One of the blessings of working with Hank was his totally open minded and positive attitude about everything. When he hired another young guy named Michael Richardson, to do sail repairs, he had no idea that it would lead to his sailmaking shop becoming the core of a major boatbuilding effort by two completely idealistic, inexperienced, optimistic drop-outs. Three, if you count Peter Minkwitz. But he didn't drop out, so he should have been smarter.

Michael had run away from life and cruised the Mediterranean on an engineless thirty foot Greek fishing boat. He had actually done it. The adventure. I was only reading and dreaming. Reading every book about ocean sailing I could get my hands on, and walking the harbors looking for that 'great deal' of a fixer upper boat that could take us across oceans. And more dreaming.

Michael had gotten plans for a thirty-two foot William Atkins design called "Erica". This was the design that eventually became the Westsail 32, a commonly found cruising boat in the late seventies and early eighties. But his buddy, Peter, had the plans for an Atkins "Ingrid", a thirty-eight foot double-ender. These plans only cost $34.00 and came from Motor Boating Magazine. We were so completely naive that it must have been fun for God to watch as we stumbled into our fate as boat builders.

Peter had also heard about this new cheap and easy boat building method called ferro-cement. There were a couple cement boats being built in Sausalito, so we could go and see what they looked like. It did look easy, and we were going to try it. I was twenty two. My girlfriend (and later my wife) Claudette, was nineteen. We both had $3.00 an hour full time jobs, and we had saved about $2,000.00 while living together. The goal was to have a boat. There was obviously a moment of reality suspension when we decided to go for it.

The plan quickly evolved to build three boats. There were plenty of communal things going on then. At least we were smart enough not to get into that. But we did decide to pool our resources for everything else. We could buy almost anything we needed in enough bulk to get the best prices. We shared big expensive tools. We rented a big plot of land down by Pier 62 for $36.00 a month from the Port Authority, and became boatbuilders.

With Jotz Sails as our central focus, we were able to do our full sized drawings for the three sets of station molds in a real loft, so the lines were faired with full length battens we used for making sails. With the three of us working on it, the job was done fast, and we were making our strongbacks and hull forms before we knew we should stop.

Ferro cement is basically like fiberglass construction. The steel mesh and rods are the equivalent of the glass cloth, and the refined mortar is the resin. Developed by Italian architect, Pierre Luigi Nervi, in the 1940's, it has been used to create soaring free form buildings like the Domes of Turin and the St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, and to make fleets of merchant ships during the Second World War. Nervi got interested in making yachts from the material, and this led to designers developing scantlings and designs that could be used by amateur builders. It was the perfect material for counter culture escapists.