Custom and production building, storage and repairs, tooling and surveying.
Alan Vaitses did it all. An then wrote about it.
If the highlights of Allan Vaitses' career were configured like a baseball card, a few entries would feature prominently. First, in a period of less than 20 years on his own he built more than 200 custom boats - that's over 200 distinct designs-in wood and fiberglass (plus one in ferro-cement), sail and power, pleasure and commercial, to 65' in length.
Second, at the peak of his shop's output, nearly two dozen different fiberglass models - for which Vaitses had built the prototypes, plugs, molds, or all three - were in production by various manufacturers in the United States.
And third, as with "major league teams" played on, Vaitses learned his trade at some legendary locations, among them the Herreshoff Manufacturing Company in Bristol, Rhode Island.
But the fact is, Allan Vaitses' resume is too long and too varied to reduce to a small-card format. So let's expand the view and present a man who very much dedicated himself to the business of boats.
On-the-Job-Training
Vaitses' lifelong interest in small craft started with boyhood summers spent on
Mattapoisett Neck in Massachusetts. (He and his wife Mable built the first of
two homes there, where they reside today.) This is Buzzards Bay, an area whose
history includes upper-class yachting, middle-class boating, and all manner
of commercial maritime activity. Young Allan not only loved messing about in
boats, he was sufficiently seduced by the idea of building them that he left
college after two years to learn how.
That was in 1937. He hired on at a boat yard in nearby Marion, doing hauling, painting, carpentry, storage and repairs, and building docks and to floats. Work picked up considerably in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane in 1938, and stayed strong throughout the area as yards large and small became involved in boat-building and vessel conversions for the war effort. Vaitses followed the government contracts in southern New England, and his vocational technical education accelerated accordingly.
He joined a planking gang at a New Bedford yard building Coast Guard picket boats. He learned spar-making at a Fairhaven yard converting a dragger to a minesweeper. He became a ship carpenter in Warren, Rhode Island, constructing minesweepers. Carl Beetle, of whaleboat and catboat fame, brought Vaitses to New Bedford as a boatbuilder charged with every aspect of construction ("from keel to finish," according to Allan) as this shop turned out three dozen 36' bouy boats. Next stop: the Herreshoff plant, building minesweepers and PT Boats. As Vaitses eagerly learned the trade and demonstrated his abilities, he gradually took on supervisory roles, as well. He found himself in demand as a skilled and motivated worker in a wartime economy faced with a shortage of trained, able-bodied personnel. He moved to a yard in Fairhaven, close to Mattapoisett, building aircraft rescue boats. Then back to the Beetle shop for a second round of bouy boats, and again to Herreshoff's, this time for aircraft rescue boats. By now, Vaitses was feeling the absence of a knowledge of lofting, so he (and Mable and their two small children) traveled across the country to Hunter's Point Navy Yard in San Francisco, where Vaitses lofted steel and wooden vessels.
By 1945, Vaitses was called up for military service and spent the next 20 months in the Army as an ammunition inspector and renovator, assigned to the occupation forces in Japan. After the war, he tried commercial photography for a while, self-employed in Mattapoisett, but in 1948 returned to boats by way of the Burr Brothers yard in town, where he was named foreman. He could row to this job, and did, summer and winter, in a lapstrake double-ender he built for himself, designed by L. Francis Herreshoff, whose work he'd been following in The Rudder magazine. Six years into this job, Vaitses teamed with a talented mechanic/boatbuilder at Burr Brothers, Fred Brownell, as they struck out on their own. The two built a McInnis-designed 34' bass boat before parting ways, amicably, each to set up his own business. (Fred Brownell started a yard away from the waterfront in Mattapoisett for which he invented the submersible hydraulic boat trailer and associated jackstands, revolutionizing boat hauling and storage in the process. For a profile of that family company up to the early 1990s, see PBB No. 22, page 32.)
A shop of His Own
Back on Mattapoisett Neck, Vaitses erected a humble boatshop with hand tools, but
with a knowledge of just what was required for minimum space and structure, based
on the many buildings belonging to others that he'd worked in since the 1930s.
He was now an owner/operator doing business as Allan H. Vaitses Associates.
From 1955 to 1973, this operation grew from a one-man shop to a good-sized crew in several buildings. Here's how he sums up this period, with characteristic understatement: "Built over 200 custom boats in wood up to 48', in fiberglass up to 52', and one in ferrocement at 65'. There were sailboats, auxiliaries, and powerboats to designs of L.F. Herreshoff, Alden, Colvin, Hunt, Alberg, Steward, Frers, Ford, Dunbar, Crocker, etc., and a few of my own designs. They were yachts except for a 30' Novi used as a ferry, a 48' offshore lobsterboat, and a 52' party boat."
