Building the Haven 12 1/2

" Hey Jude! You got five minutes?” It is a familiar cry in the Jordan home. Bill and Judy Jordan have been married 47 years. They met in college, and as young adults working in education and without much money, by necessity and choice, became frequent do-it-yourselfers. They bought a 10-acre piece of land and built their own home as well as some of the furniture within it. Much of the work was done by Bill, but on frequent occasions he needed an extra pair of hands, and the call for Judy to come help would go up.

Bill first tried his hand at woodworking as a child, watching, helping, and working on his own projects alongside his father in a converted cellar workshop. As an adult, his career was in athletics and physical education—both coaching and administration. “That world,” he says, “is very competitive and high-energy, and as a release from the stress I always had some building project going on.” Eventually, he was drawn to bent-wood boxes of both Shaker and Colonial style. It began as a hobby. “Judy liked and bought bent-wood boxes on visits to Williamsburg, Virginia. I realized I was capable of making them and found it relaxing and rewarding.” He made boxes as gifts for friends and family, then started selling them at craft shows. Then, when he realized people were curious about how the boxes were made, he started including demo sessions at the shows. For the past few years, he has run an annual class in box making at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine.

Photographs by Bill Jordan

HEY JUDE was constructed on a building platform set up on posts sunk into the ground beneath the barn, their bottom ends beneath the frost line. The white-oak keel was steam-bent and saturated with penetrating epoxy. Once in place on the molds, but before being through-bolted to the frames, it was held in place by supports between the hull and the barn ceiling joists.

In 2017, Bill turned his hand to building a Ted Moores–designed 15′ 2″ strip-planked Ranger canoe, and the following year he signed up for the Fundamentals of Boatbuilding class with Greg Rössel at WoodenBoat School. Judy accompanied him to Maine and, while they were there, they took out one of the school’s Haven 12 1⁄2s. As they sailed through the anchorage, Judy on the helm, Bill holding the mainsheet, he looked back and saw Judy smiling from ear to ear. Then she said the immortal words: “I really like this boat.” Back on land, Bill went right into The WoodenBoat Store and bought a set of plans.

The garboard was strip-planked with the strips paralleling the keel. Once it was installed—as a single strake—the rest of the hull was strip-planked from the garboard down to the sheerstrake.

Preparing to Build the Haven 12 1⁄2

At home in Pennsylvania, Bill had the space to create a building shop in his barn. But the barn floor was made of bricks set in sand. In winter, the floor moves with frost heave, and it is far from level, so he built an elevated floor. “I dug six post holes 42″ deep, and planted 48″ posts that reached below the frost. Then I built a flat 3⁄4″ plywood floor on 2×6 joists on top of the posts. It served as a building platform and stayed flat throughout the build.” He also built a raised 4′ × 6′ layout table with a white top. While preparation of this sort is often overlooked in manuals or anecdotes of boatbuilding, Bill says he considered “the building platform and table essential elements of the build.”

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Bill had planned to build a traditional carvel-planked 12 1⁄2, one that would, he says, “be launched in the spring, swell shut, and live on a mooring. But the oceanside-cottage purchase did not materialize, and the reality that the boat would spend most of its life being used as a daysailer from a trailer necessitated a change of plan—carvel-planked boats and frequent trailering don’t mesh well.” So, after building the forms, keel, stem, and transom, and bending 22 white-oak frames over the summer of 2019, he came to a decision: “I would strip-plank it.”

As the planking neared the bottom, Bill butted the forward ends of the strips into the sheerstrake but cut the after ends short by 3⁄4″, leaving a 3⁄4″ gap from about amidships to the stern, which would be filled by a single strip at the end.

Bill could find little available information on strip-planking a 12 1⁄2, but with his previous experience building the Ranger canoe and the knowledge he had gained in Rössel’s class, he believed he could handle it. The biggest problem, he says, is that “the planking layout of all strip-planked boats includes a football shape, and it can get to a point where the strips cannot take the extreme bends and still lie flat over the form. It’s not a problem in a smaller hull, but in a boat like a 12 1⁄2, with a wide bilge admidships, it is. I solved it by making a garboard plank that was wider amidships than the plans called for when traditionally planking.”

Building the Hull

Bill decided he would build his garboard plank out of 3⁄4″ western red cedar strips. But before he started, he spent hours in the barn designing the layout for the whole hull’s planking. “I measured and remeasured and stuck bits of blue painter’s tape all over the forms and the battens until I had the plan: a wide—almost 10″-wide amidships—garboard where the strips essentially parallel the keel, and then regular strip planking paralleling the waterline all the way down to the sheerstrake.” Bill glued and pegged the garboard plank strips, and as the plank grew it was clamped to the frames so that it formed the necessary convex curve. Once he had it built up to more than the required width, Bill drew the arc of its lower edge, took the assembly to the workbench, and cut and planed it to size. Then he returned it to the boat and glued and screwed it to the frames.

