When we first envisioned the Mahdee project, we perhaps naively pictured ourselves sitting on lawn chairs at the boat yard, drinking margaritas while listening to Jimmy Buffet on the boom box and watching the professional progress of the yard workers returning Mahdee to the sound sea-going vessel she once was. Ah, that was a nice vision. All too soon we realized that the vision was going to be an unrealized fantasy. At first, we questioned the professionals at the yard. We thought that with a little more guidance on our part, the project would move swiftly on the proper path.
Then, we considered switching boats–scrapping Mahdee and buying a boat with less deterioration. We had already spent the better part of a year looking at boats before we found Mahdee. After spending some more weeks looking at other candidate boats, we couldn’t help but see that Mahdee was the right boat for us. So why wasn’t the project going the way we expected? Perhaps it was us. Reflecting, I recognized that for the last 20 years I have only rarely been able to let someone else fix my cars–no one else seems to do the job right. We also remembered that when we bought our 1926 house, we expected to hire the workers that would restore the house to its former glory. Brenda and I ended up doing almost all of the work because no one else seemed capable unless they charged 10 times what we thought the job was worth. Faced with a deadline for completing the house restoration we eventually did hire some workers, but we very closely managed the work. Maybe we were incapable of just sitting back and watching others work on anything we owned or cared about.
The professionals at the first boatyard working on Mahdee were definitely credentialed enough and had distinct opinions on how things should be done. At first, it was clear that the work in the yard was not well structured. Both Brenda and I have excellent management skills acquired from our working careers. We both knew that a poorly managed complex project like Mahdee will have expensive consequences. Improperly sequenced work was threatening to paint us into a corner from which the only way out would be expensive rework. Brenda and I were worrying and questioning everything to anticipate those expensive corners. Because we were on a tight time schedule, logistics was also critical. The boatyard seem unconcerned about the consequences of running out of critical materials such as bolts or castings which have long lead times or cost a fortune–after all, we, not they, were solely responsible for the costs.
The more we worked to anticipate future work, the more we saw the flaws. The boatyard prided itself on traditional methods. Unfortunately, many of the traditional materials are not what they used to be. Subtle changes in the materials made some of the traditional methods worse than useless. As trained engineers, Brenda and I saw this. The boatyard workers were convinced that old methods were still best.
So the next step was to take full control of the Mahdee project. That was when we moved Mahdee to a different boatyard. Full control means full responsibility and thus, all the stress over the consequences of our decisions. Since this is our first wooden boat project, we must rely fully upon our research into the trade, our engineering skills with the ability to assess stresses, strains and material properties, and our project management and logistics skills. We are no slouches, but we must admit there is still lots of room for errors–just look at the problems with the space shuttle, arguably built with access to the most technologically advanced materials and labor.
The problem with rebuilding or building a boat is that there is not much room for error. There are lots of ways for a boat to sink. We only get one chance. When it comes time to launch Mahdee, we will put her in the water and she had better float. When that happens, we will have spent two years of our life working on Mahdee. There are some procedures we will have repeated hundreds of times like spilling and planing the many planks on her hull. It would be disastrous to realize we should have done something slightly different to keep the boat from sinking–for example that a slightly different flick of the wrist while planing those planks would have made those planks fit and seal completely. Once we put Mahdee in the water, some small mistakes will probably be fixable, but much of the work is non-accessible. It would be a great financial strain to have to pull her back out of the water and send her back to the boatyard for major rework.
On the other hand, building a wooden boat is not rocket science. People with far less skill and education have been building wooden boats for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. While the many successes don’t generate much press, there have been a few spectacular failures–Sweden’s Wasa and Britain’s Mary Rose come to mind. The sinking of the Wasa was a financial disaster for Sweden that resulted in the invention of the deep diving bell so that some of the expensive canons could be recovered. Mahdee would be a similar financial disaster for us and I don’t know what kind of technology we would need to invent to recoup some of our loss. So maybe it is like rocket science, for us not unlike rocket failures that result in very expensive explosions. But at least we are completely in control of our destiny, even if, like the Wasa, its at the bottom of the harbor. Now, if I can just get over the dread.
