It’s too bad Maurice Griffiths is dead, if you love wood boats.
Griffiths (1902-1997; bio here) knew wood boats, better than almost anyone. For decades, he edited the U.K.’s leading yachting magazine, but we don’t care about that.
We care about the sailboat designs he left behind, the books he wrote, and the wisdom he shared with people who gravitate to boats and water.
He explained curved hull lines, masts and booms and lines, why this and not that. Other books do that, too, but none better than his folksy writings.
Griffiths designed boats for British waters and English pocketbooks, which means they’re small. But small can be gorgeous (his are), and also seaworthy (within limits).
Few people build wood sailboats anymore. Too expensive. There are plenty of them still around, though. You can buy used ones fairly cheap, but their upkeep isn’t cheap. They require more TLC than fiberglass boats; they’ll rot if you don’t take care of them.
I’ve never owned a sailboat, and don’t want one; I prefer living in a house, despite what Arthur Ransome (bio here) wrote about houses:
“Houses are but badly built boats so firmly aground that you cannot think of moving them. They are definitely inferior things, belonging to the vegetable not the animal world, rooted and stationary, incapable of gay transition. … The desire to build a house is the tired wish of a man content thenceforward with a single anchorage. The desire to build a boat is the desire of youth, unwilling yet to accept the idea of a final resting-place.”
(From Racundra’s First Cruise, 1923)
All I can say is nothing’s changed in 100 years, except the building materials. What Ransome wrote then, is still true today, and probably always will be.
Griffiths designed better houses, so to speak, compared to the immobile plywood crate I live in. His dwellings glide over water, propelled by wind, taking their inhabitants to distant and exotic places, of the sort I have no wish to visit in my old age. But I do like to read about them, and gaze at lovely boats, and try to imagine what it would be like.
Recommended reading: Dream Ships (written in 1949, when most boats were still built of wood), and Sixty Years a Yacht Designer (written in 1988 after he’d had a proper amount of time to reflect on designing and sailing small boats).
Photos: Above, Maurice Griffiths; below, a typical Griffiths design, the Eventide.
