A BOAT: LOST & Found
by David Egger
M
y father was a renaissance man. He enjoyed the ancient sports of archery, fencing, sailing, ice boating and fly fishing. He constructed his own bows, fletched his own arrows, built bamboo rods and tied flies to catch trout. He also had a passion for wooden sailboats. When he was transferred from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to a job in Holland, Michigan, in 1953, he got serious about boating and bought and restored older boats on which he would sail Lake Michigan from the port of Holland and Lake Macatawa. When he got tired of repairing and re-building neglected boats, he decided to build his own. He chose a Herreshoff designed 28-foot ketch (H-28), the plans for which could be purchased from Rudder Magazine. The design, as modified by a Japanese naval architect to allow for added headroom below deck, was actually 32-feet long. Having a close friend that had built an H-28 and who sailed with my family each summer encouraged him. He lofted the boat in the basement of our home and built the Marjory Jane from the keel up over a four-year period in the late 1960s—first in the basement, then later outside in our backyard.
48º NORTH
He carved the fittings for the boat and had them cast at a local foundry, had the lead keel cast at that same foundry, located the all-important stem piece of oak (18-feet long, 12-inches wide and 4-inches thick) and sawed it to shape with a small Delta bandsaw fitted with roller skates. I was a student at Michigan State University in East Lansing at the time and remember hitchhiking home to help him steam and bend the 2-inch by 2-inch oak ribs and screwing them into place. The hull was built with 1-inch by 1-inch mahogany strips screwed into the ribs and nailed into the mahogany strip below. When the task was finished and the Marjory Jane peaked around the end of the house drawn in her cradle on a flatbed by a local driver, the neighbors exclaimed, “Where did that come from?” Marjory Jane was splashed at a local marina on the Grand River and we celebrated at a local lunch spot. Upon returning, we found the launch slip empty and my father’s first thought was, “Oh my God, it has sunk!” Fortunately, it had not, the marina needed the space and moved her to an adjacent slip. Over the next 10 years, our family sailed her across Lake
40
JUNE 2020
