Steve Smith disappears through the wicket gate — the smaller, person-size door built into one of the two much larger doors of his backyard barn. Then the large door swings open, pushed by Smith from the inside, to reveal the proud bow of Simba, a 25-foot wooden catboat. “Catboat owners all name their boats after cats,” says Smith. He’s been maintaining Simba, which is owned by a client (now a friend) in Brewster, for 27 years.
Smith, of S.N. Smith & Son in Eastham, works alone, restoring and maintaining wooden boats of all sizes. Despite the name of his home-based firm, Smith’s son never did join him in the business, nor did his daughter.
Smith built the towering two-bay white barn in his back yard alone, too. “See this post?” he says, laying a hand on the building’s thick frame. The post is 12 by12 by18 feet. “It got delivered at the top of the driveway,” says Smith. He lugged the wood down to the yard, building an H-frame on the ground, then hired a crane to set it upright.
Simba has a new owner and will be heading to Mystic, Conn. The work he’s doing now is the last he’ll do on this boat. Its12,000 pounds rest on blocking, kept from rocking by stabilizing boat-stands on all sides. Climb up and the cockpit is glossy and clean, with a gleaming walnut wheel.
Wedged under Simba is the 17-foot flat-bottomed recreational rowboat Smith built for this year’s Boatbuilders Show on Cape Cod, which opens Jan. 31. “I built it as a display piece because it’s easy to transport,” he says. “And washed up, it’s not bad looking.” He’ll also bring a 15-foot double-ended Viking-style rowboat — a pretty design, he says, by the Long Island designer Paul Gartside.
The boat show opening in Hyannis on Jan. 31 is the 19th Cape Cod-based show organized by Falmouth boatbuilder Scott Dayton. It’s open to the public and different from a boat show in Boston, says Smith, where potential buyers meet salespeople and yacht brokers. Here, potential buyers meet the actual builders.
“Sometimes they’ll have only an idea of what they want,” says Smith. “They’ll have a dream. You’ll try to qualify it for them.”
Smith is the only professional boatbuilder in Eastham. Wellfleet boatbuilder Walter Baron will also represent the Outer Cape at the show. He’s bringing a 14-foot decked double-paddle sea canoe, which he built from a design by Bill Thomas. “Walter and I are the last two standing,” says Smith, “from here out to P’town.”
Smith moves back out into his frozen yard, which is littered with timber and the bodies of boats. “Those are ‘someday projects,’ ” says Smith, pointing to a restoration that awaits. He doesn’t mind the mess. “My yard is making me a living,” he says.
Boatbuilding wasn’t Smith’s first plan. He grew up in Utica, N.Y. and went to DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he studied zoology. The required classes in biochemistry, genetics, and physics got him thinking about what would come next: likely more degrees. He took a step back after graduation and cast around for odd jobs instead.
As a kid, he had restored cars and sailed boats for fun, racing all through high school and college. Now he found himself in Wilkes Barre, Pa., where the son of an acquaintance had moved his failed boat shop to his father’s warehouse from Mystic. “He thought it would be fun until he got into the profit margin and the amount of work,” says Smith.
Smith had wanted to know if someone could make a living working on boats. He got his answer. The man took Smith to the back room, where dozens of boats and engines lay in disarray. “He smiled at this 33-foot-long pile of peat moss and said, ‘Can you restore this with a minimum of supervision?’ ”
“Sure,” Smith told him. “I lied,” he adds.
He moved into the warehouse and resolved to teach himself the craft of restoration. “I read all night and worked all day,” he says. His boss showed up every afternoon, “to see if I was still alive.” The 33-foot pile of peat moss turned out to be a 1926 GarWood Baby Gar — a 33-foot triple-cockpit mahogany runabout. The boat had originally been powered by a Liberty V-12 World War I aircraft engine. Smith found one for sale, and 18 months later the boat was good as new.
And when his boss bought a wreck of a 53-foot P-class sloop built in 1913, Smith restored that, too, interior and all. “The learning curve was steep,” he says.
In 1984, Smith moved to New Bedford for a job building Beetle Cats at the Concordia Company. Beetle Cats are 12-foot traditionally-built wooden catboats. His team of six men built 25 new boats a year, Smith estimates, and maintained something like 75. Eventually he managed the shop, which meant being “carpenter, delivery person, the whole nine yards.”
Smith met his wife, Lorraine, who was already teaching at Nauset, on a blind date in 1987, and a couple of years later, after they were married, Eastham became home. “She had the better job,” says Smith. He commuted every day from Eastham to New Bedford until the owner of Concordia sold the Beetle Cat division in 1992.
There was plenty of work on the Cape. “I think at one point early on, I had 25 Beetle Cat customers out here,” Smith says. He still works five to six hours a day, six days a week, restoring and maintaining boats from Provincetown to Sandwich to Wellesley. The work peaks in the spring and early summer. In the fall and winter, he takes on other carpentry projects, from screened porches and decks to additions.
To be a carpenter of boats, says Smith, is entirely different from all other forms of carpentry. In boatbuilding, Smith says: “Take the level and the square and throw them away.” Everything is curved and twisted; the lines are whimsical; everything flows.
Boatbuilders are problem solvers and fine-tuners, he says. They’re also heavy lifters. How does Smith handle multi-ton pieces of timber by himself? “You make a face,” he says, and look to mechanical advantage. “Simple physics and a little bit of nerve.” He still has all 10 fingers, he says, and holds up his hands to prove it.
Smith is a scientist still, willing to experiment in pursuit of a solution. When he was making Beetle Cats, “it was the same boat, day in and day out.” But the wood was always different. A plank of cedar or oak, pulled from the steam box and ready to twist and warp into shape, was either “friendly” or it would fight the whole way. “The only way to tell was through your fingertips,” says Smith. “Sometimes a plank would go down like butter. Other times it would explode in your face.”
The boats in his yard look like shipwrecks. Smith gazes out at them fondly. “Most people who buy big wooden boats have this idea that they’re going to maintain them themselves. But it’s a moderately daunting task.”
Eventually he’ll retire, says Smith, “when it quits being fun.” That milestone isn’t yet in sight. “I think, physically, I’ll run out of ambition before it’s no longer fun.”
Smith doesn’t have a boat of his own. “You know, shoemaker’s kids,” he says. He has an old rescue dog, Enzo, and a rescue cat named Violet who is “three-quarters nuts.” And he’s got a plan: another Gartside design that he will build for himself — a 20-foot, 750-pound double-ended canoe-style sloop rig.
The design allows the sailor to sleep in the boat. “It’s seaworthy enough that you could bounce up the coast,” he says. An adventurer could sail it from Sandwich to Maine. But probably, Smith says, “I’ll just sail it in Pleasant Bay.”
Showboating
The event: Boatbuilders Show on Cape Cod
The time: Friday, Jan. 31, 2 to 7 p.m., Saturday, Feb. 1, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, Feb. 2, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
The place: Hyport Conference Center, 35 Scudder Ave., Hyannis
The cost: Admission is $10 for adults, free for children 12 and under
