I want to tell you about my friend Wilbert.
Wilbert Weir is a master carpenter from Little Bay Islands,
Newfoundland - a tiny fishing village on the northeast coast of
the island. He built his first wooden dory at the age of 16. He
didn't stop building them until he was 88.
That's 72 years of building wooden dory boats. In
one 8-year stretch, he built 54 of them - by hand, one at a time.
He learned from his father, who was a fisherman on the Grand
Banks. His father learned from his father before him.
That's four generations of boat builders, going back to the days
when the dory was the workhorse of the North Atlantic - the boat
that fed families, built communities, and survived some of the
roughest water on earth.
Now, Wilbert is 97 years old. He's no longer building. Little Bay
Islands underwent government resettlement a few years back - the
community is gone. And with it, the living tradition of building
these boats the old way, by hand, from timber.
Without these plans, everything Wilbert knows would have been
lost forever.
Now, Wilbert isn't exactly the type of guy who stands in front of a
classroom in fine academic attire. So I asked him: "Just how do you
plan on doing that?"
His answer: "Well, you have a Bachelor's degree in English and a
Master's in Business. And I've built more wooden boats than anyone
else I know. I can teach anyone how to do it - if you'll write it
up."
And that was that.
No half measures with Wilbert.
So he built a 16-foot Grand Banks dory from scratch - one of his
best - and wrote down everything he did. Every measurement,
every cut, every technique he'd learned over 72 years. He filled 237
pages of handwritten notes on yellow notebook paper, scraps of
plywood, even the back of some sail cloth.
Meanwhile, I photographed every single building step. Crystal-clear
digital photos. Wilbert's instruction was clear:
"I want the pictures to be so detailed that even if we didn't say
a word,
anyone could build a boat just by following them."
Then I took his 237 pages of notes and locked myself in my basement
workshop for two months compiling, editing, and formatting them into
a proper set of plans.
When I finally handed the "finished" plans to Wilbert, he sat down
in a quiet place and reviewed them. He later told me he read them 8
times before he was done.
His verdict?
"These dory plans are good, but not as good as they need to
be."
He sent me back with a list. Make it easier for beginners. Explain
the tools better. More photos. More drawings. Explain what wood and
why. Detail the planking techniques. Include his tips and tricks.
So we went back to work. And again. And again.
In total, we made 36 complete rewrites of the "finished" plans.
Each rewrite contained 12–24 revisions. That's roughly 800 total
edits.
I finally got his approval. The plans were the absolute best they
could be, as far as this master builder was concerned.
And when Wilbert says "these dory plans are perfect,"
you had better believe it.
