Before the First New Board

Finding the wood was only the beginning

Deciding to rebuild Tortuga had not given me a supply chain. I knew we had a great deal of damaged wood to replace. Now I needed to find the wood that would take its place.

Luckily, I wasn’t trying to solve that problem entirely on my own. Fabian was a local carpenter from San Blas. He had connections and knowledge of the area, and that gave us somewhere to begin. His contribution wasn’t limited to what he could build. He also knew people and possibilities that I didn’t.

For the master’s cabin, we wanted cedar for the cabinets and tongue-and-groove cedar for the walls. We also wanted teak. Finding the wood we wanted was one thing. Paying for it was another.

The retail price we were facing was 300 pesos per board foot. With the amount of rebuilding ahead of us, that price was killing the project before the new wood ever reached the boat. So I asked Fabian whether there was a manufacturer or lumber mill somewhere locally. Rather than accept retail as our only option, I wanted to see whether we could go closer to the source.

Fabian thought there was. We searched online, found a lead, and went to the mill.

From three hundred pesos to forty-eight

At the mill, we negotiated a wholesale price of 48 pesos per board foot instead of the 300-peso retail price we had been facing. We also negotiated delivery.

That was one of the first times the project stopped feeling like a collection of impossible expenses and started looking like something I might actually be able to manage. The boat still needed an enormous amount of work, but now one of the biggest material problems had an answer.

We could order the wood, have it delivered, and still be well below the retail price we had been looking at. More than the money, it gave me something I had been missing for several weeks: evidence that the practical problems might actually have practical solutions.

The other supply problem

The other major material problem was the hull. Tortuga is a ferrocement boat, and I needed to find the Portland-cement-based material required for the repairs we were planning. Then we got lucky again. A local supplier had the cement mix we were looking for and could provide it in quantity.

That mattered because the two problems at the top of my list were now beginning to come together. I needed wood to rebuild the interior, and I needed material for the hull repairs. We had found sources for both.

I could get bags and bags of the cement mix if I needed them. I could get the wood delivered. Suddenly the rebuild felt less like a dream I was defending and more like a project that could actually be supplied.

We can do this

The relief was enormous. It felt as though a huge weight had lifted from my shoulders.

My determination, my stubbornness, my vision for the future, my dreams: all of it felt more possible than it had in the previous weeks. I had already decided I wasn’t going to quit, but deciding not to quit and knowing how you are going to move forward are two different things.

Now we had wood. We had cement. We had a way to get the materials to the boat. The work was still ahead of us, but for the first time in a while I could look at the problems and think: We can do this.

Finding the people

Materials were only part of the equation. The next hurdle was finding people who knew how to work with them.

The carpentry side was the easier part because that was Fabian’s world. He was comfortable with the teak and cedar, and the interior work belonged to a trade he understood. What I still needed was someone who really knew cement.

That led me to Lalo, the painter in the yard. He had a couple of younger guys working with him, strong and willing to work. Through talking with them, I learned that Lalo had an uncle who had spent years working cement. The only catch was that his uncle was about seventy-eight years old and already retired.

So we brought Lalo’s uncle out of retirement. I didn’t want a seventy-eight-year-old man out there doing the heavy labor, but that wasn’t what we needed from him. We needed his experience. His job was to teach the younger guys how to lay and work the Portland cement, how to prepare it, apply it, bond it and cure it, and then watch over the work like a trainer and quality-control man.

That arrangement gave us something I could not have bought in a bag or ordered from a supplier: knowledge being passed from an experienced craftsman to younger men who were willing to learn. Now I had a source for the cement, an experienced teacher who knew how to work it, and a crew with the strength to do the physical work.

The crew begins to grow

The same thing was happening on the carpentry side. The more involved I became in construction management and project management, the less time I had to stand beside Fabian measuring, cutting, sanding and building.

So we added Fabian’s son, Raul, to the crew as an apprentice carpenter. He was young, healthy, willing to work and willing to learn. He had also done some work on a neighboring vessel in San Blas, the wooden schooner Patricia Bell, so he already had some experience around boat work. With Fabian guiding the carpentry and Raul learning beside him, that side of the crew could keep moving even as more of my time shifted toward managing the whole project.

That made me comfortable bringing him into the building crew. Over time, we found a few other young men who were between jobs or needed some work. We needed them, too. There was far more to do than skilled finish work.

We had rotten material to tear out, debris to haul away, forty years of dust and grime to clean, interior surfaces to scrub, prime and paint, and endless jobs that required hands more than titles.

