John D. Bosler - Text-only Version

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DOUGLAS TRUMBULL WAS NOT ENTIRELY WITHOUt EXPERIENCE IN SMALL BOATS. Earlier in his career there had been a 26-foot Cheoy Lee sailboat he was too busy to use. And there was a plastic go-fast boat on a lake in Canada.

His most memorable boating experience came the day he carefully lowered himself into a canoe, powered by a small electric outboard, and motored silently, slowly along a lakeshore, enjoying the sights and sounds of the water and land.

“It was a sublime experience of being with nature and disturbing nothing,” he says.

For a time, he thought about building a boat himself that he and his wife, Ann, could enjoy cruising in Northeast waters. After realizing that would be impossible, Trumbull began a search for the perfect boat, visiting shows and talking with builders across the country. Nothing he saw was just right enough, although he remembers touring a number of nice yachts.

A Stitch In Time

Expanding his search to the Internet, Trumbull came across the web page for Devlin Designing Boatbuilders, a company which uses a stitchand- glue technology to build traditionally styled plywood skiffs, dories, sailboats, and larger motorboats in an old shed on the shore of a small bay near Olympia, Washington.

In this postcard scene, Sam Devlin has been designing boats in a tiny office nestled against the shed since 1982. Design fixed, he then steps next door to help bring pencil lines to life in a shop that has space for tools, one boat, and, perhaps, a couple of skiffs.

“When I found Sam on the Internet I immediately saw what I wanted, an aesthetic I liked,” Trumbull recalls. Devlin’s larger boats, “were tugboat-like, they were workboat-like, they were functional…they were something quite apart from a production boat.”

They talked and traded email. Trumbull flew to the Pacific Northwest from his New England home to Devlin’s old shed on Young Bay, a dent in the shoreline of Eld Inlet. The builderdesigner displayed his work and described his philosophy of boat building. Trumbull, conditioned by his boating experiences and dreams, and by the rewarding, silent hours aboard the electric canoe, began to sharpen his ideas for a cruising yacht.

He and his wife liked the design for a boat Devlin calls the Sockeye 42 and worked to make it fit their needs. First of all, that it offer good visibility all around, that it be safe, comfortable, efficient—and quiet.

Workboat Features, Yacht Styling

The result was John D. Bosler, a 43-foot, single-engine, plywood-epoxy resin-glass fiber boat that looks something like a tugboat and something like a fishing boat, but that is a superbly designed and built cruising yacht. It is safe, comfortable, and efficient, and is the quietest motor yacht I have ever boarded.

She has the vertical pilothouse windows long associated with workboats and the fantail stern found on tugs, a rounded transom with no sharp corners to bang against a dock or towed vessel.

Inside, however, one finds luxurious (and practical) dark green leather upholstery on the saloon settee and the pilot berth. Countertops are made of solid cherry lumber, some of it cut from trees that grew at Devlin’s home. The sole is yellow cedar, with all screw holes plugged. There is an espresso machine on the cherry counter, and a French press.

A Stidd chair dominates the pilothouse and its extensive bank of electronic equipment, which is properly arranged directly ahead of the helm for simple and safe cruising. As evidence of the utility of this layout, when I visited John D. Bosler, Olympia and upper Puget Sound were engulfed in fog. Trumbull, using compass, chart plotter, and radar, motored slowly along the coast of Hartstene Island, crossed Dana Passage, and entered Budd Inlet to the safety of his boathouse.

The yacht has a steam whistle from an old boat (now powered by an air compressor) that is simultaneously a pure musical sound and a summons for the nostalgic. There is an antique brass bell and Navy-style compass, as well as radar, a chart plotter, VHF and single sideband radios, a weather fax, and Ocean PC computer.

The hull is dark green and the house is white, proper colors for a yacht that looks like a workboat. She has a row of round, tug-type bronze port lights along each side, cap rails and rub strakes cut from purpleheart, and a John Deere four-cylinder diesel one can barely hear.

She has a traditional doghouse in the foredeck, to provide light and ventilation for the single stateroom below. Trumbull and Devlin toyed with the idea of giving John D. Bosler wood-framed pilothouse windows that would slide down into the walls of the boat, as one still finds on old workboats. But instead she was built with the newest doors and windows by Canada’s Diamond SeaGlaze, and hinged only the glass directly ahead of the helm.

