Working Waterfront: Keeping It Alive

By Steefenie Wicks
Sausalito’s traditional working waterfront is small but very much alive.   There are boat builders, shipwrights and ship captains working from small locations, making a living in their crafts.  Most of the training that keeps this working waterfront heritage alive comes from past students of the Arques Traditional Boat Building School, under the direction of Bob Darr.
Jeff Reid, Jody Boyle and Anton Hottner are all graduates of the school and all three have small shop spaces at Gate 3, one of the last spots on the Sausalito waterfront where such a thing is possible. None have been able to secure leases to their spaces, and this is bit unnerving because it offers no real security for them.
Jeff Reid was born and raised in Skaneateles, New York, an area full of small lakes. Even though his parents did not have a boat his friends did, so at the age of 8 he was on the water.   The same can be said for both Anton Hottner and Jody Boyle.  Anton was born in Germany, Jody just outside of Boston. That love of the water and sailing is what eventually brought the three of them to the Arques School.
Jeff would be the first to tell you that while he has been working here as a shipwright for the past 15 years, he has never had a business card or advertised his skills; all his work comes by word of mouth.   His mainstay is woodworking on repairs and restorations which he feels are the bread and butter of Arques School graduates.
He believes that the maritime shops, service people, and waterfront workers who now inhabit shop spaces at Gate 3 are a close-knit group that survives because they both work and play together. This includes helping Heather Richard at Cass Gidley Marina by volunteering to work on the small boats that have been donated to the organization.
Captain Heather Richard, who stands 5ft. 2 inches, commands tall sailing ships in the Bay area.  She also hails from the Boston area, and started sailing when she was around 6 years old on a wooden Sunfish.  She coached sailing out of St. Francis Yacht Club in 2000, working privately in the sailing community of the Bay area.
For the past five years, Heather has been working on a project known to locals as Cass’s Marina.  She explains: “This is a public city-owned property that went out of business. A group of us got together and formed a non-profit organization to have a waterfront sailing program at this location. Work has been slow but donations are just starting to come in recently. Oracle donated a bunch of docks after the America’s cup races. The engineering for the ramp has been done, the pilings have been driven, and the Lions Club has pledged $10,000 and manpower to help re-build the office.”  Heather and her committee are now putting together a fleet of small boats.
Heather has a near coastal 100-ton master’s license, which allows her to run charter boats the size of Gaslight and a little bigger.   She is working on board a USA 76, which is an old America Cup’s boat now under charter in San Francisco.  It’s a very long process to learn how to run this vessel that is 84 feet long, the largest boat she has worked on. Because of her size she has had to be better than most of her male counterparts.  But she feels that once she is on board and the crew starts to see what she is capable of; they soon change their minds.   
Jody Boyle, who is currently working on a 40 ft. yawl, has been at his shop at Gate 3 for the past 10 years, and had no idea that he would be in one space so long.  But he has plenty of work, which makes his month-to-month arrangement worth it.    His skills bring him work from outside Sausalito so he travels to different locations doing boat repairs and vessel restorations. He mentions how the most important things he learned from Bob Darr and the Arques School was lofting, hand tool work and that attention to detail.  “The school was awesome,” he says.
For the past 3 years Anton Hottner has worked on the 136-foot long luxury motor yacht, the Acania.  He was recently commissioned to design and build a 17ft lapstrake rowing boat.  His client Doug Gilmore, who believes in supporting the working waterfront, has purchased 3 small boats that both Anton and Jody have worked on.
Anton feels that the importance of the waterfront is that “It’s alive.”  He says: “If you change the zoning, condos can take over shop space and then it becomes a ‘dead’ experience. “
The boat-building heritage of the waterfront is alive because it is passed on.  Recently, a family came to pass on their father’s boat building tools because they felt they should be used. The family decided to seek out boat workers in Sausalito, and found Jody and Anton.  To their surprise they ended up with a set of beautiful specialized wooden tools, most of them hand made.  Anton says, “When you pick up a tool and feel the handle you can almost feel the man who used the tools, the romance of what he was building with that tool.”
Heather feels that Sausalito is one of the few places in the country where new wooden boats are still being built. “There are a lot of talented young boat builders working here and we are now starting to see that maybe fiberglass was not that good because it did not last as long as people thought,” she observes, adding,  “Maybe we should be looking for new materials that would work, but the traditional wooden boat is still preferred.”
Many vessels return each year to have repairs done only in Sausalito by the shipwrights from the Arques School -- vessels like the famous 52-foot yawl Dorade.   Designed by Olin Stephens in 1929 for $28,000, the Dorade would change the way people thought about sailing.  Recently she was docked at Schoonmaker Marina where Jeff and Jody were commissioned to do repairs on her.
They work together, they play together … Heather, Jeff, Anton and Jody all have one thing in common: a love of what they are doing which gives them the right to pass that on to Sausalito’s next generation of waterfront workers.  



Jody Boyle, Anton Hottner, Heather Richard and Jeff Reid (left to right)
Photo by Steefenie Wicks