared dream, could have dreamed. But you have to take the step. And you have to be willing to find out that it’s, oh, I didn’t like that at all. And I had it, I mean, three days out on that first major passage after we’d already owned the boat for about two and a half years, I thought, when I get this boat to Bermuda, I’m putting it up for sale and I’m never going to see again. I’m not cut out for this. We had some rough weather, you know. And it wasn’t blind terror. It was more like, oh, there’s no reason for me to own a boat that can cross an ocean because if this is crossing an ocean, I want nothing to do with it ever again. But even, you know, and that’s really what I thought.
I was up at the foredeck in the middle of the night, putting the second reef in, thinking, what should I do? I could be at home in bed with my wife, warm and dry, with the warm curves of her body up against mine. And instead of here, I’m soaked to the bone. And I don’t think we’re going to die. But this is not what I signed on for. I do not like this at all. This is too much of everything. And I’m too far away from shore. And I don’t want to be here. And when I get to Bermuda, I’m selling this thing. I never want to be in this situation again. But, you know, it passes.
David: It’s been lovely chatting to you, David. And thanks again for your time. I just wanted to let people know what’s the best place to find you. Tell me your Twitter handle.
David Ryan: Well, my Twitter handle is Captain, I think it has the common abbreviation as CPN. Captain David Ryan. And I only picked that because David Ryan was already taken and I didn’t want to be like David Ryan 66. Well, you might as well step in. I had some concern. People would think I was like a captain in the military or something. And I get a kind of respect that I’m not due. And I think if you just do David Ryan, you get to me quick enough. Fortunately for my sense of overblown ego and the embarrassment about that, Twitter very shortly after I made that decision displays you by your name. And your Twitter handle is actually less displayed. So on Twitter, I just look like David Ryan. It’s only if you look at the Twitter handle. And I become Captain David Ryan.
And then our business is SailingMontauk.Com, just as simple as that. That’s where I am on the Internet.
David: And on your website as well as information about your tours and things, you’ve documented a fair bit of the construction of your boat?
David Ryan: Yeah. If people go to the website and they choose ‘About Mon-tiki’, that becomes a drop-down box that offers a one-step link to the blog, which is the entire build in reverse chronological order, starting with basically the empty space that we built in the first delivery of plywood, all the way up to the vessel there with her mast standing and waiting for Honda to finally get their act together and bring us some motors so we can put her in the water. We only need the motors so we can motor out. Once I’ve got some sea room, she’s a sailing vessel by God. At this point I’m so frustrated I’m tempted to just haul her, drop her in. We’re trying to be prudent.
David: If somebody is building a boat and they wanted to email you, can they just track you down through your website?
David Ryan: Yeah, David at SailingMontauk.Com. I think we have a form mail on the website. Anybody doesn’t remember that. I guess it’s pretty obvious from the way that I’ve talked during your interview. I feel that these kinds of things have the power to be transformative in a very positive way. They have been for me. It’s something I feel a little bit passionate to the point of evangelical. I was really lucky to have some people along the way who said, you can do this, this is not magic, it’s not superhuman, it’s not beyond your abilities, and it will be worth your while. You won’t be disappointed. I think those are the fears and probably the last one more than anything else is that people are afraid to give their best effort to something and then find that the thing that either they’ve come up short or the thing itself has come up short. And it’s just not that way. Every boat that I’ve built has been tremendously satisfying, has done everything that I hoped it would do, has been incredible to build, has been incredible to sail, and I don’t think this boat is going to be any different. I think it’s going to be a great business for our family and a great adventure machine for our family, and that’s out there for anyone who wants to give themself to it. D; Yeah, and I think it’s lovely what you’re saying. I think we all share the same fears for things like that, and it’s really good that you’ve sort of been through the process and you’re sharing the fact, yeah, you did have those fears, but you just need to keep taking the next step because the rewards are going to be there.
David Ryan: They are. They’re there by the day. I mean, just the other day we were putting up a mast and we nearly lost it, and that was very frightening, and we nearly lost it because of mistakes that I made, and that can make you feel pretty low. But then today with the mast up, we hoisted one of the sails, the wind was still, and we put up the staysail for the first time, and getting to see what that tan bark sail looks like against the blue sky is exactly what I had in mind. And at a certain point, the building will be done, and as much satisfaction as there is in the building. Like I said, I built the sail, and that’s going to be pretty special, and it’s there. And that satisfaction is there. I built six-footers, and it’s there at whatever scale and scope you undertake, and I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s wonderful that there’s kind of still in this world is sometimes so dematerialized that there’s something that you can do with your hands, a skill saw and a hammer and maybe a screw gun. That’s really all it takes to build something that when you’re done, you’ll think, wow, and it won’t just be that you’re proud because you built it. It’ll be a damn fine little boat that you’ll have a lot of fun in.
David: Just as an additional question, because you mentioned a couple of times that you’ve done some filming and some sort of documentary stuff. Is there any of your work that people can find to have a look at? Do you sort of have anything on the Internet or YouTube, things like that, apart from the boat work?
David Ryan: Well, there’s the boat work. There’s work done under the DLR Films imprint that’s up on YouTube. Those were kind of promotional documentaries for social justice causes, and then I had a fairly successful series on human sexuality, documenting couples and kind of what makes them stick together, fairly controversial. I actually had some run-ins with the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification down in your country. I had a couple of films chased out of film festivals by police.
David: Ah, lovely.
David Ryan: Yes. So part of my turn towards the boat building was to try and not have such an interesting life, I guess.
David: That was your taste of Australian bureaucracy, was it?
David Ryan: Yeah, that was pretty interesting. That was pretty interesting stuff.
David: Well, thanks again. It’s been fantastic having a chat to you and learning about your little world there in Montauk. It sounds such a nice spot. I’m going to make the effort to get out there if I’m on the East Coast at any stage in the future. And yeah, thanks again. Thanks for your time, and hopefully, well, good luck with your business. I hope it gets up and the boat…
David Ryan: Maybe in a year’s time we should be on the first… We should be at the far side of our first full season’s operation. We can check back in and see how it’s gone.
David: Excellent. Great. Thanks again, David. Talk to you later.
David Ryan: Thank you, too.
Well, please let me know if you’ve got a boat building project underway or have some thoughts about boat building in general. You can post comments at thesailingpodcast.Com forward slash boat building, or if you’ve got some photos to share, just email me a link. Email david at thesailingpodcast.Com, and I can add them to the website. After talking to David, I feel that he’d be a great host for a sailing trip or a cruise out of Montauk, and Montiki should be well and truly ready for the summer sailing season. So if you get a chance to visit Montauk, please drop in, say hello to David, and let him know that you enjoyed the interview. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook page. You can go there by just typing in www.Thesailingpodcast.Com forward slash Facebook, and if you click on the like button, you can stay up to date when episodes are released, and I’ll post a few links to interesting sailing sites I find while I’m researching the podcasts. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a great day, and thank you for joining us on our journey. You’ve been listening to David and Carina Anderson of The Sailing Podcast.