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In the mid-1950s, Yrjö
Sundell, the father of a friend of mine, built a
boat. In my eyes the boat was amazingly beautiful
and since then it became my dream to build one
myself, too.
In the 1980s, I started
reading the Wooden Boat magazine and came across an
article of Samuel Devlin and his boats, among those
the Surf Scoter. But it wasn't until the new
millennium that I finally got round to it -- having
taken a look in the mirror one day and realizing
that it was about time I got started with the
building of my dream boat as I wasn't becoming any
younger.
The initial plan was to
build some 15 feet runabout. But my family, then
grown with children and grandchildren, wanted a
larger boat suited for family trips. I then
remembered the Surf Scoter and felt that even
without previous boat building experience, I would
be able to tackle the task with the stitch-and-glue
method. Luckily, my brother-in-law's attic of an old
cattle house, i.e. my workshop, was not able to fit
a larger boat...
With the help of the study
plans, I first built a Surf Scoter miniature and
read Devlin´s book to get more familiar with the
stitch-and-glue method. Building the boat started in
April 2002. Most of the work was done during my
summer vacations over of period of four years. The
pilot house needed to be built outdoors in the front
yard of our summer house, as with it the boat would
not have fitted out of the cattle house attic.
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