If you want to build a ship,
don’t drum up the men to gather wood,
divide the work and give orders.
Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea…
Antoine de Saint Exupery
There’s something almost obscene about seeing a boat out of water, like catching your grandmother naked or finding out your hero kicks dogs. Ingwe sits there on blocks at Berkeley Marine Center, exposed, vulnerable, her wooden hull revealing every scar, every rot pocket, every place where time and saltwater conspired to fuck her up. And there’s Ava, working alongside her father, Don, both of them covered in dust and bottom paint and the particular grime that only comes from truly giving a shit about something.
This is hands bleeding, backs aching, the kind of work that makes you question every decision that led you here. But watch them, really watch them, and you see something else entirely. The way Don shows Ava how to fair a plank. The silent understanding when they both know a seam needs re-caulking. The wordless choreography of two people who’ve done this dance before, who understand that maintaining a wooden boat is less about the boat and more about maintaining yourself against the entropy of the universe.
Because here’s the thing about wooden boats: they demand everything. They’re needy, expensive, occasionally treacherous mistresses that will sink on you if you don’t pay constant attention. They’re beautiful, difficult, completely impractical in the modern age, and absolutely worth it.
You can see it in these photos. Ava up on a ladder, scraping, sanding, sealing. Don underneath, inspecting through-hulls with the concentration of a surgeon. Both of them engaged in this fundamentally hopeless but utterly necessary act of preservation. The marine railway looming behind them like some industrial cathedral, the Berkeley Marina stretching out beyond, and somewhere in the distance, the bay that Ingwe was born to sail.
This is heritage. Not the sanitized museum kind, but the real deal: knowledge passed from father to daughter through scraped knuckles and shared frustration. This is how you learn that some things are worth the blood sacrifice. That beauty requires maintenance. That the best things in life will absolutely break your heart and your back, and you’ll come back for more because what else is there? What else matters but this: hands on wood, family working together, keeping something alive that by all rights should have rotted away decades ago.
