Sailing in Place, by Dave Zeiger with Anke Wagner, photographs and illustrations from multiple sources, Kindle Direct Publishing. 300 pp., $9.99 ebook or $24.99 paperback.
The world’s wooden-boat culture agreeably contains multitudes—dockside dreamers, kayak-kit builders, classic-yacht racers, bewildered muddlers, overweening perfectionists. And Dave Zeiger and Anke Wagner, are somewhere out in a skewed orbit, like Pluto, beyond all these others.
For 30 years now, Dave and Anke have lived and cruised aboard a succession of wooden boats from 19′ to 32′, making their home afloat in the archipelago of islands and inlets in Southeast Alaska. They built four of these boats themselves, three to their own designs. None of them are conventional, pretty, or sophisticated. None has an engine, electronics, or even a propane stove. “We set a low bar!” Dave writes, not apologetically. All are boxy and bargelike and have proven remarkably capable. Latest of the five boats, MUSTELID, a 24′ sailing scow launched in 2019, is the culmination of their experimenting. “We’d picked up quite a number of cockamamie notions over the years, and heaped them all into this design. Too much innovation at one go isn’t always advisable, but MUSTELID performed even better than we had (cautiously) hoped.”
Their experience is worth a closer look.