A master wooden boat builder from Mattituck has just completed a labor of love retirement present to himself: a 20-foot wooden sailboat built completely from scratch, mostly using hand tools and customized to his exact specifications.
With retirement looming, Donn Constanzo — who with his brother Bruce Wahl founded Wooden Boatworks in Greenport in 2001 — sold off his beloved 35-foot double-masted ketch sailboat and focused all his energies on the wooden boat project.
“I could handle the boat,” he said of the ketch. “It wasn’t a problem. I could single-hand it. But if the weather got kind of funny, or the weather turned or a squall came through, it was a bit much for a 72-year-old guy to handle. I’m fit. I’m in good shape, but I’m not 25. So I just was preemptive and decided I’ll sell the ketch and build myself a little cruising boat.” Mr. Constanzo, who recently sold two-thirds of his company to Steve Lubitz and Patrick Brennan, a village trustee, and said he will fully retire at year’s end, reached out to trusted former employee, Stephen Worsham, to work with him on the new boat.
Now, after 22 months of what they said was painstaking but rewarding work, the sailboat was launched into Stirling Basin late last month.
The boat has a natural crook cherry oak stem and cabin beams with two natural crook hanging knees, courtesy of a cherry tree that was being cut down in East Hampton. It has a white oak keel and Alaskan yellow cedar planking between teak garboard and sheer planks, white oak frames and locust floor timbers, deck beams and Carlins, plus a sheer clamp and beam shelf made from Douglas fir. Nearly every piece of the boat — including almost all of the wood — was already lying around Mr. Constanzo’s shop.
“I have, for years, been putting aside timber, fastenings, hardware,” he said. “I have probably one of the largest traditional marine hardware collections in the country. I’ve been saving timber for years.
“So I said to myself, ‘This is stupid if I don’t build this boat.’” The boat — dubbed Datesy, in honor of his wife Linda’s nickname — has more than 2,200 rivets, each of them installed by hand — a technique that requires two people, with one peening a copper rivet with a ballpeen hammer over a cone shaped washer called a rove.
“Even the metal hardware, we already had, [including] all of the turnbuckles for the rigging,” said Mr. Worsham, 29. “Besides some metal from some local guys, we haven’t had to ship anything out.”
Mr. Constanzo said most of the work was done with hand tools.
“We do have more modern tools, and that’s helpful at times, but we … I would say at least 75% of it is done with hand tools.”
He added that he’s thrilled with the finished product, but gives much of the credit to Mr. Worsham.
“I’m over the moon with the boat,” he said. “It’s exactly how I hoped it would turn out, probably even better — in many, many ways thanks to Stephen.
“He’s a superb craftsman. You couldn’t work with a lovelier man. He just made every moment fun and enjoyable. We got on great. We had a really good time. And, you know, I think it shows in the end result.”
Mr. Worsham, whose wife Helena recently gave birth to their first child, said the timing was right and the job was too good to turn down.
“It worked out well because we got to work at our own speed and do everything we wanted and really custom fit it right.”
The pair used a design crafted by the widely-admired Nova Scotian designer Harry Bryan.
“We painted the floor white and started laying the lines down, building it in the old, traditional way,” Mr. Constanzo said.
Mr. Worsham said that using time-worn techniques gave the men a little more flexibility.
“When you have the plans for a boat, you’ve got basically a list of numbers,” Mr. Shoreham said. “And if you punch those numbers into a computer, it would give you the 3D image of the boat. So we’re doing the same thing without a computer, on the floor, and it allows you to double check if maybe those numbers aren’t exactly right.”
While the new craft can carry up to six passengers, it’s designed so that it can be sailed by a single captain.
“It has 850 pounds of ballast, so it’s very stable, and it has a center board,” Mr. Worsham said. “The goal with this is to be able to sail it in shallow water — the Great South Bay, the Florida Keys, that kind of thing.”
Traditional wooden boat building, which is still alive and well in Greenport and a few other parts of Long Island and New England, began to be overtaken by fiberglass designs in the 1960s — putting many wooden boat builders out of business.
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a “resurgence in wooden yachts [that’s] still ongoing today, but more-so in Europe than the United States,” Mr. Constanzo said.
In his 30s, Mr. Constanzo moved to Europe, where he spent 14 years working in Italian, French and Spanish boat yards. In Italy, he and a partner, Jeffery Law, bought a 45-foot William Fife sailboat built in the 1920s, fully restored it, and started racing.
“She made quite a splash,” Mr. Constanzo said. “She was a very fast boat. We were winning our class and we gained a reputation where we would race the boat in [regattas] in the summer months, and then one of the larger yachts would hire us to put their boat through a refit or a restoration over the winter months. That would fill the coffers so we could go out and race the whole summer. We did that for quite a few years.”
Both men said that wooden boat building is about patience and precision, craftsmanship, tradition and imagination.
“Even though we’re living in 2024, people feel a need to connect to something that isn’t mass produced,” Mr. Constanzo said.
Integrity — of design, construction and maintenance — is everything, he said.
“That whole mentality that something’s built to last, something that’s built with integrity and has an aesthetic value, that also performs really well? That’s kind of tough to beat, right — even if it is a little more expensive,” said Mr. Constanzo, who noted that he lives in a Sterling Street home down the block from Wooden Boatworks that was built before the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Earlier this week, Mr. Constanzo said he would gladly meet to have his picture taken in front of Datesy, but not without Mr. Worsham.
“Look,” he said breezily.“You’re going to put this in the last sentence of your article — a quote from me.
“When you see this boat, it’s Stephen’s work. As for me,” he said with a laugh. “I did my very best to get in the way.”