During the same period and in addition to some of its own production work, the Vaitses shop also built prototypes, plugs, and/or molds for 22 different fiberglass models produced by several major manufacturers, including such names as O'Day, Bristol, and Silverton. In 1973 Vaitses sold the business but continued to manage it (as Buzzards Bay Boats). Ownership and name changed again in '75, with Vaitses staying on as manager. He left in '78 for a two-year joint venture in Mattapoisett, covering wooden boats with glass - which brings us to the subject of his developments and inventions.
A Predilection for Inventiveness
Once he'd mastered the basics of boatbuilding and acquired a repertory of tricks
of the trade, Allan Vaitses enjoyed experimenting with materials and methods in a
continuing effort to improve efficiency.
His predilection for inventiveness first bore fruit in the late 1950s, when, in a pre-epoxy era, he began using the waterproof glue available at the time to build boats by what has become to be called the cold-molding - as distinct from hot-molding. The latter was a widely practiced technology that builders here and abroad had been using for years, a well-known example being the sleek L-16 sloop produced by the Luders yard in Connecticut. Vaitses claims to be the first builder in this country to cold-mold a vessel. He employed this system in two 5.5-Meter sailboats (one of which raced successfully at an international level) and in a number of other boats, the largest being a custom 48' deep-V offshore lobsterboat designed by Ray Hunt.
Vaitses was quick to recognize the advantages of cold-molding as a tooling medium for fiberglass, a material he was introduced to at an early stage in its development, as he worked with fiberglass pioneer Carl Beetle, of nearby New Bedford. Vaitses went on to cold-mold many plugs and prototypes at his Mattapoisett shop for himself and for a rapidly growing constituency of glass boat manufacturers. His shop maintained its original expertise in wood, even as it kept pace with the rapid evolution of early fiberglass technology. Vaitses co-invented and patented a system of building ribs into a foam-cored laminate for composite construction, prior to the appearance of dedicated PVC structural foam for the purpose. That foam was Airex, and the Vaitses shop was one of its first customers in the U.S. Vaitses took out that patent, by the way, not to stop others from using his system, but to prevent someone else from forcing him to cease and desist.
Vaitses co-developed another fiberglass construction method, called the CVC system (the initials stand for the principals involved, two Collamores and Vaitses), which Vaitses and others used to build many one-off boats in all sizes, over cage-like wooden male molds. A third glass-related development was the so-called Vaitses method for sheathing wooden boats. This system - controversial in some quarters - called for a heavy glass layup mechanically fastened to the wood underneath. Hundreds of boats have been covered in this way and, Vaitses says, "with no reported failures of the system after 25 years or more." It had the approval of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Canadian government authorized loans on fishing vessels rebuilt this way.
There were also minor but not inconsequential Vaitses inventions, the product of a mind constantly searching for a slick way to solve a technical problem. Two examples: Vaitses invented and marketed a concentric well for installing outboard motors inboard. And he devised a handy tabernacle arrangement for raising and lowering the rig on the L.F. Herreshoff-designed Meadow Lark, a sharpie ketch his shop built in quantity in both wood and glass.
Surveying, Consulting, Writing
By 1980, Vaitses declared himself semi-retired. But that applied only to actual
construction. He devoted himself to surveying, consulting, and writing. His first
surveying job was in the late 1940s, and he surveyed part-time until 1973. During the
1980s he averaged 30 to 40 surveys, four to six appraisals, and two to three consulting
jobs per year. He tapered off in the early 1990s to, in his words, "a couple of
court cases, one arbitration, several cases settled out of court, and investigations
and reports on liability."
During all this time he was writing. He'd begun writing articles for the marine press in the late 1940s, and estimates that all told he's written "at least 40 pieces." This includes a feature for Professional BoatBuilder on the fine points of custom-building contracts (PBB No. 37, page 60), a subject Vaitses had learned the hard way. But his real contribution to the literature resides in the five books he authored from 1980 to 1988, whose titles are self-explanatory. Published by International Marine, they are, in order of appearance and with parenthetical comments by Vaitses: Lofting ("been re-issued by WoodenBoat Books"), Covering Wooden Boats with Fiberglass ("did some of the photography"), Boatbuilding One-Off in Fiberglass ("ditto"), What Shape Is She In? A Guide to the Surveying of Boats ("did the photography"), and The Fibergalss Boat Repair Manual ("drawings by Ed Davis from my sketches, photos by others").
At 84, Vaitses remains active, while doing only "selected" consulting, appraisals, arbitration, and expert-witness work. He's also writing another book, this time a memoir he's titled A Life in Boatbuilding.