“I wanted a wood boat,” Trumbull told Devlin at one of their planning meetings. “But without the problems that come with cedar, oak, and fastenings.”

Trumbull asked for low maintenance, fine woods, indestructibility , and “a very high visual aesthetic.” And, he emphasizes, “I told Sam the core thing is that it’s got to be quiet as a mouse.”

Coming Together

Devlin’s own exposure to boating began as an infant. He slept in a sea berth in a “ship” bedroom—complete with curved walls—built by his father. The elder Devlin for a time operated a marine supply store, and Sam played in a skiff landlocked in the store.

In kindergarten he won a prize for drawing a picture of a tugboat. “They have always made me feel warm and comfortable,” he says.

Devlin earned college degrees in geology and biology, and later worked on tugs in Alaska and aboard fishing vessels. But he wanted to build wood boats, so in the 1970s he left Alaska and returned home to Eugene, Oregon, with a commission for a 20-foot sailboat.

“Though there is little new under the sun, I had lots of ‘what ifs’ and ‘how abouts’ and a burning desire to see what these ideas would look like, and, most of all, how they performed,” he says. “So, in 1977 my wife, Liz, and I pooled our resources and started the business.”

The dream of boat building come true, he and Liz in 1982 moved to Olympia to achieve another dream: owning a shop on saltwater. “We knew the minute we started that we would get to saltwater,” he explains.

The Devlin Designing Boatbuilders’ yard is a classic. You reach it by driving slowly along a winding, rural road that passes woodlots, farms, and cottages. Home sites slope to the bay, and boats lie quietly on moorings. I wasn’t surprised when a neighbor arrived with a bucket of freshly-harvested oysters for the Devlins.

Interestingly, stitch-and-glue boat building is not a Devlin invention. Others built them, even before Devlin got the idea. “It is a generic building style, and if you go to a boat show it is not hard to find stitch-and-glue boats,” Devlin says. “Mostly, they are smaller boats.”

Devlin, however, has taken the technique further, and made the technique well known and accepted. A designer rather than a naval architect, he’s drafted plans and built about 400 traditionally-styled boats using stitchand- glue. These boats range from skiffs (great tenders) through a series of stylish powerboats, to John D. Bosler, his largest project to date. But he is now working on plans for a 50-footer for a customer.

Devlin believes he inherited “a certain degree of inventiveness” from his father and grandfather.

“It’s a different approach to learning: to figure it out on my own without drawing on others’ experiences.

“So I figured out a way to put together wooden boats. That was 23 years ago, and the way I build them now is so similar to my first efforts that it is almost scary.”

The Reel McCoy

There is a temptation to make too much of Douglas Trumbull’s career and his decision to build John D. Bosler, which is named for his father-in-law.

While Trumbull’s name may not be familiar to most, his work probably is.

A Hollywood film producer known as a special effects visionary, Trumbull worked on futuristic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek—The Motion Picture, Blade Runner, and Brainstorm. He wrote and directed Silent Running and now is president and chief executive officer of Entertainment Design Workshop in Sheffield, Massachusetts, a digital design firm specializing in creative content, development, and production for films, television, and theme parks.

He also produced and directed Back to the Future—The Ride for Universal Studio theme parks in Florida and California. He created Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid for the casino resort Luxor Las Vegas.

In 1993, Trumbull shared an Academy Award for the Showscan CP-65 Camera System, a process of high-speed 70 mm cinematography.

So, a man celebrated for pushing the technology of motion picture production and visual effects in futuristic films builds a boat whose style is a century or more old, but built with contemporary materials and techniques. What do I make of that?

He has good taste, that’s all.

The Process

Stitch-and-glue is almost as simple as it sounds. The technique uses marine plywood, baling wire, fiberglass tape and cloth, epoxy fillers, hardwood flour, and epoxy resin.

Building a fiberglass boat requires manufacture of costly plugs and molds, at least for the hull, deck, and house. Building a traditional plank-on-frame wood or cold-molded boat similarly requires the use of molds to produce the desired lines. Devlin’s boats require neither.

“Such expensive tooling generally stops much of the evolution of an individual boat design,” Devlin says. “Stitch-and-glue construction does not bear this initial burden.