The rebuild was turning into a small workforce. It wasn’t something Fabian and I were doing alone anymore.

Every repair revealed another one

As we opened the boat farther, new problems kept appearing.

The old fuel tanks were metal, and by the time we got down to them they were badly rusted. They had to come out. That meant finding someone who could build replacements, and that is where Braulio came into the project.

He was the fiberglass guy. He came in, took molds and measurements from the spaces in the hull, and began working toward custom tanks that would fit where the old metal tanks had been.

At the same time, other work was moving in parallel. I had young men inside cleaning, sanding, priming and repainting the interior hull. I had carpenters measuring, cutting and sanding. I had Lalo and his crew working on the hull, mixing and applying cement with trowels under the guidance of someone who understood the material.

Then we found the bowsprit was rusted.

That was another heartbreaker. So I found a welder. He came in to repair and patch the bowsprit and bring it back toward serviceable condition.

Every time I thought I had identified the job, the job seemed to grow another branch.

A well-orchestrated ballet of chaos

By then my role had changed. I wasn’t just rebuilding a boat with my own hands. I was coordinating a construction site.

There were carpenters, cement workers, painters, hull workers, fiberglass work, welding and general helpers, all doing different things at the same time. I had materials coming in, old material going out, new problems surfacing, and people needing decisions from me.

It became what I can only describe as a well-orchestrated ballet of chaos.

The chaos never really stopped. I just found a comfortable chaotic rhythm inside it.

I knew I was in the middle of a storm. There wasn’t a magic moment when the wind stopped and everything suddenly became easy. The only thing I could do was experience the mess, keep making decisions and keep the work moving.

I had to trust that eventually the sun would rise and the seas would calm. But first I had to get through this part of the storm to reach the good part.

The lift changed the plan

One of the biggest constraints on the rebuild had nothing to do with carpentry, cement or welding. It was the marina’s boat lift.

The lift had been rated at about fifty tons when it was new. By the time I was doing this work, the operator was concerned about what it could safely handle. Tortuga herself was already close to that range when loaded.

The lift operator was experienced, and as we talked about my timeline he told me something that changed how I approached the interior. He had been involved when Tortuga was hauled years before I bought her. He told me that, fully loaded, he had only been able to lift her about six inches clear, and that the lift had blown hydraulic hoses during the operation.

He asked whether I could keep her light.

At first I simply told him I would do what I could. As we got to know each other better, the weight issue became more specific. Any weak point in the hydraulic system could turn into a leak or a blown line when the machine was being pushed near its maximum. If that happened, the lift could be down for days while they waited for a qualified technician.

Eventually the marina asked me to give them advance notice before the launch so they could schedule maintenance and prepare the machine. They also asked me to avoid adding unnecessary weight before they had to pick Tortuga up again.

They didn’t force me to stop the interior work. It was more complicated than that. I didn’t like the limitation, but I respected the problem. They had agreed to haul the boat and were obligated to put her back in the water, and I understood that they were being asked to do it with equipment operating near its practical limit.

Building light enough to launch

So I adjusted the build.

We did as much of the heavy framing as we reasonably could, but we held back a great deal of the final interior woodwork. The hull repairs needed to continue because the boat had to be ready for the water, but cabinetry, flooring and other weight could wait.

Removing the old iron fuel tanks helped. Their fiberglass replacements were lighter. I also kept almost no fuel aboard for the launch, only about five gallons of diesel, enough to motor from the launch area to the slip where Tortuga would stay.

It was one more example of the rebuild forcing me to think several moves ahead. Every improvement had a consequence. Every new piece of material had weight. We were trying to repair the boat while also making sure the marina could physically put her back in the water.

The other storm: the marina

The physical work was not the only source of stress. There was tension with the marina almost from the beginning of the tear-out.

From my perspective, they were running a marina and a rental yard, not a construction company. I rented the space so I could work on the boat, but the work itself was noisy, dusty and messy. Rotten wood had to come out. Debris piled up before it could be hauled away. Walls and flooring were being ripped apart.

Security guards would take photographs of the debris and send them to the administration. There were complaints about noise, trash and the general mess.

I understood their responsibility to manage the property, but from where I stood, I was operating a construction site because that was exactly what the boat had become. I needed room to do ugly work before anything could look better.

I probably wasn’t always the easiest person to deal with either. I had a project to finish, and I was focused on finishing it.

