Spreader Drawings

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It is difficult to comprehend what a mass of hardware is a boat's "rig" until one has to find a place for it off-boat.

In the winter of 2006 I pulled Murre's masts so she could go under wraps for the cockpit rebuilt. I bundled up the sails into the rafters of our garage and coiled the wire behind the gas meter, but the booms and spreaders I installed in our bedroom on horses and next to my writing desk.

Joanna was away at the time, but upon her return I was only made to explain how long I thought they might be there. "Just until I can copy them down," I said.

Fortunately, at least where the booms and spreaders were concerned, Joanna's attention was easily redirected toward the living room where the bowsprit sat on tarps under the bookshelf and a fine covering of varnish dust had mysteriously settled on much of our furniture.

The book that absorbed me during this cockpit rebuild was L. Francis Herreshoff's Sensible Cruising Designs. A collection of Murre's spars ended up in the house because I intended to draw-up in the Herreshoff style as much of the boat's rig as the winter would allow.

There is something entirely engaging in Herreshoff's drawings. The H-28 chapter is, in some ways, where the Mariner 31 was born, but the attraction goes deeper than simple lineage; it goes right the heart of seeing a boat. The idea begins in the mind but meets its first expression on paper as an anatomy, a boat in pieces. But in Herreshoff, the abstract expression is itself appealing as a work of art. His drawings are at once intricate and accessible, highly detailed and rudimentary, and somehow essentially physical, almost as if his pencil were sculpting the boat that would be.

In the end only Murre's spreaders made it onto paper that winter before they and the other spars were banished to the garage.

Click here to access spreader drawings and write up...