Sloop: Restoring My Family's Wooden Sailboat--An Adventure in Old-Fashioned Values

• The Year of the Boat: Beauty, Imperfection, and the Art of Doing It Yourself
• Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working with Troubled Boys-a Teacher's Memoir
• Rebuilding Rose: The Tale of an Atkins Packet Sloop
• Macedonia Passage: Dangerous Cargo
• Paper Captain: The Paper Boat Captain's Manual

Sloop is the captivating story of Daniel Robb's education in boatbuilding, peopled by an eccentric cast of characters -- lumbermen, boatbuilders, and local artisans -- who are part of a changing and perhaps dying world. They tell Robb how to find the materials -- certain kinds of wood, fastenings, caulking, and canvas -- he'll need, which are increasingly hard to come by, and they educate him in the techniques of restoration, an all-but-lost art. Building and restoring wooden boats means an initiation into a world where life is lived simply, with respect for materials, for labor, and for the local waters.

A craftsman and environmentalist, Robb is a willing and able student, and although the restoration of the boat takes far more time and effort than he'd calculated, it is ultimately successful. After all Robb's struggles with quartersawn white oak, homemade steam boxes, bronze screws, copper rivets, andold mast hoops, the Herreshoff sails again -- and a dying art and a vanishing way of life remain alive and vibrant just a while longer.

By turns charming, meditative, and wonderfully quirky, Sloop is a paean to a sense of place and to old-fashioned values.

Daniel Robb doesn't want to lose touch with those things, so he provides readers with this excellent and thoughtful book. He contrasts these with the challenge of the modern - when is "good enough" good enough.Maybe because we share a few childhood memories, a first name, or maybe because we're both human - Daniel's detailing of the honest hesitation he experienced in what might otherwise be a straightforward restoration carpentry project spoke to my own experience - not of boatbuilding, but of life.The only thing bad one can say about Daniel's memoir of boat building in Woods Hole is that he changes the names of most of the other people he meets and works with. Our own age is similarly transitional, and this is his starting off point for a number of meditations on the durability of man-made goods, and the old fashioned values of craftsmanship. While the world tilts and shrinks, our contact with the real things of this world, like wood and metal, like the wind and wave, get to be less and less. Part carpenter's manual, part memoir, part philosophical treatise, Sloop is thought provoking and tremendously readable. Which, for a small town memoir, is probably a good thing, but for a reader intimately interested in said small town, well, one can't help but wonder who's who. Daniel points out that the sloop in question, a Hereschoff 12 1/2, was a product of a transitional age - as the world was moving from natural to manufactured propulsion.

I loved the soul searching when faced with the decision to restore the boat to museum quality versus making it functional again. This book was a gift and I could not put it down. Through a narrative the author draws into question our modern frentic lifestyle and finds folks who are able to find fulfillment doing what they love. An easy read, this is the first book I've read to completion in a long time. The boat would seem to be the focus of the book, but the value is in the relationships with the other characters.