The image above shows most of the sheets in the plans set for the Eun Mara. A bit yellowed, some are just about worn out, and all are very necessary to complete the boat as designed. The sheets not pictured are the full sized half-section patterns for the building frame moulds.

So what were the events that led to the selection of this design and the purchase of the plans? To start with, my wife and I both had some sailing experience, she on cruisers on Lake Ontario and me, to a lesser extent, in dinghies on small inland lakes. Once we had been married for a couple of years we decided that we needed a sailboat. We didn’t have a lot of money so we ended up buying a used fiberglass 16 foot sloop with a cuddy cabin for as much as we could afford and brought her home.

We had some great times on her over the years and I even repaired the bottom blistering that had become worse over time. After a summer spent on my back opening up blisters, filling, and fairing the hull, I complained that it would be easier to just build another boat and be done with it. It didn’t help that I was reading Woodenboat magazine at the time and there were many articles about people who did just that.

A couple of things then happened at about the same time. Firstly, we got caught out in a bit of a blow with our two young daughters and one became quite seasick. It was becoming clear that our family was rapidly outgrowing our little sloop. I was also beginning to see that we needed a more capable boat for the rather large lake that we sailed on. As if to press the point further, Woodenboat then ran the series by the Wagner brothers about the building of their Grey Seal. The more I read and reread those articles, the more I saw myself building a Grey Seal of my own.

Inspired, I bought “50 Wooden Boats”, “30 Wooden Boats”, followed by “40 Wooden Boats” and finally Iain Oughtred’s Design Catalogue, and of course Iain’s boatbuilding manual itself. In Iain’s own words the Grey Seal was a big project for a lone builder so I looked at his smaller designs as a warmup for what was now being called “The Big Boat.”

In 1996 I ordered the plans for Oughtred’s “Acorn Dinghy” from Woodenboat Magazine. During that summer I built my first boat in a 10 foot by 10 foot shed with power supplied by a gas generator. I built the 7’6” version because I wouldn’t have to scarph any plywood that way. I could work only during nice weather since all cutting and shaping had to be done outdoors.

In the end I proved to myself that I could indeed build a boat that my family could use. Other than how to actually build a boat, I learned two important lessons with the Acorn (aka Wren, Auk, etc.). First, it takes a lot of work to build any kind of boat and secondly, that your best guess at costs are about half what it will really cost.

Now I had to decide which boat to build next. I knew it had to be an Oughtred design, since I had some experience building to his plans now, and I knew the Grey Seal was going to be too big for me to build alone. My attention turned to the Wee Seal and I was just about decided on it when I was told by my better half that she did not like the look of the Scandinavian styled overhangs on her.

Slightly desperate now, I noticed a single photo of a boat only described as a “canoe yawl” in Iain’s boatbuilding manual. I decided to write to him asking about this design. After a few weeks an envelope arrived with a reply in Ian’s ornate writing, telling about two new designs he had on the drawing board, the Farne Islander and the Eun Na Mara. I was sitting on the couch looking at the specifications and outline sketches when my wife walked in asking what I was looking at. I showed her the sheets and she pointed at the Eun Na Mara and simply said, “That one.”

The more we looked at her the more it became clear that this could indeed be the one to build. The flexibility of the yawl rig was something new for us and we needed to know more.  I wrote to Iain again asking for more information and in his reply he told me that the plans were still incomplete but the updated sheets were being sent out as he finished them. 

This may be a good place to talk about the price of plans. There seem to be some prospective builders who think the price of plans are too high. As of this writing a set of plans for the Eun Mara are about $450 US. At first glance almost five hundred bucks seems like a lot for eleven pieces of paper. But really, this represents only two or three percent of what the boat will likely cost. For the work involved in producing the drawings, that’s a pretty modest fee for the kind of boat you’ll end up with. In reality, spending $80 on plans for an $800 boat is much more expensive.

Anyway, soon after, some money changed hands, and a big envelope arrived in the mail with a simple message on the envelope flap. “Thanks, hope it goes well!” Inside were the first few drawings for Eun Mara number 16.

That was in December of 1999 and over the next few months envelopes would appear with this sheet or that sheet partly done now, completed later, corrections after that.  By the spring of 2000 we were ready to get busy building “The Big Boat.”

In the next installment, we’ll try to make sense of the building frame and I’ll tell you about my “notebook”.