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Craft At Sea: Boatwright worries skills will die with him
AP Photo
Don Dosher fits a strip of finishing trim into the cabin of the 51-foot shrimp boat Laura Wynn, in Varnamtown.
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Published: October 13, 2008
WILMINGTON
It's hard to say what Don "Grunts" Dosher was thinking that recent Tuesday as he watched the Laura Wynn float in saltwater for the first time.
For 45 years, building wooden shrimp boats in the Varnamtown area has been his life's passion. But the Laura Wynn, he says, is his last.
"Grunts" as he's been called since infancy, says that failing joints and the failing industry of shrimping are the reasons for his retirement. The latter reason is also why, he says, there's no one else interested in carrying on his legacy.
"Back's gone. Knees's gone, shoulders's gone. Won't be long, I'll probably be gone," he said. "They say hard work won't kill you, but I disagree."
Dosher, 58, looks like a boatwright straight out of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem with his well-trimmed gray beard and weathered skin. He almost always wears a cap with a pencil poking out from underneath, ready to mark his planks. His wiry stature is good for climbing up ladders onto dry-docked boats and squeezing into the nooks of wooden hulls.
He hand builds the boats by himself using cypress, juniper, heart pine when he can get it or treated pine if he can't, and, if the customer wants it, mahogany.
Kenny Pearce, a Raleigh resident, commissioned Dosher for the Laura Wynn, which Pearce named after his wife. He plans to run it out of Bath. He said he hired Dosher because his work is an art form.
"I just kind of hate to see it be the last one," Pearce said. "It ought to be in a museum."
The day of the launching, Pearce and Dosher put final touches on the hull paint, add a few bolts and watched a machine pick up the 51-foot hulk like a toy and place it slowly in the Intracoastal Waterway.
Dosher says he might build a few more small skiffs. He's promised one for a Boy Scout troop in Wilmington. But he's retired from building big boats such as trawlers. He's sticking to building homes, now, to support his wife and daughter.
His hands have built about 100 shrimp boats between 40 and 60 feet long. But there's no demand for the boats now, and his hands have seen better days.
"I got my marks," he said, pointing with his right hand to the fingers of his left.
"Sawed them off. Radial saw," he said, pointing to each finger as he spoke. "They put that one back on. And it decided to stop on that one. It went right across there. It didn't never reach that one. Saw jammed."
Dosher was born and raised in Varnamtown, a fishing village where everyone knows everyone else and supper is just as likely to include collards as shrimp.
Dosher said that when he was a boy, young men there had two options. They went into shrimping or into the tobacco fields. His first job was working tobacco for 75 cents an hour.
But then, during 10th grade, he decided to build boats. His father had built smaller boats for a time but made his living as a tug captain. Over the years, though, Dosher seems to have earned the equivalent of a doctorate in wooden-boat building.
He was 15 years old when he built his first boat. He worked afternoons, Saturdays, weekends, and the boat took about a year to finish.
It takes him about six months to finish one now.
There are no plans. No drawings. He doesn't need any. After the keel and ribs are laid, each plank is bent by hand according to how he thinks it ought to look. Off the top of his head, he can shape the bow so that it's not too flat or too "full." He can visualize exactly how the lines will look, how the stern will sweep.
"People's asked me about plans," he said. "I've never had no plans. I just know how I want the boat to look, the lines on it and all that. And I can put the same lines on a small boat or a larger boat."
By fixing older boats, Dosher found common weak spots. He built new boats without those problems. It's this experience that gave the Laura Wynn's treated pine keel extra blocks for stability. It was also this experience that put high-grade stainless steel nails into the planking.
Dosher says he was the first, and only, person in this area to build shrimp boats with a "hat brim," or rounded overhang that shades the pilot house windows.
Now, he fears all that knowledge will be lost.
Between a declining market for local shrimp and rising costs, Dosher said, there's too much overhead in shrimping.
And without shrimping, there's no shrimp-boat building.
"Really, I hate it because I wish somebody younger had took interest and learned the ifs and ands and buts about the boats," Dosher said.
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