PETRICHOR

Of all human senses, it is said that smell is the most evocative: the unexpected waft of perfume that brings back the long-missed presence of a loved one, the subtle odor of mustiness that transports you to a little-used summer camp of childhood, the lingering hint of newly baked bread that recalls a grandmother’s kitchen…. For Dylan Spaulding, the smell of fresh-cut cedar carries him straight back to childhood memories of his father.

Dylan grew up in rural New Mexico, a state with little association with boats or boatbuilding, but from an early age he shared a love of woodworking and then of boats with his father. His father had grown up in New England and before moving to New Mexico in the 1970s had worked as a carpenter at South Street Seaport and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When he moved west, he continued working with wood but, says Dylan, “mostly doing carpentry and shop displays; work that didn’t satisfy his creative side.”

Photographs by Dylan Spaulding

There is an old adage among boatbuilders that you can never have too many clamps and when it came to fitting the outwales and inwales on his Northeaster Dory, Dylan proved the saying true, using a combination of long bar clamps and individual spring clamps. The puzzle joints—visible in the starboard strakes—are standard in CLC kits; they are easy to align, and require minimal clamping pressure during assembly.

When Dylan was in third grade, the family moved to Essex, England, to live on a 31′ 6″ Maurice Griffiths–designed Golden Hind his parents had bought there. For a year, the four of them—Dylan, his mother, father, and 15-year-old brother—sailed the cutter up and down England’s East Coast, across the English Channel, north to Copenhagen, and, for the winter, to northern Holland to tie up alongside a sailing barge in a canal. “My brother hated being cooped up on a  boat with us, and my mother, who was a New Mexico native and had no prior sailing experience, had had ideas of Mediterranean cruising, not Baltic winters. In retrospect, I realize my father also had very little experience. It was before the digital age, and our only source of weather forecasts was the crackly BBC radio broadcasts; navigation was all dead-reckoning and paper; and we had an analog depthsounder on which the needle went round—and round—and if you didn’t know how many rotations it had done you couldn’t be sure if you were about to hit bottom or were in deep water. We frequently ran aground.”  For eight-year-old Dylan, the year on that wooden boat in Europe was “a formative adventure.”

Once construction was complete, Dylan turned the boat over to paint the hull and fit a bronze half-round strip to protect the skeg when beaching.

Some five years after their return to New Mexico, when Dylan was 13, he and his father decided to build a Rushton Wee Lassie. The building process had been documented in a 1991 article by Mac McCarthy published in WoodenBoat magazine, and they had found a table of offsets in Atwood Manley’s book, Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing. Dylan lofted the patterns for the molds, and he and his father built the canoe of strip-planked cedar. “I spent much of my eighth-grade spring break gluing cedar strips together,” recalls Dylan. “To this day, the smell of freshly sawn cedar takes me back to my dad’s shop and that project.” Dylan still owns the canoe. It hangs in his garage, above his own boatbuilding workspace.

A few years after they built the canoe, father and son tried their hands at some stitch-and-glue construction and built a Cape Charles Sea Kayak, referencing two more articles in WoodenBoat magazine. When finished, they used the boats together, forging memories far beyond the workshop. “One of the memorable trips,” says Dylan, “was to the upper lakes of Glacier National Park, where my father and I floated silently, the lake to ourselves, watching bald eagles in the trees, and camping.”

On launching day in November 2024, Dylan’s son—who had not been born when Dylan embarked on the building project—was proud to be PETRICHOR’s first passenger.

Twenty years later, in 2015, Dylan’s father passed away from cancer. Almost immediately Dylan decided to build another boat. “It felt like something I needed to do, partly in his memory.” He wanted to build something more substantial than a canoe or kayak, but remembered the enjoyment gleaned from a small boat. “I wanted to sail, but also recalled how great it was to cartop a lightweight boat and travel to locations farther from home,” he says.