“With no building molds or tooling to consider, a stitch-and-glue design has a chance to constantly evolve and improve, and that’s important. I believe any design can use refinement, and as my work has evolved, I’ve found ways to increase the ability of the stitchand- glue boat to suit its purpose and meet its owners’ performance requirements.

“The goal is to use a minimum number of parts, yet to do it with elegance and grace,” Devlin adds.

The lower up-front capital cost does not mean that a Devlin boat is a cheap boat. Construction of a stitch-and-glue design requires more highly skilled labor than a production fiberglass boat, for one, and Devlin’s crew is better than most. Each can do any job on the schedule.

Construction of John D. Bosler required 10,500 hours of labor. As a result, completed and commissioned, she is a $600,000 yacht.

Careful lofting (scribing the shape of hull panels on plywood) and cutting is a must for a successful project.

On John D. Bosler, Devlin and his shipwrights beveled the edges of plywood panels to create an overlapping (or scarf) joint and glued fourfoot- by-eight-foot sheets of plywood together, Devlinend- to-end, to create eight panels that are 46 feet long for the hull and topsides.

Small stitch-and-glue boats require no framing or internal bracing. The plywood skin provides the necessary strength.

But vessels the size of John D. Bosler need interior framing for strength and support, and Devlin’s shipwrights draped the long and unwieldy plywood panels over four bulkheads, two athwartship and two longitudinal. Then they stitched the seams and made them fast with epoxy resin and fiberglass.

Creating the basic hull shape took Devlin’s crew about six weeks. When it was completed, they rolled the hull out of the shop, turned it right side up, and then pushed it back under cover to begin finishing work.

A Clear View

After the deck was in place, shipwrights built a quick mockup of the pilothouse to be sure that visibility would be according to plan. “I wanted incredible visibility,” Trumbull says.

The five pilothouse windows are sized and spaced so the horizon is at the middle of the glass. No deck gear, such as the anchor, windlass, or burgee staff, obscures that view.

“That was difficult to achieve,” Devlin recalls. “It took a lot of work.”

In most boats, the anchor is in plain view atop the forward bulwark. In Trumbull’s boat, the anchor feeds through the bulwark, a bit starboard of the centerline, out of sight from the helm.

“I am really pleased,” Trumbull says of the view from his pilothouse.

Devlin likens his technique to monocoque aircraft and auto construction, in which the skin is part of the structure. He also compares it to a peeled banana: Each piece has a specific shape, and if you could trace the outlines of the pieces on paper and then cut and glue the paper together, you’d have a banana.

To him, a stitch-and-glue boat is a series of peels designed through intuition, and with the aid of a computer-drafting program. He then puts the peels—built of high quality marine plywood— together to form a boat.

The plywood panels are temporarily “stitched” together with baling wire through holes along the seams of the panels. The stitches are not continuous, as in the connection of a sleeve to a shirt, but are single stitches spaced several inches apart.

With stitching complete and hull panels in perfect alignment, the seams are coated with epoxy mixed with hardwood flour, and covered with fiberglass tape. When the seam compound has cured, the hull is turned right side up, the wire stitches are removed, and the small holes plugged.

This yacht hull is one-and-a-half inches thick. Plywood that massive can’t be easily bent to form sexy shapes, so Devlin starts with a halfinch panel that follows the shape of the hull and transom, then overlays quarterinch- thick plywood sheets bathed in epoxy. The hull exterior is later sheathed with fiberglass cloth saturated with epoxy resin.

“This produces an incredibly stiff yet relatively lightweight hull that is immensely strong,” the builder says. “And if it is done right it can be pretty, too.”

When a stitch-and-glue boat is completed, all wood will have been totally encapsulated with epoxy. Devlin says moisture will never get into the wood, so it will retain its strength. The exterior of the Trumbull yacht was painted with Imron, a coating Devlin expects to last 10 years.

Such paint treatment does survive. In my visit to the Young Bay yard, I saw a 35-foot Devlin built Czarinna in the shed for refurbishing after 11 years of service, some of those years in Florida. Its Imron paint showed some discoloring and slight crazing, but it still was passable.

With new paint and new Diamond Sea Glaze windows it will look better than new.

