BISH

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BISH, a 28-footer designed by Murray Peterson.

There weren’t many decent sailing days left as the screws tightened down on the gloomy fall of Seattle, Washington, and this day seemed to be turning into another bummer. A piddling southerly had faded to nothing, the overcast was thickening, and we were now stalled in a Puget Sound bay that resembled a vast, gray, stuporous pond. The same thing had happened last time we went out, and we had surrendered after two hours of pointless drifting. Karl Bischoff had had his new 28′ Murray Peterson–designed schooner BISH essentially completed for more than a year, but a string of complications had prevented an honest sea trial under sail all that time. BISH had twice attended the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, but under diesel power. How, Karl and I were aching to learn, does she actually sail?

We drifted for half an hour, chatting as aimlessly as the air, before we realized that BISH had gradually spun herself around. She was then pointing northeast, where there was a slight stir of a new northerly. Below us arose a barely perceptible bow wave. Entirely on her own, BISH had parsed the changing weather, turned herself nearly 180 degrees, and dialed in a close reach, for which the sails were already set. This happened not through any technological wizardry—the highest tech on this boat is a bilge pump. She just wanted to sail.

Ten minutes later we were reaching into a fine 10-knot breeze, BISH in her groove, the day redeemed.

Maybe it was also a redemption of Karl’s stubborn insistence on building BISH exactly as the designer intended.

For many amateur boatbuilders, the first thing we do when we open up a new set of plans, right there in the first hot flash of enthusiasm, is to begin scheming all the things we’ll change. And it might be justified when the design is nearly 60 years old—venerable enough to legitimately feel outdated, but not yet a sacred classic. BISH was built to Peterson’s Susan design, which was among his last dozen boats, drawn in the decade before his death in 1974, and it makes absolutely no concessions to modern conventions. It’s carvel planked, full-keeled, gaff-rigged, devoid of even the most modest rigging conveniences such as winches or cam cleats, and displaces 6½ tons. The accommodations are split into two munchkin-sized cabins connected by a tunnel with only 45″ of headroom. Anyone bedding down in an aft-cabin quarterberth will be canoodling with the engine. The companionway steps are minuscule and hazardous cantilevered perches that require serious care every time you negotiate them.

But the boat is unquestionably lovely, and though conventional schooner wisdom claims that the rig lacks practicality for boats under 40′, from the outside it looks like a fully grown schooner. Apart from the truncated aft -cabin trunk, it could be mistaken for Peterson’s 41-footer, Coaster III, if you didn’t see a human figure aboard for scale. The designer wasn’t angling for a “cute” little boat. This is a serious cruiser.

BISH in Puget Sound (left), Karl Bischoff (right).

There were a couple of times during his dozen years of building BISH that Karl was tempted by the sirens of modernity. He contemplated building lightweight bird’s-mouth masts instead of solid poles and employing a leakproof plywood underlay for the deck. A good many of us would avoid consulting the proper authority because we wouldn’t want to be talked out of our wonderful ideas. But in both cases, Karl consulted Bill Peterson, the designer’s son and a naval architect himself, who strongly discouraged the changes. He maintained that lighter masts and plywood’s greater rigidity would upset the designer’s carefully calculated balances of weight and structure. Karl acquiesced.

“Murray Peterson knew a lot more about design than I do,” he says.

Peterson was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1908. He died in 1974, the year of WoodenBoat’s birth, and issue No. 1 carried an obituary and tribute by his close friend John Leavitt. “He was a master at combining traditional appearance with practical design,” Leavitt wrote, “taking full advantage of any design and construction techniques which might assist in arriving at the desired result.”

Leavitt wrote that Peterson in his youth haunted the Portland docks and harbor shores, absorbing the character of the commercial schooners that shuttled freight among the small towns scattered along the Maine coast. “Beneath the grimy, salt-stained hulls, he saw that many of these little vessels had something else to offer besides mere picturesque appearance.”

After high school, Peterson enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology but dropped out when he realized that a formal education in naval architecture would likely lead to a life concerned with commercial ships and steel hulls. He went to work as a draftsman in John G. Alden’s office in Boston, and while there in 1930 produced the first of his schooner designs—the 34′6″ COASTER, which he then had built for his own use. Thoroughly traditional in its aesthetic, it prominently featured the twin cabin trunks that would distinguish two later and larger design derivatives, Coaster II and III, and eventually the 28-footer, Susan, so named after the first boat built to it. In 1933, he left Alden and set up his own design business.

According to a remembrance written by Bill Peterson, his father drew the 28′ design in 1966 and commissioned builder Malcom Hoyt Brewer of Camden, Maine, to build a first boat on speculation. Two prospective buyers expressed interest but eventually dropped away, so Peterson kept the pocket schooner himself and happily cruised with his wife, Susan, for the last four summers of his life. Bill Peterson, an avid horseman, wrote that sailing SUSAN later reminded him of riding one of his family’s strong and responsive Morgans. “She accelerates quickly and gracefully. Her motions are similarly easy, and control is minimal and delicate when the sails are set properly in their different combinations. SUSAN powers through seas and ghosts along in a calm. Like a well-trained horse, she seems to anticipate change.”

