This is the original text, more or less, of a profile article on Meade Gougeon  writn.by Jim Brown and submitted to WoodenBoat Magazine in December, 2013. With substantial cutting to suit space and focus needs, it was published in the January – February 2015 issue. Comparing the two manuscripts speaks volumes on what editors endure from certain boating writers in order to make their floating verbarrhea marketable.

The author thanks the Magazine’s editor Matt Murphy, and the Gougeon crew, especially Grace Ombry and Meade Gougeon, for making the writing a great adventure, and Joe Farinaccio for posting this lengthy version of the manuscript at OutRig!

JWB  3/9/2015

COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY CRAFTSMAN

Catching Up With Meade Gougeon

By Jim Brown

It is easy to say something kind and well reasoned about my particular friend Meade Gougeon, but it is not easy to grasp, even harder to explain, the scope of his influence, and that of his brothers Joel and Jan, on modern wooden boats. Or on any boats. Or on wooden anything.

Since 1971, the Brothers have been leading the way in formulating craft epoxy resins and in showing us how to use them. Even more than their West System® epoxy products, it has been their guidance in the application of a new technology that has resulted in a sea change in small craft design, construction and repair. Because of this technology, epoxy-laminated wooden structures of great variety can now exhibit unprecedented stiffness, strength, lightness, fatigue resistance and – most notably for wood – permanence. Such elevated physical properties are normally associated with today’s all-synthetic, composite materials used in industrial settings, but they are now routinely rivaled in wood/epoxy by amateur craftspeople working in home shops with ordinary tools and at relatively low cost. The LAUNCHINGS pages of this magazine reveal the preponderant extent to which we wooden boat enthusiasts have embraced this new technology.

There’s a story there, of how wood/epoxy boat building happened technically, and the Gougeon Brothers are a big part of it, but this is not that story. Instead, what follows is an account of how this new know how happens for people. It is a selection of personal parables resulting from my long acquaintance with the three brothers, with certain members of their staff, and especially my acquaintance with the elder brother Meade. He’s the man, more than any other, who put epoxy in the boat yards, in the hardware stores, and on the work benches of so many independent craftspeople world wide. Who is this guy? How did wood/epoxy happen for him and, at age 76, what’s he doing with it now?

Meade Gougeon (gu·zhÓn) is, primarily, an affable leader. He and his wife Janet have ten children, seven of them adopted, which may explain his knack for gathering highly qualified, yet eminently cooperative, people to staff his endeavor. The Gougeon homes and company headquarters are at Bay City, Michigan, about 140 miles north of Detroit on the south end of Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay. The Brothers began building boats in a little shop down by the Saginaw River in the mid 1960s. They soon acquired a much larger shop next door, staffed it with family and friends, and now their space-age glue factory with a staff of 50 operates in impressive new premises across the street. Meade has been officially retired from the firm for 12 years, but as we shall see, he has not exactly swallowed the anchor.

Besides their youthful, summer boating, the Brothers also came up as kids in ice boats, sailing on “hard water” at automobile speeds. Because of minimal friction, ice boats normally sail much faster than the ambient wind is blowing. On downwind courses they routinely outrun the wind, even tacking close hauled through the very same air of a breeze pathetically unable to keep up. This phenomenon, called tacking downwind,* gives the sailor a soaring sensation largely unknown to “soft water” sailors, and it was a thirst for that sensation that made Meade want a boat for summer use that also could tack downwind.

He says, “I knew that downwind tacking on soft water would require very light weight construction, and that led me on a materials quest, and that led to falling in love with wood/epoxy technology.” It is that very love affair, more than any verbiage, that explains how modern wood/epoxy boatbuilding happened for Meade, and for many of us reading this. So, let the uninitiated be forewarned: To merely flirt with this temptress is to risk infatuation and, ultimately, commitment.

*

“Tacking downwind,” is common practice in normal, waterborne sailboats, but in ice boats, fast multihulls and hydrofoilers, a similar tactic can yield exponential results. These craft are effectively always close hauled, never run dead downwind,  and the term takes on a different meaning, such as: To dramatically amplify apparent wind velocity by greatly increasing boat speed,. Essentially, this phenomenon achieves a vast increase in the efficient usage of wind power.

The youngest brother, Jan, a compact and husky sailor’s sailorman, was four times world champion in DN-Class ice boats, the designer/builder of several extraordinary sailing craft for soft water (in which he twice won the single handed Chicago-Mackinac Race), and the imagineer of many wood/epoxy techniques in use today. He once said to me, “Here it is, forty years later and I can’t believe I’m still doing this stuff. I don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.” Sadly, Jan died in 2012, but he is quoted here as if still living, as are his inventive contributions to wood/epoxy technology, and his philosophy of maintaining one’s “grief-to-fun ratio” at a positive level. That’s how epoxy happened for Jan.

The middle of the three Brothers, Joel, played a more practical, in a way more crucial, role in the advent of the family store. As a flying ace in Vietnam, he survived 128 combat missions, came home with some savings, and found his brothers’ fledgling glue factory desperately in need of start-up capital. He threw in with his siblings, took over the office and, as he says, “I made the machine run.” That’s how epoxy happened for Joel. But as the story goes, his money was supposed to be for a new home, and it was quite a while before Joel’s wife would speak to Meade again.

The basis for wood/epoxy technology lies in the fact that wood is extremely vascular and hydroscopic stuff, and epoxy is the diametric opposite. Wood’s very dimensions fluctuate significantly, even with variations in ambient humidity, to say nothing of soaking. Epoxy, in contrast, is molecularly dense. Depending on their formulation and application, epoxy coatings and sheathings can effectively exclude water (whether in vapor or liquid form) from wood.  Furthermore, dry wood is a lot lighter and stronger, and lasts a lot longer, than wet wood. “Just try using a toothpick,” says Meade. “It’s stiff and sharp at first, but it soon becomes wet and wimpy.” Therefore, to use wood as a modern, “engineering” material, the essential challenge is to stabilize its moisture content at a relatively low level.

