Like Trees, Boats Should Be Wooden

Although Eichenlaub once built a Snipe in three days in a round-the-clock push to get it done in time for a championship, his methods are not those of a time-study production line. Star boats as a class are becoming so refined that there is little one boatbuilder can do to distinguish his boats except to do what the other builder does and do it better—and lighter.

Lightness is all-important in a racing boat, but there is a dangerous hairline separating the kind of jerry-built lightness that will come unglued the first time wind and wave hit the boat and the lightness that will translate to speed. Eichenlaub toes that line like a ballet dancer. He cuts and sands, paints and fastens with infinite care and in just the right proportions, and he carefully weighs each plank to check it for moisture before putting it in place. An Eichenlaub Star, fully rigged and ready to sail, can weigh as little as 1,365 pounds. This is only half what a comparable fiber glass day sailer might weigh. "You'll hear about Stars weighing 1,350 pounds," Carl concedes, "but they weigh them without rig and sail."

"In many ways Carl is a genius," says Lowell North, a sailmaker who has three times sailed himself to a world championship in Eichenlaub Stars. "Although some sailors on the East Coast may not agree, we on the West Coast know that he is the best."

There is some talk now among Star sailors on both coasts of admitting fiber glass hulls into their sacrosanct fleets. But the talk does not bother Carl Eichenlaub. He is confident that, fashioned by the right hands, a wooden boat will always triumph over one made of this alien material, and his confidence is not rooted in mere prejudice. After a yearlong study, he is convinced that the resins which hold the layers of fiber glass together to make a molded hull go on curing for months after the hull has been taken from the mold. This means, in Eichenlaub's view, that the boat will go on changing shape for as long as a year. Since one thirty-second of an inch in the wrong place would be an unthinkable horror in an Eichenlaub Star, these twisted monsters (in Eichenlaub's view) offer him no threat. "If a wooden boat changes shape," he says, "it's fairly easy to correct. With fiber glass, you're in a mess."

If what he says is true—the glass people strongly deny it—this might prove a reasonable argument against fiber glass. But Carl Eichenlaub has what he thinks is an even stronger one. "Boats," he says with the finality of a busy man who doesn't like a lot of foolish palaver, "are supposed to be made of wood."