QUAAK

The ship in the background is the USS Constitution. The nearby building is the maintenance facility where much of the new materials for the Constitution’s rebuild were fabricated. Tucked away on the far back of the second floor was my friend Bill Brommell’s workshop. Around that time, I was newly unemployed by the Department of the Interior. I spent at least one afternoon a week coming by for extended lunches in the shipyard or surrounding parts of Charlestown.
Bill was the model maker at the Constitution Museum, and I had met him one afternoon after I had wandered into his space. He had more tales than the average sailor, and they would poke out at the odd moment when some bit or oddity was under discussion, like how he and his wife had set up with a Greek shipbuilder right after World War II, building traditional wooden Greek fishing boats and small vessels.
They did not have a ship saw ( sort of a bandsaw on heavy steroids), so timbers were cut using a pit saw—literally a pit in the ground with one sawyer in the pit and one above pulling the saw back and forth. He casually mentioned that they called the pitman Gorilla because his arm and chest muscles were huge from working the pit saw.

Bill had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of traditional boat and shipbuilding techniques. And we wound up cooperating on a variety of projects. One was constructing the small boat he was rigging in the picture. We built the boat in the fifth-floor Folklife Center I operated. It was a great lark. Bill reduced and scaled it down from a larger craft used in Porugal’s wine trade in the 1700s. My friend, Ralph Johnson from the Pert Lowell company, built it with a crew of happy volunteers, including me.

With boats, size, and capability can be a matter of perception. Bill named the boat Quaak after the sounds that yellow-crowned night herons make. Quaack was an incredible boat to row, smoothly gliding through the water. Bill, however, soon made rigging for her so she could be square or lug rigged. Quaak sailed sweetly with all those rigs. We took her to the WoodenBoat Show in Mystic, Connecticut, one year. He set up her square rigging, and we proudly proclaimed she was the only square rigger in the show that year.

Quaak was fully equipped with everything needed, including a ship bell to use as a fog signal. Her transom was properly decorated with a transom banner that I carved.