18' Bolger Diablo Grande Skiff (2010)

Description Per Dynamite Payson: “Tough, fast, highly capable workboat and exhilarating play boat.”

The “redeeming” backstory – Passing Along to my kids a Love to Build

I started building Iain Oughtred’s Ness Yawl. This was a boat I had dreamed of. I was building it quite carefully to hopefully become a classic. During this build, my wife and I had three sons, two years apart each, followed a few years later, by two daughters. The day finally came where I had three eager young boys that wanted to help Dad build a boat – yaa, just what I had hoped!
The situation quickly deteriorated as eager hands brought saws, drills, and hammers to “help”. When the words “no, don’t do that” became the most often heard phrase to my budding young boatbuilders, I knew something had to change quickly and in a major way. I realized that putting aside one dream and exchanging it for another was the only way to go. The Ness Yawl was sold with the hull ¾ built, and a family boat project immediately started.

Bolger’s Diablo Grande looked like the right fit for budding young boatbuilders skills, since epoxy filler and paint can hide a multitude of learning mistakes. As a family, we spent the next 2 ½ years working together on this boat while everyone’s woodworking, epoxying and most of all, patient sanding skills developed. Some modifications were made with proper strengthening designed and installed, and all provisions of USCG “Safety Standards for Backyard Boat Builders” were carefully calculated and followed. A love to build had taken root in the next generation! There was not a happier family when we plopped that boat in the water, all climbed in and began a 10 year stretch of family vacations centered around being together on the water, as well as numerous summer Saturdays spent boating on local rivers, all in a boat we built ourselves.

The love to build has carried forward and has taken on numerous shapes and forms in the lives of our growing family-desktop computers built from scratch on wood/epoxy chassis, wooden guitars, and numerous other small boats. It has also carried into careers in robotics, computers, and building carbon fiber/epoxy full size airplane kits.

We still try to take a yearly family vacation and spend it at a cabin on a lake, to be together and be on the water. All this stemming from the right family boatbuilding project that was started at the right time!