Dream Boat Nears Maiden Voyage at Long Last

For 17 years, Don McQuiston’s unfinished dream sat outside a Carmel Valley ranch house: a shell of a wooden sailboat that beckoned his attentions like the waving hand of the dead Captain Ahab.

For McQuiston, this was more than just a toy. It was a 57-foot imitation of a Baltimore Clipper, the kind of sailing ship used by whalers, slave traders and adventurers in the early 1800s, a tiny bit of history that the Del Mar resident was piecing together with his own hands.

The boat-building project, which he started in 1972, when his son, Donny, was just 12, drove him nearly insane at times with its detail work.

It didn’t matter that McQuiston didn’t know the first thing about carpentry or woodworking, let alone shipbuilding.

What he didn’t know he learned, spending hours poring over how-to books and translating the knowledge, with his son, to wood the next weekend.

There were delays over the years--times when the money ran short or other projects intervened or, most recently, when his wife, Pat, developed a brain tumor and almost died.

Not long ago, however, the ship--named the Tuolumne after the Northern California river along which he and his wife played as children--was finally lowered into a slip at a Mission Bay marina.

Donny, now a 29-year-old building contractor with a wife and a child of his own, was there with his parents when the sleek mahogany vessel made its splashdown.

For the McQuistons--daughters Debra, 36, and Marci, 34, complete the family--the moment marked the end of a frustratingly long, $250,000 project that has brought them all closer together.

The work is far from completed, however. Masts and booms must still be built and fitted before the sailboat embarks on its maiden voyage sometime next year, with a trip to the Sea of Cortez, and on other trips to Hawaii or possibly Australia.

McQuiston, 57, recently described how the building of his dreamboat included a few lessons about life and his own limitations, becoming a sort of personal instruction into Zen and the art of boat building.

“One thing I’ve learned is that you can pretty much do anything you want with the proper attitude,” said McQuiston, a trained graphic designer who publishes a series of coffee table books. “If you believe it, 99% of the time you can do it.”

The sailboat’s deck is Angelique wood from Suriname. The finished interior is varnished mahogany, with handmade, engraved doors throughout. Its three double staterooms sleep 10, with attention paid to create private space for long voyages.

“You just have to see this boat to appreciate it,” said Mike Alvarez, yard supervisor for Knight & Carver Marina. “The interior is absolutely gorgeous. It’s hard to believe this is the first boat this guy has ever built. I’d like to own the thing myself.”

Alvarez has seen scores of experienced builders start on the boat of their dreams. Few of them finish.

“After a few years, they get discouraged or the money runs out or they get sidetracked, and the great dream to build their dream boat is sunk,” he said. “But this guy just kept it going, even after his wife got sick he went back to it.

“Think about it--17 years is a hell of a long time for a project.”

McQuiston, a self-proclaimed student of naval history, had long dreamed of building his own boat, a means of quality control not possible when buying someone else’s handiwork. But the prospect of spending all that time and money somehow always stopped him.

Finally, in the fall of 1969, during a vacation with his wife and three children on the back roads of British Columbia, something snapped in his head like a brittle wooden beam.

“When you drive great distances, bizarre ideas sometimes enter into your head,” said McQuiston, a man with glasses and a peppery gray beard who speaks in slow, considered sentences. “I guess I just suddenly decided that I was going to build that boat no matter what.”

Three years later, he had consulted a naval architect on his chosen hull design. Since it was illegal to embark on such a project in his Del Mar back yard, he took a friend up on an offer to start construction on his Carmel Valley ranch.

McQuiston expected the project to take no more than three years.

But for much of the next two decades, he and his family spent their spare time at the 2,500-acre ranch--within view of cattle, roosters, mountain lions and bobcats--building their own sort of ark.

First they constructed the boat’s concrete and steel-mesh hull. Then they began the woodwork.

McQuiston soon discovered the joys of working with wood--along with the headaches of building a seaworthy vessel in which everything must take on a curved construction.

He found that building a 23-ton boat is nothing like constructing a house. The sea, he knew, would eventually take its toll on his finished product, twisting the wood every which way, expanding it, contracting it.

It was like building a fine piece of furniture that would never sit still, and joints and other pieces had to fit perfectly. The wood could not be bent, but, with time and patience, it could certainly be shaped.

“There’s something magical about working with wood,” McQuiston said. “It’s pretty to look at and a joy to work with--until you make a mistake.

“There were many times when we pulled something out because it just didn’t fit or look right. In the wintertime, we had a lot of pretty exotic hardwood thrown into the fireplace.”

There were also a few surprises along the way. McQuiston, who said this will probably be his last boat-building project, found that many of the books he consulted on the subject were trash.

“There were a few well-written books that stood the test of time on a subject, but I got a lot of bad books, too,” he said. “There were a lot of authors who were long on theory and short on experience who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.”

So McQuiston experimented. When he finished a hatch or a piece of railing, he eyeballed it to see how it looked. If it didn’t pass muster, he’d tear it down and start over.

And, since his boat wasn’t being made of fiberglass like many of today’s vessels, parts were often hard to find. So he made them himself.

For the few real specialty jobs, such as marine electrical work (a subject he knew little about) he brought in help, people such as his older brother.

“When you’re raised in the country, you grow up learning to do things for yourself,” said McQuiston, a native of rural Arizona. “City folks are used to having most things done for them. If the toilet goes, you call a plumber. But not if you’re a country boy. And not if you’re building your own sailboat.”

The grind of crafting a sailboat while working full time often wore McQuiston down.

“You just flat run out of steam and enthusiasm, working days at the office and then under the lights at night, working on the boat. You just got burned out.”

And sometimes, the long hours incited quarrels between father and son over simple things.

“I might have stormed off on a few occasions,” Donny McQuiston recalled. “But I was usually back within two days to see what kind of help Dad needed.”

Earlier this month, 17 years after they started, the McQuistons trucked their boat from the ranch to the water. He might never have finished, the elder McQuiston laughs, if the ranch hadn’t been sold--and anxious developers hadn’t asked him to move his boat.

“It was the kick in the butt I needed,” he said.

On the day the boat was towed to the marina, the McQuiston family reaped the reward of years of hard work. Sailors from all over the docks gathered to look at the boat, awe-struck. Veteran builders did double takes.