Meet Jura, a true daughter of the Pacific Northwest. Jura was commissioned by a couple in Victoria using a design from Douglas Peterson that was published in the July 1976 edition of Wooden Boat Magazine.
While the original plans called for a strip-planked hull, shorter coachroof, and plywood deck sheathed in fiberglass, the couple commissioning her worked with Peterson to adapt the design, opting for a Western red cedar carvel planked hull, an extended cabin, and a laid-teak deck among other changes. They entrusted the build to Bent Jespersen, the legendary Sidney, B.C., wooden boatbuilder. Jespersen set a laminated white-oak keel with a mahogany stub for the lead fin, laminated oak stem and sternposts, and steam-bent oak frames on ten-inch centres tied into heavy oak floors. The 1-inch cedar planking, butts carefully staggered, was faired and saturated inside and out with epoxy, giving the hull a seamless look often mistaken for being cold molded or fiberglass. Above, spruce deck-beams carry a double layered plywood sub-deck coated in epoxy and overlaid with half-inch teak, while the coachroof and cockpit coamings are single-plank Honduras mahogany.
Many people that I speak to are deathly afraid of owning wood boats, often for good reason—they need to be tenderly cared for and nursed, and do not like to be neglected. But beyond the practical considerations, of which there are many pros and cons of wood versus fibreglass, steel, aluminum, cement, etc, I think there is a different spirit present in wood, perhaps because of all of the care and love that must go into keeping them beautiful. And I think that spirit has an effect on us: just as art has the power to key our souls up to a higher note (to reference Kandinsky), so too does excellent craftsmanship, for instance, the art of caring for bright work, have the opportunity to key our souls up to sweeter tune. It’s a tune that finds harmony with different values, ones of patience, care, diligence, passion, rather than ones of economy, expediency, and efficiency. Our society seems to have placed an immoderate emphasis on the latter three E values. An overemphasis that one might argue is tearing apart our sense of wholeness and connectedness, of enchantment, with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.
