High Tech Artisians

Hand made high tech

Yesterday, as part of my ‘birthday surprise’, Lisa took me to the airport where we got on a small prop plane and headed off to parts unknown.

The unknown part turned out to be  Bar Harbor, Maine. But even after a great lobster dinner, I had no idea why we had come so far.

The next morning, we got into a car and once again headed for parts unknown.

In this case, it was the small Maine town of Trenton, home of the Morris Yachts factory.

Lisa had arranged for us to have a private tour of the boatworks.

I have long had my eye on Morris.  I sold my last boat, a Swan, as part of my divorce, and you know the old expression: the two happiest says of a man’s life  – the day he buys a boat, and the day he sells it.  

Morris makes some of the finest sailing yachts in the world.  They are a very small company, and they don’t produce more than a relative handful of boats each year and you have to order nearly a year in advance. 

Morris is located in a magic part of the boatbuilding world.  Within a 10 mile radius of Bar Harbor the best sailboats in the US (and possibly the world) are all built.  Great names in sailboats abound out here – Hinckley, Morris, Brookline and the craftsmen who have done this for generations.

Eric Roos took  us on a tour of the boatworks, and I was astonished to see that despite the fact that Morris Yachts are extremely high-tech, they are in fact hand made.

One can easily imagine the days in which wooden boats were hand made – the carpenter laboriously sculpting the planking to the desired shape.  These boats are laminated fiberglass, but the craftsmen still lay the sheets of glass down by hand, one at a time, shaping them as they go.  And the fiberglass itself has gone even higher tech.  Roos showed us sheets of fiberglass that are delicate weaves of glass and kevlar or glass and carbon fibre.  

This makes the boats stronger than steel (literally) while weighing next to nothing. Yet despite being so light-weight, you are going to feel remarkably safe when you are offshore and it is blowing 40+.

And even though these boats represent the cutting edge of high tech, they appear, to the casual observer, as beautiful as a 1930’s hand-made wooden yacht. That is the remarkable achievement.

Here is the cockpit of the M42.  I have my eye on the M-series, which despite their size, are built for single handed day sailing.  See how the high-tech is sublimated to the classic design.

And here’s the finished product – an M52 under sail.  See how despite the layers of incredibly hi-tech material, the boat still appears as a classic, even though she is incredibly light-weight and far stronger than steel.  

Well, of course, all of this brings me back to video in a strange way.

Just because we have moved to the highest technology for video gathering and processing – tiny hand held cameras and laptop edits, we can also merge ideals of great craftsmanship into our own processes.

The fact that we have lost cameras that weigh a ton or editing suites the size of my livingroom does not mean that the product has to suffer. On the contrary, as Tom Morris proves, high tech can produce some breathtakingly beautiful work.