Karl was reasonably well prepared for this project. He was a seasoned sailor; he’d owned a 37′ Tayana for nearly 30 years and lived aboard for eight. He’d built one smaller boat, at 15′ Whitehall pulling boat. And he was, and is, fiercely determined. “Somebody might call it ‘bullheaded,’” he admits. “People at the marina would see me on my knees on the boat trying to take out a screw. ‘That screw’s never coming out,’ they’d say. ‘Oh, yes it is,’ I’d say. Four hours later I’d have it out.”

Still, it’s a major leap from a 15′ rowboat to a 28′ schooner, and Karl repeatedly insists he was no master craftsman, then or now. But he says he harbored no great doubts about being able to succeed at building a serious boat. “Because it’s not this one big thing,” he says. “It’s this small thing and that small thing, and you can learn how to do each one as its time comes. When I had to do the lofting, I took a class, and then I did it. If your goal in life is to have this completed boat and sail the world, I could see how it would look overwhelming. But my goal was just the adventure of building. It was about the journey, not the destination.”

At the outset, there was the considerable distraction of his day job: He and his wife, Leslie, together ran a Seattle branding and design agency with 16 employees. He decided he could take off one day a week for boat work and still reserve weekends for other things—especially spending time with Leslie, who doesn’t share his passion for sailing. There was no place at their home for a workshop that would accommodate a 28′ boat, so he bought a shack in Seattle’s south-of-downtown industrial district, demolished it, and built a 33′×50′ warehouse-like box to enclose the workshop and boat.

At a day-a-week pace, the work slogged forward grindingly. It was a full four years—2010 to 2014—before the hull was fully planked. And there were setbacks. One dark night in 2012, a burglar literally sawed a new doorway into the shop’s backside and made off with a crop of tools and 1,000 silicon-bronze screws stockpiled for the project. Insurance covered it, and Karl fortified the shop with a monitored alarm system and motion-detecting outside lights. Another serious problem arrived from outside in the form of a poured-lead ballast keel that somehow had turned out to be not the specified 4,400 lbs but 2,100 lbs heavier. He’d provided the fabricator with a wooden mold, intending it to be buried in earth to support its bottom and sides. But the fabricator had apparently left the mold free-standing while pouring in the lead, resulting in a severely bloated form. Karl spent several weeks shaving and sculpting the keel, starting with a chainsaw, then a power planer, and finally hand planes—“really dirty, messy work,” he says. Some consolation: the metal shop accepted the scrap offcuts for a refund.

Karl also made a major error himself, and it became a head-banger that baffled him for years. Instead of cutting off the frames at deck level, he extended them about 7″ higher to the tops of the bulwarks, and fully planked the hull up to that level. A good, strong, integrated structure, he figured, would be better than grafting bulwarks onto the completed deck. But then arose the uh-oh: how to make the inboard bulwark-to-deck joint absolutely watertight? At the Wooden Boat Festival one year, he asked several professionals, and they all had the same answer: “No idea.” He couldn’t face the prospect of ripping off hard-earned planking and lopping off the ends of the frames, so finally he went ahead and installed mahogany covering boards on the deck butted up to the frames, built hollow bulwarks up from there with 1″ cedar planking on the inboard side, cut in scuppers, wedged solid-wood fillers inside where chainplates had to be bolted through, and finally ran an epoxy fillet the full boat’s length to smooth and seal the bulwark-to-deck joint.

“It’s kind of Mickey Mouseish, because it’s an afterthought,” he says, “But it works.”

Happily, more good ideas than problematic ones came along.

The laid deck and Edson worm-gear steering mechanism, wheel, and antique binnacle compass.

One was the decision to begin edging toward retirement from his business. He’d begun the boat in his late 50s, and an acquaintance who’d taken 33 years to build a Peterson schooner suggested Karl was starting a little late. A joke, but maybe not entirely. Karl offloaded some of his responsibilities and started taking off two days a week for boat work. Another decision was to brand the schooner’s details with not only a consistent design aesthetic but also an underlying philosophy—not unlike what his firm might suggest to a corporate client.

Most prominently, there’s the five-pointed star—in effect BISH’s logo. It appears on the transom nameboard, the companionway slides, the cabin lockers (as decorative vents), and even in some bronze castings on deck hardware. Speaking of bronze—it’s everywhere. Karl appears to have a spotless record in barring stainless-steel hardware from the premises. Some items he fabricated himself, such as the mainsheet and foresail sheet horses, consisting of bronze rods torch-heated for bending. Some are off-the-shelf castings from Port Townsend Foundry, such as the elegantly curvaceous boom-gallows supports. Many are used pieces scavenged from marine resale shops or the Internet. Early on, another recent Susan builder, Bob Albers, advised Karl to set up an eBay parameter such as “boat bronze,” and wait patiently. This scored a number of pieces, usually at major savings. A new factory edition of the bronze worm-drive steering gear was available but would have cost $3,500. One surfaced on eBay for $300.