A Closer Look

The fog gone, we found Trumbull and his boat in her shed on Budd Bay in Olympia. From every angle the green hull of the John D. Bosler was perfectly fair and the paint flawless.

We boarded through the starboard pilothouse door, via a step on the float. Under way, a pair of lifelines stretching from the anchor pulpit would be hooked to connections just aft of the door to keep anyone from tumbling overboard.

The pilothouse is compact but workable. Steps to the master stateroom, head, and engine room doors curve forward and down from the starboard side.

Amidships are the massive Devlin-built helm station and the Stidd chair. The 20-inch wheel is something special: Trumbull built it from Nicaraguan coco bola wood.

Compasses and chart plotter are dead center, the radar screen slightly to the right. Depth sounder and engine gauges are on the lower corners. Radios are overhead, on a shelf above the windscreen. The helm receives an “A” for design and function.

Stretching fore-and-aft on the port side is the pilot berth, which (with a couple of pillows) makes a wonderful watch station as well. On the aft bulkhead are chart table and locker. Magnets keep charts in place, even with a breeze through an open door or window.

The Stidd chair rotates easily 180 degrees to give the captain quick access to paper charts should he need more information than can be found on the plotter and radar screens.

On the starboard side, aft of the door, is a seat for another guest.

Remote Control

Trumbull chose a sophisticated Mathers’ Micro-Commander control system. Using handheld remotes, he can shift gears, power up the bow thruster, and control the autopilot from one of three stations. One is in the recessed anchor well on the foredeck, allowing him to motor into an anchorage and drop the hook singlehanded from a seat on the foredeck. Another plug for the remote is in the pilothouse, and the third is in the aft cockpit, handy for backing into a moorage.

Although the boat does not have a flying bridge, Trumbull plans another Mathers’ outlet on top of the pilothouse, as well as a couple of informal seats and some canvas screening. After initial cruises, he discovered the horizon-to-horizon view and total silence from atop the boat and so now intends to enjoy them.

Workboat styling continues in the master stateroom, which has naturally finished trim and roof beams. The overhead is tongue-and-groove Port Orford cedar strips, painted white. Eight ports and a skylight hatch provide an abundance of natural light. A large hanging locker set into the after bulkhead allows access to the engine room, when major work is needed, via a second set of heavy and wellinsulated doors. A secret doorway, indeed.

On my first tour of the boat I was shown a smaller doorway into the engine room in the head and wondered how anything serious could be accomplished. The second time around, Devlin laughed and gave it away.

The two-compartment head lies aft of the stateroom on the port side. Sink and cabinets come first, followed by a shower and toilet room. Rather than clutter up this tight space with doors, Devlin uses roll-up fabric screens for privacy and to contain the shower spray.

Cedar grating covers the sole in the head. It squeaks a little underfoot, but is in character and can be cleaned easily. The cabinet and countertop are painted wood; if they get messy, Devlin says, just bring in a hose.

Comfort Center

From the pilothouse, recessed step lights mark the way aft to the saloon, galley, and day head. First impressions that remain: the quality of finish work, particularly in the thick, heavy cherry countertops, and the generous dining area that is convertible to a berth.

The sink (flanked by under-the-counter freezer and refrigerator) and a long counter are on the starboard side. The propane stove is in a U-shaped area on the port side, ahead of the settee and table, with a work counter to the right. The forward bulkhead is surfaced with cedar wainscoting.

Varnished beams provide ceiling support and accent the off-white vinyl headliner.

The day head, which doubles as storage and drying area, is aft on the starboard side near the door to the cockpit.

Bronze port lights continue the workboat styling, while large Diamond Glaze windows offer super views.

Room To Move

On many boats one needs to be a contortionist to find a seat at the dining table. John D. Bosler, however, has generous spaces, and settling in for a meal or coffee is effortless.

The cherry table folds opens for meals. Fold it closed for coffee or drinks; it has built-in fiddles that will keep peanuts and glasses in place regardless of the weather. An electric drive raises or lowers the table.

In boats with rounded transoms and cockpits one usually finds a seat of some kind, with cushions for lolling about. On this boat, however, that after part of the cockpit is filled with a storage locker that contains vented space for two propane bottles and deck lines, fenders, and steering gear. The waist-high locker and bulwarks make the aft cockpit safe in the roughest seas.

