The Workings of Wooden Boating – Skills, Sensations and Obligations
Regardless of the genre or orientation of doing wooden boating, these practices require investments of time and money, skills on the part of the practitioners, and committed institutional constituencies such as schools of boat-building, associations and publishers of dedicated books and magazines. This observation, and the very simple question of why people engage in wooden boating, begs for a nuanced answer; one may wonder how wooden boats are useful and reasonable, or how they ‘make sense’.
Practitioners have multiple and elaborate ways of reasoning wooden boating. One needs to appreciate the ways that boats appear unique, beautiful and prestigious. One needs to account for fun and for the ability of boats to evoke craft sensibilities and feelings of locality. Equally, one needs to understand the story-telling and the workings of patina within wooden boating. In short, while recognizing that wooden boating is a culturally thick social activity in which the people involved invest various resources of time and money, it is relevant to ask that how it is that boats are able to require these resources and convince the humans actors to play along.
In the following section I consider three ways in which boats collect resources and capture human practitioners. Firstly, I will reflect on the accumulation of skills as a practical explanation of how it is that boat-owners face an always extending list of things-to-do and of how engagement with their boats becomes ever more complicated and resource-intensive. I then consider emotions as a second sphere of interaction between boats and practitioners. Here I highlight the ways that boats are able to evoke emotions in those who build, own, use and care for them. Finally, I consider the emergence of the boat as an entity that has moral rights and that places obligations on those with whom it interacts. This last possibility arises, in part, out of practical, emotional and aesthetic understandings of boats. Yet, it appears as a distinct and particularly strong outcome of mutual exchange between the boats and practitioners.
The Skills of Wooden Boating
Wooden boating is rich in details that can be discussed, learned and disputed. As such, the accumulation of relevant skills is vital. The knowledge that boaters acquire and the skills they develop encompass different aspects of boating. Some concern maintenance while others relate to using the boat on the water. I concentrate here on the former. In caring for a wooden boat, one encounters and accumulates knowledge of how boats were traditionally built, and of contemporary techniques both of building and of renovation. One develops knowledge of different raw materials – wood, screws, cloth or chemicals – and of their availability, suitability and use. One learns to judge whether suggested methods and materials are appropriate – to tell whether it is acceptable to, for example, colour your varnish, or to use epoxy resins to strengthen the seams of a hull from the 1930s. Judging also involves the naming of deviations and problems of quality such as the ‘orange-skin’ finish in varnishing.
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• Mikko Jalas