Sitting in my shop was a freshly oiled, clinker-built 14′ faering. Three friends and I, working in Russell, a coastal town on the north end of New Zealand‘s North Island, built the boat over the course of just two weeks; it was the first boat of its kind ever to be produced in New Zealand. As we prepared to carry the finished boat out of the shop and into the street where friends and reporters were eagerly awaiting the fruits of our labor, it occurred to me that we’d never measured the doorway.I set out on the path to building this boat three years earlier when I had traveled in the middle of winter to Nordland, a Norwegian county that straddles the Arctic Circle, to produce a film about how Norwegians, considered some of the happiest people on Earth, remain so even when the sun does not shine for months on end; where the darkness is interrupted only by an ethereal blue light.
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A beautiful boat for a beautiful town, and an excellent write-up.
I wish that I had known that it was being built while I was there! Would have loved to have seen it and not feed the craftsmen!