Inside the locker you’ll see a Devlin innovation: The floor is finished with truck bedliner material, painted by Devlin’s crew. It shows up in many places throughout the boat.

The cockpit sole is covered with a cedar grating, finished with Decks Ole. Devlin believes this to be much easier to keep clean than fiberglass or other materials—and it also fits the image. Old tugboats have wood grating underfoot, as well.

Searching For Silence

Trumbull’s campaign for a quiet boat appears to have been successful.

The sound level in the pilothouse while under way is about 63 decibels, according to measurements by Trumbull, which is the level of noise you would find around home. At first, the decibel reading was about 60, but it was accompanied by a harmonic in the exhaust system. Modification to the mufflers eliminated the harmonic but increased the noise level slightly. Devlin continues to tweak the system.

A sound meter commonly would register 70 to 75 decibels or more in the pilothouse of a powerboat. Devlin and I took the boat on a demo run on Budd Inlet while Trumbull went shopping, and even with the John Deere at full throttle we chatted as easily as when we were in his rural office on Young Bay.

Silencing the 85-horsepower John Deere was a major effort, as diesel engines are not silent, but the work helped to control other nuisance noise sources at the same time.

Normally, any wood around an engine acts as a sound box to transmit diesel sounds throughout a boat. To defeat such resonance, Devlin built engine room bulkheads and decks from plywood containing a sound barrier. The material, called Db Plywood, is made by Greenwood Forest Products of Portland, Oregon. It consists of two layers of plywood separated by a material that does not transmit sound energy.

In addition, Devlin applied three inches of high-density fiberglass wool insulation to the plywood. Next to it went a vinyl-lead barrier, an air space, one inch of fiberglass wool, another air space, and a outside protective surface of perforated aluminum sheeting.

Trumbull and Devlin chose a naturally aspirated diesel, fearing that a turbocharged engine would have added yet another level of undesirable sound. The boat didn’t need the extra horsepower, either.

It all works. The diesel rattle from the Deere is only background noise.

Trumbull rejected a diesel furnace because of the whine generated by the burner. Instead, John D. Bosler has two other sources of heat.

Under way, two electric heaters are used, powered by a Fischer Panda 8kW generator housed in a sound shield below the cockpit deck. Trumbull started the genset while I was standing in the cockpit, and all that could be heard was the exhaust cooling water splashing into the bay.

In port, with shore power available, electric heaters provide soundless heat. Trumbull searched the market before finding electric units that passed his stringent noise tests.

At anchor, Trumbull lights a pair of bulkheadmounted Soapstone propane heaters. They are romantic, he says, and they keep the boat warm without a hint of noise.

Furthering the anti-noise effort, Devlin installed an Aqua Drive system because it helps isolate propeller sound. The boat carries a fivebladed propeller, for smoother and quieter—if slightly less efficient—operation.

Devlin figures only 42 horsepower are needed to drive the displacement boat to hull speed, which is about eight knots. The Flo Scan meter indicates fuel consumption of two gallons per hour at eight knots (2,100 rpm). At seven knots fuel burn drops to 1 GPH.

Creeping home in the fog at three knots, the Flo Scan hardly registered fuel use, Trumbull said.

He liked slow speed, as John D. Bosler moved in and out of fog to reveal the sun and crowds of sea birds. Trumbull’s fuel bill will be small.

On The Way

Originally, Trumbull considered cruising waters near his Massachusetts home. Now, however, John D. Bosler will be moored in Olympia with a view of Mount Rainer from her boathouse. Trumbull is even thinking about moving his home to the Pacific Northwest.

About now, he’s probably headed north for a summer in Southeast Alaska aboard his tugworkboat- yacht. If he stops in port cities along the way, Trumbull will spend a lot of time answering questions from dockside admirers.

Equipped as she is, Trumbull won’t need to make many stops, however. The boat will do just fine in any of the big water crossings along the Inside Passage, and she’s well equipped for just hanging on the hook in remote—and quiet —anchorages.

Sadly, Trumbull will be making the trip only with friends. His wife, Ann, died last year just before John D. Bosler was completed.

Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2001 © Dominion Enterprises (888.487.2953) www.passagemaker.com

You are reading the text-only copy of this article. To access the article as it appeared in PassageMaker Magazine, please log in to purchase and download the PDF version of this article.