Dream boat
Three decades after the inspiration struck him, Kingsland's vessel is just about ready for launch -- and his restlessness will be satisfied
By Tony Chamberlain, Globe Correspondent | May 26, 2007
At 60, Scituate's Bob Kingsland is a sailing man whose dream seems older than he is.
After all, history is chock-full of young sailors fixated on one day setting off to ply the world's rolling oceans, never to return to the humdrum life ashore.
Most such fantasies naturally drown somewhere between the down payment on the first house, orthodontist bills, and college tuition -- those dream-ending life necessities. But 30 years later, Kingsland's fondest wishes are coming true.
In 1977, Kingsland, a Cohasset native, was an accomplished metal sculptor with solid design, engineering, and building skills. It was while he was in the hospital -- recovering from a broken leg that left him in a cast to his hip -- that he could not get the thought out of his head: He wanted to build a boat -- a grand cruiser to set off and see the world.
Within a couple of years, Kingsland, who had rented an old autobody warehouse off Route 3A, made the first of four calls to the Globe to ask if anyone would be willing to write a story about his amazing homemade boat.
The first story, written in 1980, depicted the 33-year-old Kingsland deep in the belly of a steel hull, welding steel ribs to form a stout frame for what would become a 20-ton boat.
Fast-forward a couple of years and Kingsland's project was still well underway. Now that skeleton was plated in steel, forming the easily identifiable full hull of a 50-foot cutter.
But then we lost contact with Kingsland, whose life had become infinitely more complicated than one man building a boat and making trips to the grocery store on his 1973 BMW motorcycle. More complicated and more ordinary as, along the way, he met his wife, Sandy, and the couple had two children.
Kingsland is quick to acknowledge that had he begun the family before the boat, it might never have been built. But Sandy was understanding, he said, and the work went on. The magnificent little ship, ever so slowly, was taking shape. If the dream seemed further away as his daughters, Haley and Brooke, grew, entered Milton Academy, and then on to college (Stanford and Duke), it has always been there.
"It's just nuts," said Kingsland, whose house in Scituate, with its attached boat shed, is within sniffing distance of the North River and the town's coastal cliffs. "I was supposed to launch this boat 15 years ago. I should have already sailed around the world and come back. But once you get hundreds of thousands of dollars into it and this many years, you've got to keep going."
Finishing touches
Our last contact with Kingsland and his boat, now named Restless, was 15 years ago, when he estimated that he was "90 percent finished" and would be sailing soon.
Now, after another 15 some years, Kingsland said the end really is near. He has a launch date of June 16 at the Scituate Harbor docks, to be marked by bands and parties, and, he mused, "Who knows how many spectators?"
The hull is a lighter version of Stars & Stripes blue, and when it hits the water and springs to life with the pulse of wave and current next month, Restless, with its 3,500 feet of welding, 200 gallons of epoxy in the coach work, and 35 miles of electrical wiring, could be valued as high as in the seven figures. A modified Ted Brewer design, the vessel will be 50 feet overall, 46 feet on deck with a 14-foot beam and 6-foot draft. At 20 tons, she will carry 1,150 square feet of sail on the 71-foot cutter rig.
Buttoned down, the design can withstand a 360-degree rollover, and her broad decks can collect huge quantities of purifiable rainwater. She is a world cruiser in every sense of the word.
Not apparent in the list of specs are the perfection and artistry of the living space below decks, with varnished teak cabinetry, all created in Kingsland's workshop.
When he's not busy with finishing touches on Restless, Kingsland works at Boston University as a designer and builder of technological creations used in scientific experiments at the school. Kingsland studied metal working and sculpture while a student at Brown University in the 1960s.
In the early days, he worked as a swordfish spotter for commercial fishermen.
Many of the thousands of painstaking hours he has put into Restless will never show in the finished work. When he was about three years into the project, he reached a major decision of how to shape the bottom with a hard or soft chine. He chose a compromise that let him fit the plates together more easily at the waterline, then bending them to soften the appearance.
But weeks later when he had finished this phase, he found that the chine looked "too prismed" -- so he tore out all the work, and remolded and fastened the hull anew, a huge job that set him back an untold number of weeks.
"It was 100 percent more work for 15 percent more quality," he said at the time, displaying his quest for perfection, not just getting the boat finished.
"If you don't rip it out and fix it," he decided long ago, "it'll make you unhappy for the whole history you live with the boat."
While there have been few decisions so dramatic, Kingsland sees the boat now as a series of compromises and smaller interlocking decisions, from matters of hull shape to whether satin or gloss varnish should be used on the cabin teak below decks.
"You come to see the whole thing not as one project, but a series of independent projects that you just figure out as you're doing them," he said. "It's like learning to learn. You learn how to solve problems and just get things done because you have to."
All the years his two girls were growing up, they were told the boat would take them "to palm trees and warm water" -- a phrase they came to think was the name of the boat. The long time overrun on the project had much to do with raising his family, and Kingsland was not sure how both parts of his life would fit together.
Obviously, the creation of Restless has been a major focus of Kingsland's life, but, he said, "It hasn't dominated my life. I had a great time with my kids, and we have been a real family. Still, I've been able to keep the progress going on the boat."
Immeasurable value
When he launches her next month, Restless will still be far from complete -- if any boat is ever really complete. But she will be rigged ("A sailboat can't go into the water without being rigged"), and the 85-horsepower Perkins diesel will fire, the transmission engaged, and for the first time since the dream took shape in the hospital bed so many years ago, Restless will head out to her mooring in Scituate Harbor after a visit at the sailing club docks.
Assessing the value of such a boat is difficult. For tax purposes, the assessment dates to when the keel was laid in 1979, but obviously, the value of the hull as it first took shape -- perhaps $250,000 -- has long been outdated. And obviously, the value of the thousands of man hours far exceeds Kingsland's collection of materials receipts.
One lifelong Dutch aficionado of cruising boats came to Kingsland's house a few years ago and inspected the work, concluding, "I thought I had the finest steel boat money could buy, but now I see I was wrong."
Obviously, the real answer as to the value is determined by what a buyer is willing to pay, and while Kingsland envisions many scenarios, he has not really decided when, or even whether, to eventually sell Restless.
For the next couple of years, he will probably finish her, and take at least one extended sailing trip to the South Pacific, to lands and oceans that have been the one constant inspiration in those long-held dreams.
"Well, we're not getting any younger," said Kingsland, who, despite a graying in his beard, looks little different than he did when he and his boat first appeared in the Globe three decades ago. "So we better take off pretty soon. We've certainly talked about it enough, and it's about time we did it. Besides, we've gotten to hate the New England winters."
© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