The stainless-steel proscription oozed and spread out, not surprisingly, to cover most other modern commercial products. All of BISH’s blocks are wooden and handmade by Karl himself. He says he was motivated to take on the job partly because of the cost of classic blocks (typically up to $200 each) and partly by the simple desire to learn to do it. “I watched some YouTube videos, and it seemed like something I could do. And I could.” He shifted into assembly-line mode and manufactured 25 mahogany-shelled blocks, in various configurations, with Delrin sheaves and bronze axles.

At the outset, Karl was aiming to keep the boat free of any electrical devices whatsoever—partly a reaction to having spent too many irritating hours troubleshooting electrics on his production boat, and partly a determination to be a consistent traditionalist. “I just think the history of seafaring is fascinating,” he says. “Even on my fiberglass boat, I had ratlines and baggywrinkle. I thought if I built a whole boat in that vein it wouldn’t come across as goofy.” He got as far as antique kerosene running lights, but then came the engine. He bought one, a vintage Norwegian Sabb, that actually had a hand crank for starting. Karl liked that. “But the guy who sold it to me took note of my age and suggested that I might want the electric starter, and said he’d throw it in at no extra cost. So I installed it.”

“I haven’t used the hand crank yet,” he admits.

Despite frequent demurrals about his woodworking skills, Karl’s craftsmanship is excellent inside and out, and the forward cabin shows off a quiet, cultivated design sense. The table came from his childhood home, cut down and refinished. The custom-made pillows are covered with reproductions of portraits his mother had painted of his father, “Bish,” the schooner’s namesake. The galley is minimalist—a sink and a camp stove—but the mahogany counter and trim give it the right sense of dignity.

The unusual companionway steps save space.

It’s partly here, in this living space, that some design shortcomings become evident. The space does not quite have standing headroom—at least not for Karl, who is 6′ tall. There’s almost no storage space at the galley: “You can’t even stash a bag of potato chips,” he says. And those quirky companionway steps, constructed exactly to Peterson’s plans, seem like an accident waiting to happen, though Karl thinks there could be an upside: “You get used to being conscious of your movements as you move around the boat. Maybe this is a good thing for sailing in general—be conscious of your body.”

Another recent Susan schooner, built by Bob Albers in Texas and launched in 2016, provides an interesting contrast—and an affirmation of the design’s intrinsic merit. Albers, a mechanical engineer and experienced boatbuilder, redesigned the hull for cold-molded construction with a sheathing of Xynole set in epoxy. Eliminating the 2″-thick oak frames from the structure carved out some extra room down below, and he increased the deck camber to get 6′ of standing headroom in the galley. Despite the weight savings in the hull construction, together with his use of bird’s-mouth masts, Bob says his schooner floats right on its design waterline and has shown no tendency to hobbyhorse in rough water. He’s plenty happy with it and is confident in the hull’s durability.

Karl expects to singlehand BISH most of the time, but he was happy to have someone with sailing credentials aboard to help with this first sea trial, even if it was a journalist.

Together we uncovered a few quirks. First, there was a jungle of lines for a relatively small boat, and since they were all the same identical mock-vintage polyester tan, it wasn’t instantly obvious which did what. More than once, I got confused at the helm while Karl was hoisting or dousing sails, and more than once he remarked about the very long halyards rigged for mechanical advantage. It was clear to me that without winches, cam cleats, clutches, or roller furling, he was going to be a very busy singlehander. He agreed, and at least began considering the prospect of a winch or two—bronze, of course.

The narrow cabin trunks, we noticed, are advantageous for moving around on deck. The side decks are an amazingly generous 20″ to 23″ wide. However, when the foresail and mainsail booms are amidships, there was no easy route to maneuver between the port and starboard sides. There’s no fix for this; it’s one of the inevitabilities with a small-schooner rig.

The boat moved uncannily well in a breeze that at first barely stirred. Since “barely stirring” is an all-too-common Seattle summer forecast, Karl commissioned Bill Peterson to design a topsail, which had been built but not yet rigged. With 460 sq ft of working sail, it was hard to explain why BISH was moving so well, but it was an auspicious sign. I told Karl that I doubted he would ever need or want to fuss with a topsail, and he didn’t disagree. His whole idea with this boat, from the beginning, was back-to-the-basics sailing, a resolute avoidance of fuss.

When the wind finally picked up, BISH heeled to maybe 12 or 15 degrees and just locked in, like she was on rails. There was no ruffling from the chop that the wind was kicking up, no uncertainty in her momentum. “Rock-solid,” Karl observed, happily. “I’ve sailed 30′ production boats, and compared to this, they felt like big dinghies.”

There were some rigging tweaks ahead, maybe some substantial modifications. There were a few niggling worries—learning to reef singlehanded, for instance, may not be easy. “You know, it’s interesting that I chose to build a gaff schooner,” he said. “I’d never been aboard a schooner, never sailed a gaff rig.” On this day, there seemed to be no regrets.

Lawrence W. Cheek, a regular correspondent for WoodenBoat, lives on Whidbey Island, Washington. He has built two gaff-riggers.

A new old schooner

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