At times I felt that the marina saw Tortuga primarily as a rented space and a source of revenue rather than as the dream I was trying to rebuild. I can’t speak for what motivated them internally, but that was how the relationship often felt to me. The longer she stayed on the hard, the longer I kept paying rent. They saw the spot, the rules and the revenue. I saw the future I was trying to create.

That tension became part of the storm too.

The storm is part of the story

Looking back, that period taught me something I didn’t fully appreciate while I was living it.

People like the sunset part of a dream. They like the calm sea, the finished boat and the photograph where everything finally looks beautiful. They don’t always see what comes before it.

Sometimes you have to go through the storm to enjoy the calm. You endure the mess, the arguments, the setbacks, the bills, the delays and the days when every solved problem seems to reveal another one.

That part forges you. It changes the way you approach problems and makes the eventual victories sweeter.

At the time, I wasn’t standing there congratulating myself for becoming stronger. I was trying to get through the day. But the storm was part of the journey whether I liked it or not.

A victory after months in the trenches

There were not many obvious victories for a while.

For six, seven, maybe closer to nine months, it felt like day-to-day fighting in the trenches. Build something. Discover something. Solve a problem. Find the next one.

Then another major problem demanded an answer: the engine.

The diesel engine that had been in Tortuga for roughly forty years was not only nonfunctional. It was an Italian engine, parts were difficult to obtain in Mexico, and the parts I needed were no longer being made. The engine was rusted, seized and effectively beyond the repair path I could realistically support.

That meant another setback. I had to measure the engine space, research what would physically fit, and find not only a replacement diesel engine but a matching transmission that could work with it.

Eventually I found a candidate in San Diego, California. It was installed in another boat, a race boat that I could use as a donor. So I traveled from San Blas, Nayarit, to San Diego to see it for myself.

That was the pattern. Even the wins came with another job attached.

But by then I understood the rhythm better. Find the problem. Find the person. Find the material. Solve what is in front of you. Keep moving.

The donor boat turned out to be more valuable than I had expected. While we were there, we were also able to get the mast and deck hardware from the same boat. Tortuga needed a mast, and this one was about seventy feet long with the spreaders we needed.

That was a remarkable find. A mast of that size, with its spreaders, could represent something on the order of eighty to ninety thousand dollars new, while a replacement diesel engine and transmission could easily be another ten to twelve thousand. Those figures were the kind of numbers I was comparing at the time, and suddenly one donor boat was solving two enormous problems at once.

To me, it felt like a miracle. After months when every answer seemed to uncover another problem, here was one discovery that moved several parts of the project forward at the same time.

But even a miracle came with paperwork.

Getting the engine, transmission, mast and hardware from San Diego to San Blas was not the same as throwing parts in the back of my truck and driving south. I had to learn a completely different discipline: international shipping.

I had to arrange cross-border hauling, learn how the border process worked, and deal with bills of lading and the documentation required to move large marine equipment from the United States into Mexico. It was another skill set I had never expected to need when I bought a sailboat.

Getting everything into Mexico solved one problem and created the next one. The replacement engine was used. Before Tortuga could depend on it, it needed to be refurbished.

That meant finding a diesel mechanic in Mexico who was willing and able to do the work. Pistons, rings, heads, compression testing and the rest of the rebuild all had to be addressed before that engine could become Tortuga's engine.

So even this victory carried the same question that had followed me through the refit: was I getting closer to abandoning the project and taking the financial loss, or was I getting closer to finishing it and finally having the win?

I kept answering that question the same way. I still wanted to sail with my family. I still wanted to see those beautiful places together. Part of me was simply too stubborn to quit and admit failure, but stubbornness by itself was not enough. I also had a constant desire to find the next solution.

And I had my wife in my corner. When things piled up, she kept reminding me, 'You got this. If anybody can pull this together, you can.' That support mattered. Sometimes the difference between another setback and the end of the project was having someone remind me why I had started.

Still inside the storm

I used to imagine there would be a day when I would look around and think: There it is. We made it. The chaos is over.

I don’t think I have experienced that day yet.

The boat is not finished. In some ways, getting her back into the water was only another phase of the project. The calm I kept imagining was never a single date on the calendar.

What changed was that I learned how to work inside the storm.

The lumber mill, the cement supplier, the crew, the fiberglass work, the welding, the engine, the weight limits and even the friction with the marina were all pieces of the same lesson. I did not need every problem to disappear before I could make progress.

I needed enough people, enough material, enough knowledge and enough stubbornness to keep the project moving.

Before the first new board could become a finished interior, I had to build something less visible first: a supply chain, a crew and a way through the chaos.