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    How to Build a Boat: A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea
    How to Build a Boat: A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea
    How to Build a Boat: A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea
    Audiobook9 hours

    How to Build a Boat: A Father, His Daughter, and the Unsailed Sea

    Written by Jonathan Gornall

    Narrated by Jonathan Gornall

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Part ode to building something with one’s hands in the modern age, part celebration of the beauty and function of boats, and part moving father-daughter story, How to Build a Boat is a bold adventure.

    Once an essential skill, the ability to build a clinker boat, first innovated by the Vikings, can seem incomprehensible today. Yet it was the clinker, with its overlapping planks, that afforded us access to the oceans, and its construction has become a lost art that calls to the do-it-yourselfer in all of us. John Gornall heard the call.

    A thoroughly unskilled modern man, Gornall set out to build a traditional wooden boat as a gift for his newborn daughter. It was, he recognized, a ridiculously quixotic challenge for a man who knew little about woodworking and even less about boat-building. He wasn’t even sure what type of wood he should use, the tools he’d need, or where on earth he'd build the boat. He had much to consider…and even more to learn.

    But, undaunted, he embarked on a voyage of rediscovery, determined to navigate his way back to a time when we could fashion our future and leave our mark on history using only time-honored skills and the materials at hand. His journey began in East Anglia, on England’s rocky eastern coast. If all went according to plan, it would end with a great adventure, as father and daughter cast off together for a voyage of discovery that neither would forget, and both would treasure until the end of their days.

    How to Build a Boat celebrates the art of boat-building, the simple pleasures of working with your hands, and the aspirations and glory of new fatherhood. John Gornall “tells the inspiring story of how even the least skilled of us can make something wonderful if we invest enough time and love” (The Daily Mail) and taps into the allure of an ancient craft, interpreting it in a modern way, as tribute to the generations yet to come. “Both the book, and place, are magical” (The Sunday Telegraph).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateMay 7, 2019
    ISBN9781508283379
    Author

    Jonathan Gornall

    Jonathan Gornall is an award-winning freelance journalist, whose writing has appeared in The Daily Mail and The Times (London). While at The Times, he was the author of a weekly column, “Microwave Man,” that looked insightfully, and often humorously, at the role of man in the modern world. He published a book of the same title in 2006. He has twice attempted to row across the Atlantic, and lives on England’s east coast with his wife and daughter. 

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    Reviews for How to Build a Boat

    3.5/5

    12 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      How he made a clinker style dinghy for his daughter Phoebe. It was as difficult as it always looks, and took him a year off and on, but fortunately the account is mixed up with lots of very interesting stuff about his life and family, and his exploits trying to row across the Atlantic. Basically he never made it across the ocean so became desperate to finish off this boat project. What Phoebe will make of it in the long term is anybody's guess, I think I could get irritated by the performance of a short stout lug sail dinghy. Lots of interesting stuff about the Orwell, Ipswich and thereabouts. Also the account of his mother's pregnancy and her reaction to the father is very moving, and the reason he ended up at Wolverstone school.
    • 2/5
      I think most people buying the book were more interested in the father daughter relationship than the actual construction of the boat. His history ocean rowing is interesting, but without diagrams or photos, the technical relay of constructing the boat drags. I had to go online just to see what the boat looked like!
    • 3/5
      The story of how a man built a boat for his daughter. The author, who found himself becoming a father again at age 59, set about to leave his new born daughter a remembrance of himself. His troubled past family life obviously affected him, and he wanted to make sure that his child did not have to ever have the doubts about family that raced through his veins. His solution was to build this boat. Never mind that he had no idea of how to build it, nor any skills to accomplish it. He pressed on, to his eventual success. It's a good story. Spoiler: after reading the advance copy I received from NetGalley (which was an electronic copy, with no photos), I went online and found the author. There I found him and his daughter, in the boat, looking extremely happy. A happy ending!