Noah is better known, but Steve Thon took the age-old craft of boat building to a higher level. Literally.
Rather than build a boat in a valley and end up on a mountain, Thon built his ark on a mountain and hauled it down to the sea.
Thon grew up in Minnesota, about as far as one can get from bluewater sailing. But he's long had a hankering for adventure. Minnesota is short on mountains too, but Thon has bagged peaks in the Rocky and Chugach mountains. He even made an attempt on Denali.
It was on an impromptu bid to climb Goat Rock, a precipitous peak near the end of the road in Eklutna Valley, where Thon drifted into his life's work, a sailboat big enough to carry him to any corner of the seven seas.
Finding his dreamboat
On his first night in Anchorage after moving north, Thon met Bob Linville, a commercial fisherman now living in Seward, at a mountaineering club meeting. In May 1980, Linville suggested climbing Goat Rock in Eklutna.
They were hiking up to the base of the mountain, behind where Rochelle's Ice Cream Stop is now, when they spied the large wooden mold of a boat hull outside a cabin. A conversation with the mold's owner, Preston Schultz, fanned a slow-burning fire in Thon.
Before long, Thon and Schultz agreed to work on the boat as partners.
Schultz was a commercial fisherman. Having sunk his boat in Prince William Sound during the winter crab season, he wanted to build a combination seiner/longliner that could fish far offshore for tuna, which would require refrigeration and a fair amount of storage. Fuel was expensive. A motor-sailer — part motorboat, part sailboat — seemed like a unique solution.
Schultz moved back to Anchorage and modified the original plans he had purchased for the hull. His new model was the "Spray," a decrepit sloop estimated to be at least 100 years old and completely rebuilt by Joshua Slocum in Massachusetts in the late 1890s. Slocum, who had been given the rotting hulk when he was down on his luck, subsequently sailed the Spray single-handedly around the world, the first to do so.
An Australian boat builder, Bruce Roberts, had stretched Spray's hull to make it sharper, adding more run in the aft sections. Those were the plans Schultz settled on: 47 feet long and 14 ½ feet across the beam.
The boat was designed to be seaworthy, "to behave herself and not terrify the crew," in Roberts' salty description. At her best sailing downwind on the deep-blue seas, she wouldn't necessarily be a willing partner into a headwind. Rather, she was designed to carry a lot of food and water, hold a steady course for days on end and sail sedately. A boat fit for a retired sailor. (...)
Building on a dream
Thon worked on the boat 30 years. Wait. That's not right. Putting it that way diminishes both Thon's dogged perseverance and the forehead-slapping miracle of a boat built from scratch.
Repeat after me: Thon worked on the boat for 30 years. What if every syllable of that sentence took three years? When your lips stopped moving, you'd still have three years of hard labor before the boat was ready to be taken home to the sea.
Thon worked on the boat after long days working as a carpenter and house-builder. He worked on the boat for a decade while exercising his carpentry skills with the Anchorage School District. He worked on weekends and holidays.
He worked on the boat in his sleep.
Alaska is a tough place to work outdoors, especially in winter. Before he could concentrate on the boat, Thon had to erect a shed over it. The firewood-heated, two-story building, which doubled as a shop and had enough room for Debbie's car on cold nights, was bigger than most houses.
Thinking ahead — well over the horizon, it turns out — Thon designed the front of the shed to be detachable. He cradled the boat's hull on heavy-duty metal frames so that, eventually, a trailer could be backed under it.
Boat parts are expensive. He'd save up several thousand dollars, buy a part, a necessary tool, a few rolls of fiberglass cloth or a barrel of resin, then problem-solve, fabricate and expend sweat equity until he had saved enough money for another round.
That's how, for example, he ended up with three welders, each more expensive than the last. When he brought home the third one, Thon's wife Debbie shook her head and rolled her eyes.
"Who knew there were three different kinds of welders?" she said.
Rather than build a boat in a valley and end up on a mountain, Thon built his ark on a mountain and hauled it down to the sea.
Thon grew up in Minnesota, about as far as one can get from bluewater sailing. But he's long had a hankering for adventure. Minnesota is short on mountains too, but Thon has bagged peaks in the Rocky and Chugach mountains. He even made an attempt on Denali.It was on an impromptu bid to climb Goat Rock, a precipitous peak near the end of the road in Eklutna Valley, where Thon drifted into his life's work, a sailboat big enough to carry him to any corner of the seven seas.
Finding his dreamboat
On his first night in Anchorage after moving north, Thon met Bob Linville, a commercial fisherman now living in Seward, at a mountaineering club meeting. In May 1980, Linville suggested climbing Goat Rock in Eklutna.
They were hiking up to the base of the mountain, behind where Rochelle's Ice Cream Stop is now, when they spied the large wooden mold of a boat hull outside a cabin. A conversation with the mold's owner, Preston Schultz, fanned a slow-burning fire in Thon.
Before long, Thon and Schultz agreed to work on the boat as partners.
Schultz was a commercial fisherman. Having sunk his boat in Prince William Sound during the winter crab season, he wanted to build a combination seiner/longliner that could fish far offshore for tuna, which would require refrigeration and a fair amount of storage. Fuel was expensive. A motor-sailer — part motorboat, part sailboat — seemed like a unique solution.
Schultz moved back to Anchorage and modified the original plans he had purchased for the hull. His new model was the "Spray," a decrepit sloop estimated to be at least 100 years old and completely rebuilt by Joshua Slocum in Massachusetts in the late 1890s. Slocum, who had been given the rotting hulk when he was down on his luck, subsequently sailed the Spray single-handedly around the world, the first to do so.
An Australian boat builder, Bruce Roberts, had stretched Spray's hull to make it sharper, adding more run in the aft sections. Those were the plans Schultz settled on: 47 feet long and 14 ½ feet across the beam.
The boat was designed to be seaworthy, "to behave herself and not terrify the crew," in Roberts' salty description. At her best sailing downwind on the deep-blue seas, she wouldn't necessarily be a willing partner into a headwind. Rather, she was designed to carry a lot of food and water, hold a steady course for days on end and sail sedately. A boat fit for a retired sailor. (...)
Building on a dream
Thon worked on the boat 30 years. Wait. That's not right. Putting it that way diminishes both Thon's dogged perseverance and the forehead-slapping miracle of a boat built from scratch.
Repeat after me: Thon worked on the boat for 30 years. What if every syllable of that sentence took three years? When your lips stopped moving, you'd still have three years of hard labor before the boat was ready to be taken home to the sea.
Thon worked on the boat after long days working as a carpenter and house-builder. He worked on the boat for a decade while exercising his carpentry skills with the Anchorage School District. He worked on weekends and holidays.
He worked on the boat in his sleep.
Alaska is a tough place to work outdoors, especially in winter. Before he could concentrate on the boat, Thon had to erect a shed over it. The firewood-heated, two-story building, which doubled as a shop and had enough room for Debbie's car on cold nights, was bigger than most houses.
Thinking ahead — well over the horizon, it turns out — Thon designed the front of the shed to be detachable. He cradled the boat's hull on heavy-duty metal frames so that, eventually, a trailer could be backed under it.
Boat parts are expensive. He'd save up several thousand dollars, buy a part, a necessary tool, a few rolls of fiberglass cloth or a barrel of resin, then problem-solve, fabricate and expend sweat equity until he had saved enough money for another round.
That's how, for example, he ended up with three welders, each more expensive than the last. When he brought home the third one, Thon's wife Debbie shook her head and rolled her eyes.
"Who knew there were three different kinds of welders?" she said.
by Rick Sinnott, ADN | Read more:
Image: Rick Sinnott
