Many people had tried to convince us that wooden boats are hard to build. Our “renovation” of Mahdee has been described by others as a complete rebuild. Therefore, I consider myself almost an experienced wooden boat builder. It really isn’t that hard, so I have decided to distill everything I now know about wooden boats into an 8-step how-to.

Step 1: Buy lots and lots of big boards/timbers. Big is key here. If it takes 6 grown men or a crane to lift one board, you are on the right track. You will want several types of wood and the types should be the most exotic possible even if that means spending lots of money. We all know how important bragging rights are if you are stranded in a yacht club some day.

Step 2: Cut up all the boards/timbers into little pieces. If your neighbors accuse you of operating a toothpick factory you are on the right track. Of course, some pieces will be bigger than toothpicks, but they will be in the minority and the casual observer probably won’t notice them.

Step 3: Drill lots of holes in your pieces of boards. The more the better, and the holes should be of various sizes from barely visible to … well the biggest size will be limited by how thorough you were in step 2.

Step 4: Assemble the parts.

Step 5: Try to plug all the seams between the pieces made in step 2.

Step 6: Try to find and plug all of the holes drilled in step 3. If you think you have them all, drill some more holes, wait a few months and then see if you can find them. There must be way more holes than you can comprehend.

Step 7: Put boat in water and look for leaks caused by failure to complete steps 5 and 6.

Step 8: Have fun. This is the most important step because the whole purpose of owning a wooden boat is to enjoy it!

I know that everyone is seeing dread as a negative thing. I think that there is also a good side of dread. Occasionally I jump into a project and later I realize that I was not prepared and made some decisions with consequences that were not fully appreciated during execution. Dread functions to keep the project from starting until some later time. As a result, there is time to consider all, or many of the possible paths a project could follow. Usually there are many more paths that lead to bad outcomes and only one or a few that are really good.

For example, in drilling a hole, I can consider the various consequences of the hole veering off in various directions. Some of those consequences are really, really bad. Some are not so bad, or have subsequent fixes that can mediate the consequences of the error. So when it comes time to drill the hole, I want to make sure that there is no veering in the directions with really bad consequences, and if the hole isn’t to be perfect (and holes rarely are in real life), it veers in directions that have low consequences.

Unfortunately, my natural tendency is towards procrastination and dread becomes a useful excuse for not moving forward. The trick to a good project is to keep things moving forward and that requires multitasking the dread on many pieces of the project so that dread is overcome on pieces fast enough to keep everyone busy. The reward, however, is seeing Mahdee coming together in many different ways and knowing that each piece of her is well executed.