Richard Stanley’s “Solution Boat”

Richard Stanley’s sketch of the interface of the wood hull and the fiberglass top above
it that passes over the bolted wood sheer section below. Fishermen’s Voice photo

Richard Stanley has been around the building of boats literally almost his entire life. At the age of three he was hanging out in the Southwest Harbor boat building shop of his father Ralph, who began building in 1946 and retired in 2009. Neighbors and friends – Cliff Rich, Sim Davis, Raymond Bunker and Jarvis Newman, a few of them – were the boat building laureates of Maine’s central coast and the people Richard grew up among.

The recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship in 1999, Ralph has been quoted as saying his son Richard is more skilled than himself. The wooden boat tradition runs deep in Maine and Richard Stanley knows well there are firmly footed purists on both sides of the wood versus fiberglass boat divide. So when Richard said he had a boat design he calls the “Solution Boat” and combines the best of both sides of the divide, people listened, and talked.

English Cutter 21', in the shop for new paint in July 2015.
Ralph Stanley designed the boat and he and his son Richard built it.
Fishermen’s Voice photo

Richard said that when boat builder Cliff Rich first saw an early fiberglass boat in the 1970s, with a fiberglass hull and a plywood top covered with fiberglass, Rich said it was built upside down. The wood, he said, should be on the bottom for weight, stability and ride, with the lighter, rot-resistant fiberglass on top for ease of building, lower cost and durability.

“The purists on either side would not hear of it,” said Richard. “But why not? The wood hull delivers the best-riding boat. It’s the least stressful on the knees and backs of fishermen.” What seemed contradictory to the purists made perfect sense to the perfectionist or, as Richard said, “the best hull performance with a more functional, cost-effective and lower-maintenance top.”

Decades of wooden boat building has led Richard Stanley to conclude that Rich was right, and he has devised a plan for combining the two. In fiberglass construction, the hull and top are built separately and attached. This is basically the method in the Solution Boat.

Wooden hulls are more easily custom built than fiberglass hulls built in a mold. The top could be custom built for the hull or the hull built to an existing molded top. Details built into a fiberglass top could ease the visual transition from wood to fiberglass. The attachment of the fiberglass top to the wooden hull would be achieved with a combination of fiberglas and wood construction techniques.