The shed sits at the head of a granite slipway on the north shore of Muscongus Bay. Its sides are vertical white pine boards silvered by sixty winters of salt air. Inside, the smell is cedar sawdust over the deeper note of pine tar.
Caleb Drisko, fifty-two, builds one boat a year. His current vessel is a thirty-six-foot lobster boat for a sternman from Friendship who saved for eleven years to commission her. She will be launched, weather permitting, in late August.
The lofting was done in February on the shed floor, which Drisko paints flat white each winter for that purpose. He drew the lines full-size in pencil, working from a half-model carved by his father in 1981 and amended four times since.
From the lofting, Drisko made the molds, plywood frames that define the shape of the hull at intervals of three feet. They were set up on a strongback of laminated spruce, plumbed and squared with a transit level his grandfather bought used in 1952.
The keel is white oak, twelve inches sided, scarfed in two places. Drisko cut it himself from a tree felled on his neighbour's woodlot. The scarfs are eight to one and pinned with bronze drifts.
Steam-bending the frames happens in March. He uses white oak from the same woodlot, steamed in a wooden box heated by a propane-fired water tank. Each frame goes from box to hull in under ninety seconds, where it is clamped to the molds and held until cool.
A boat of this size needs sixty-eight frames. Drisko broke nine in the bending. He considers this an acceptable rate. His father, he says, would have broken six.
“A boat of this size needs sixty-eight frames.”
The planking is northern white cedar, edge-set and fastened with silicon bronze ring-shank nails. Each plank is spiled, a process of laying a thin strip against the hull and marking the curve with a compass, then transferring the curve to the plank stock.
A pair of garboards, the planks that meet the keel, took him three days to spile, cut, and hang. The sheer plank, the topmost, took two days. The middle planks come faster, perhaps a pair a day if the cedar is straight-grained.
He buys cedar from a mill in Lubec that still saws full-dimension stock. The mill's owner is seventy-eight and has no successor. Drisko worries about this more than he worries about most things.
Caulking is done in May with cotton wicking driven into the seams with a caulking iron and a small wooden mallet. The mallet has a slot cut along its length so it sings when it strikes the iron. The note tells the boatwright whether the cotton is going home properly.
The deck beams are oak, the deck itself fir, the cabin sides cedar, the cabin top painted canvas over plywood. The wheelhouse follows the older Maine pattern, with a forward-raked windshield and a sliding door on the starboard side.
The engine, when it arrives in July, will be a six-cylinder diesel reconditioned by a shop in Belfast. Drisko will not install it himself. He leaves the engine work, the wiring, and the hydraulics to a man named Pomerleau who comes for three days in August.
Drisko works alone otherwise. His son fishes scallops out of Stonington and visits when he can. His daughter teaches high school in Damariscotta and brings sandwiches on Saturdays.
The boat will cost the sternman about a hundred and ninety thousand dollars. A fibreglass boat of the same length would cost more and last, Drisko allows, perhaps as long. The difference, he says, is what the boat sounds like in a cross sea.
His tools hang on a pegboard behind the bench: three jack planes, two smoothing planes, a long jointer, four chisels, a brace with a set of auger bits, a slick for paring joints, and a half-dozen clamps whose pads are wrapped in scraps of inner tube.
Each evening, he sweeps the shop. The shavings go into a barrel, the barrel goes to the smokehouse next door, where his neighbour smokes alewives. Nothing in the cove, Drisko points out, is wasted twice.
By late August the boat will float. By September she will be working pots east of Monhegan. By October Drisko will be lofting the next one, in pencil, on the white-painted floor.