Bill coated all the interior surfaces with epoxy, primer, and final finishes while they were still accessible. The deckbeams are of white oak, the sheer clamps are Douglas fir, and the foredeck would be laid 1⁄2″ marine plywood covered in fiberglass and epoxy.

The rest of the hull was traditionally strip-planked from the garboard to the walnut sheerstrake, using bead-and-cove strips glued together and to the frames. The strips were also screwed to the frames every 4 1⁄2″ in the ’midship section and more closely toward the stem and transom. When laying out the planking design Bill had realized that near the sheerstrake it would be challenging to bend and shape the strips into both ends of the boat and that doing so would create an arc that would result in the “football shape” he was trying to avoid. Instead, he brought the forward ends of the strips into the sheerstrake, but at the stern cut them short by 3⁄4″. When planking was complete, he was left with a 3⁄4″-wide gap from about ’midships back to the transom. This gap he easily filled with a precut spacer strip.

Before turning the hull upright, Bill, Judy, and their son Will sheathed it in fiberglass and epoxy. “It’s not a hard job, but it needs more than one person, so having Judy and Will there to help was good.”

The forward and after bulkheads are strip-planked in western red cedar and provide the 12 1⁄2 with flotation and storage. The stern deck was planked in 1⁄2″ cedar, which was fiberglassed and epoxy coated. The walnut covering boards are seen here shaped and ready for installation. The centerboard trunk was built in sapele.

After fairing and painting the hull, it was time to turn it over. In hindsight, Bill says they should have marked and painted the waterline, but “I chickened out, deciding it would be prudent to wait until I launched her. Of course, that meant wading around in the water to check measurements only to find out if I’d done it while the hull was still upside down on the building frame, everything would have worked out just right.”

Will came in to help with the flipping. “He’s a rock climber and he’s built challenge courses. He understands about pulleys and purchases and has all the right equipment. I knew he was the guy to figure out how to lift it and turn it.” The event went smoothly, and suddenly there was a boat in the barn.

The transom, with its distinctive raked wineglass shape, is bright-finished sapele.

Then began the long process of fitting out. First the empty interior was coated with epoxy and painted—“a whole lot easier to do before all the furniture goes in.” That done, Bill followed the plans and the directions in How to Build the Haven 12 1⁄2-Footer. Trim and seats were fashioned in bright-finished walnut; bulkheads were crafted in strips of western red cedar. The spars were all in Douglas fir. The 600-lb lead keel was prefabricated by Broomfield & Son in Providence, Rhode Island, and Will helped his father lay it. “We had to get it lined up under the boat and drill down through the keelson; then Will stayed under the boat while I got in the boat, and we worked the silicon-bronze bolts into place with a wrench on both ends.”

Judy Jordan

Will Jordan holds HEY JUDE alongside the float on launching day. With the paint and varnish finishes, the placement of frames, and all the traditional fittings from a distance there is little to distinguish HEY JUDE from a carvel-planked Haven 12 1⁄2. But thanks to her strip-planked construction, her hull has remained stable and tight and has not leaked despite trailer-sailing for two summers.

Judy was there most days, says Bill, “every time I called out, ‘Hey Jude…’.” But for much of the build, his help was long-distance. “I enjoyed solving problems. I’d go out to the barn and take measurements, then go back to the house and get on the internet, read books, and reach out to people. I met so many people along the way: Eric Dow who builds carvel-planked 12 1⁄2s in Brooklin, Maine; the folks at Hylan and Brown boatyard and Artisan Boatworks; Steve White (son of [Haven] 12 1⁄2-designer Joel White), and all kinds of YouTubers who I’d connect with. I’d call commercial people thinking they wouldn’t want to chat because I wasn’t buying anything, but everyone would talk. Yes, they were making a living, but they were passionate about what they were doing, and were happy to help.”

Kate Jordan

The building crew: Will, Judy, and Bill Jordan. Bill “chickened out” and did not apply the waterline prior to launching—a decision he would come to regret as there was subsequently a good deal of standing around in the water taking measurements only to reveal that the waterline was exactly where the plans had indicated it would be.

Bill had steamed the first frames for the boat in 2019, and the strip-planking was completed in September 2020. But it would be another two-and-a-half years before HEY JUDE was finished. She was launched in April 2023, 17 miles from home at Lake Arthur in Moraine State Park, Pennsylvania. Since then, Bill and Judy have sailed her on countless days, often in the company of Will and his young daughters. For Bill, the experience of both the build and the subsequent impact of the boat in their lives has been a delight. “I can’t adequately put into words the enjoyment I found in building her,” he says. “There wasn’t a single day I could describe as a low, not one day when I thought the project would get me beat. And all the people I’ve met who have shared ideas, expertise, encouragement, and time along the way… it was truly a wonderful experience.”

Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.

Bill Jordan teaches the Art of Shaker Box Making at WoodenBoat School. He documented the building of HEY JUDE through three YouTube videos hosted on his channel Boxesnboats.

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