Palm Coast resident builds boats in his garage

Palm Coast Observer
News

The little wooden rowboat floated on the waters on Lake Washington on a summer day, and Jim Bennett stepped in knowing his months of carving and sawing and shaping were worth it.

“You know they’re going to float. You know they’re going to float just fine,” he said. “But you’re elated when you see the product of your work go into the water.”

Bennett and his friend Jerry Eakin had built the boat together, and they rowed it across the lake near Seattle for its maiden voyage.

“We stopped traffic. People turned and stopped their boats and said, ‘What is that? Where did you get that?’” Bennett said.

That boat, a simple 14-footer built about 13 years ago, was Bennett’s first wooden boat project.

Now Bennett, 71 and a retired financial adviser for Morgan Stanley, is two years into his third.

His latest boat, a 17-footer constructed with a hull of overlapping wooden boards — a building method called lapstrake — rests unfinished on a car lift in his garage in Palm Coast’s C-section.

'Backup project'

Boats handcrafted from wood are different from the commercial fiberglass variety that are popped out of molds to be used by pleasure boaters and weekend anglers.

There’s character in their imperfections, in the trace of a worker’s hand tools in the wood, and a nod to history and tradition in the careful reconstruction of boat models that have been made and used for centuries.

And though they’re not necessarily delicate — like commercial fiberglass or aluminum boats, well-crafted wood boats be used in rough water — they’re designed for looks, and the knots and fibers of a wooden boat’s planks can catch the sun and gleam like gold filigree during a day out on the water.

The pride of creating something like that by hand is part of what keeps Bennett returning to his garage workshop, despite the difficulty of the project. Boats aren’t the only things Bennett makes. He has built toys, the cabinet in his office, and the chessboard that rests on a card table in his living room.

The boat is his backup project, the one he works on after he finishes making other things.

“I can put it away for a month,” he said. “I finish the other stuff and always come back to the boat.”

Bennett builds his boats from plans. He doesn’t work when it’s too hot, or too cold, or when he just doesn’t feel like it.

When he does, the process can be messy and loud. Sawdust coats the interior of his tidy workspace. There’s the clanking of wood boards, the buzzing of saws, the pounding of hammers.

The sound that gets Bennett cussing is the pop of a snapped stringer.

“Sometimes you have to bend them around tighter curves than they’re intended for, and sometimes you get them in there, and they snap," Bennet said. "So you curse at it awhile, and start again.”

Bennett shaped the quarter-inch-thick wood strips that form the boat’s hull by hand, bending them into place and setting them with metal clamps.

The work can be tedious, as it was when he carved the boat’s oars from solid blocks of wood.
“I started with flat planks and carved away anything that didn’t look like an oar,” he said.

Launch party

Once the boat is finished, Bennett will hold a launch party and get a dozen or so men to help him haul it to the canal that runs behind his house.

There are about a hundred people who want to take it out for a spin, he said, and he might just let them. After all, he can fix almost any damage they could cause.

And, as he did with his last rowboat, he’ll take it out with his wife, Penny, who helped him paint the hull. “We just cruise around the canals, and wave at all the people who come out to smile and point,” he said.

Once the fanfare’s over, Penny Bennett might row it for exercise — she loved rowing his other boats, she said, and hopes this one won’t be too heavy for her to handle — and the couple’s daughter, Paige Zobenica, might take it out when she comes over to visit.

But Jim Bennett doubts he’ll use it much himself. He doesn’t fish, and rowing the local canal system gets old fast.

So he’ll sell it, and put whatever he makes toward the thousands of dollars of material he’ll need for his next project, a small tugboat. A sketch of the tug is already taped to a cabinet in his workshop.

Bennett likes using boats, he said, but he likes making them even more.

“I’d rather build them than use them,” he said. “At the end of the day, you want to step back and say, ‘I built that.’”