He settled on the Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) Northeaster Dory. Although it would need to be transported by trailer rather than on top of a car, Dylan believed the design ticked the rest of his boxes: it would be suitable for use on the various bodies of water within a few hours’ drive of his home in northern California, and was large enough for “serious boat camping and bigger water” but light for its size and capacity. He ordered a bare-hull kit from CLC.

During the years spent on the project there were periods when Dylan was unable to work on the hull itself. He used those times to pay attention to the details and to learn new skills: metalwork so he could fashion his own hardware; marquetry so he could add complementary padauk inlays in the thwarts and mast partner; and sparmaking.

“I hadn’t done any real woodworking since I was a teenager, so I decided to assemble the hull from the kit but make the rest from scratch to allow room for customization and creativity, and to challenge and develop my skills. I started out with very few tools, but finished with the equivalent of a simple woodshop crammed into a single-car garage.” Much of the work, he says, spilled out into the driveway, “to the amusement and confusion of our neighborhood.”

For the most part, when fitting out the bare hull, Dylan followed CLC’s design—spacered inwales, balanced lug rig, daggerboard and rudder assembly—but added his own touches to suit his taste and to give the boat traditional appeal. “In a way, stitch-and-glue felt like cheating, because the CLC kits go together so easily, even for beginners. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the skills my dad had taught me as a child but also to learn hand-tool skills that I hadn’t gotten from him. It led me to overthink at times and render some parts of the project more elaborately than they needed to be. For instance, I didn’t like how the CLC outwales were simply rounded off at the bow, so instead I brought them together with a compound miter joint.” He installed wooden belaying pins for the lugsail’s halyard and downhaul, wrapped the tiller with decorative knotwork, leathered the mast collar, and used bronze cleats where cleats were necessary. His spars came out of a single spruce pole—“salvaged from a San Francisco fireman’s ladder and gifted by a friend.”

To achieve a more traditional look, Dylan fashioned silicon-bronze-cheeked blocks, handworked anti-chafing leather parts, and used Duckworks’ Raid Braid for the running rigging; elsewhere he stained three-strand synthetic line to simulate manila rope.

Inspired by correspondents on CLC’s online forum, and by articles in Small Boats, he added sliding side seats to create a sleeping platform. The seats can also be removed so that, following designer John Harris’s advice, Dylan can sit on the floor to steer; he has yet to decide whether he prefers the seats or the floor. He added extra tiedowns for dry bags, stained synthetic line for his painter and anchor rode, made his own bronze-cheeked blocks, and fashioned a leather bailer as described by Ben Fuller.

Dylan began building his Northeaster Dory in 2017, but it would be 2024 before he was finished. Life, it seems, rather than lack of skills, was the prime delayer in the project. “I enjoyed the building, but I couldn’t always find uninterrupted blocks of time to work on it.  I got married, we purchased our first home and had a child, I changed jobs, and then, like everyone else, waded through the pandemic.” At times, he says, the slow pace was frustrating, but it was also good to have the project in times of stress—“coming back to the boat was always a relief.” In the beginning, he reflects, it was “somewhat daunting to take on a project of this magnitude without my woodworking father behind me,” and when he found himself adjusting to fatherhood in his own right, building the boat seemed all the more poignant. And, says Dylan, when he wasn’t physically working on the boat, he was mentally planning next steps. “Building the finicky parts from scratch required honing my skills, learning many new techniques, and mastering tools my father had managed, one by one as they became necessary.”

Courtesy of David Leonard

PETRICHOR and Dylan making the most of a gentle breeze at the start of their first summer together.

The boat was launched in Sacramento, California, in November 2024. Dylan’s son, who had grown up enough to help with some of the final sanding, was proud to be the boat’s first passenger. The aroma of wood, glue, and paint no longer hangs in the garage, but when Dylan came to name the dory, it was another scent from childhood that came to mind. “Growing up in the desert, the scent of earth after rain brings me a sense of relief; this build did that too. The scientific name for that scent is Petrichor—it seemed appropriate.”

Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.

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