Meade believed that if a boat could be built with wood that was reliably dry, and therefore dimensionally stable and durable over time, it could be built a lot lighter than usual. But to keep wood dry, in a boat, meant somehow hermetically sealing the wood everywhere, inside, outside and even in the joints. Most coatings, like paint, contain thinners that “flash off” to leave microscopic holes in their membrane that can pass water and – more insidiously – water vapor. One cannot paint everything anyway; to effectively exclude moisture, even the joints in woodwork must be sealed.  But sealed how?  With what?

In the late 1960s, Jan served an intense apprenticeship under an established boat builder. It was there that he learned to glue wooden parts together with epoxy. He once told me, that it was already being used by the Detroit pattern makers, but the stuff was really crude back then, thick as tar and hard to mix and spread. However, it did not require any real clamping pressure, and it could even  span gaps in the joinery while still making bonds stronger than the wood itself. “These were huge advantages over other glues,” he said. Most water resistant glues want heavy clamping and precision joinery. And besides, epoxy even seals the joints.”

Then Meade said, “Right, it was great for bonding parts together, but I had recently examined my old ice boat and found it looking pretty sad. I removed an inspection port in the hull and tried to look inside, but my glasses fogged up! Some water had gotten inside and turned to vapor, and was screaming to get out. All at once I realized that my boat was being stewed from the inside. So we saw that the issue was how to protect all of the boat, inside and out,  joints and all, from water  and — the crucial thing – from moisture vapor.”

Bay City, Michigan is close to the headquarters of the Dow Chemical Corporation, and Herb Dow, grandson of the founder, just happened to come into the Gougeon shop  to order an ice boat. Through Herb, the Brothers learned that epoxy was originally developed by the Germans during WW II when they couldn’t get tin for plating the insides of “tin” cans to prevent the steel from rusting. As can be readily seen, epoxy – probably most of it – is used for the same purpose today. “If a half- mil of it can do that for steel,” asked Meade, “what would it take to make it seal wood?”

With help from Dow chemists, the Brothers learned that epoxy could be “modified” with things called “reactive diluents” and “flowing agents.” This could make it both craft friendly as a glue and spreadable as a coating, and it also became ideal for saturating fiberglass cloth for sheathing and reinforcing wood.

And then there were the fillers. it seemed that a  given resin/hardener matrix could be “bulked out” by adding a selection of dry fibers or powders into the fluid mix, whereupon its texture could be tailored to resemble anything from hot honey to cold mayonnaise to peanut butter from the bottom of the jar. With Jan leading the way, it developed that these mixtures could be used for anything from non-sagging glues that refrained from running out of crude joinery, all the way to sculpt-able putties for filling depressions, filleting corners, and fairing under paintwork. The fillers could be chosen and blended to enhance the physical properties of the epoxy for a given application,  and the cured result could be anything from light and easily sanded to extremely hard and strong. It could even bond highly stressed metal hardware to wooden structures, an age old challenge for boatbuilders. Slowly it emerged that with just a small number of components, the craftsman could mix up, in his own shop, a wide range of epoxy concoctions to suit almost limitless applications. Today’s variety of uses was then unimaginably wide, but Meade and Jan knew they were pioneering. “It was like we were on a mountain ridge or something,” says Meade, “gazing westward upon a whole new realm of craftsmanship.”

Soon, the craft became a business. An early market for epoxy was in making repairs to fiberglass (polyester) boats, for it happens that fluid epoxy sticks to cured polyester a lot better than fluid polyester sticks to cured polyester. Repairing fiberglass boats remains a large component of the epoxy business today, but the initial Gougeon focus was on wood. Jan was winning lots of ice boat races in the wooden DN class. And the word got out that these Gougeon guys had a secret weapon. Ice boats are subjected to extreme stresses and frequent crack-ups, and the Gougeon shop could apparently fix anything. Now their customers started showing up with their own jars, wanting that “Gougeon goo” to fix their own ice boats. “We didn’t want to be in the glue business,” said Jan. “We wanted to build boats. But these guys were friends. What could we say?”

Well, what Meade said, if only to himself at first, was, “Hmmm. Maybe we are staring at an opportunity here.”

There were distractions in his vista. All three Brothers are veterans. Meade was in and out of the National Guard before Vietnam, serving his tour teaching English to almost illiterate inductees. Jan spent a year in Vietnam in a construction battalion, where he advanced quickly because he actually knew how to construct. But it wasn’t until 1971 that Joel, the flying ace, returned from the war with his savings, and by late that year they were all flat out in the glue business, selling the first West system branded products. That’s how it happened for them.

For me? Well, I wasn’t in on any of the start-up. My family and I were off cruising in Central America, and we didn’t return until ’75, but the timing for epoxy had been coming up to speed for a decade or so. During the 1960s there was a lot of owner-building of ocean-cruising sailboats. This “movement” was sparked, to some extent at least, by Cold War paranoia and Vietnam escapism. In those years I was selling cruising multihull designs to this clientele. As boatbuilding epoxy became available in the early 70s, it helped this can-do movement mature, but I knew little about it until I returned to find that some of my clients were using epoxy by the drum.

Meade and I began corresponding in the early 70s, and we finally met at the first World Multihull Symposium in 1976. That bellwether event included a late-night skull session for Meade and me, and it became obvious that I should visit the glue factory.

What I found was more like a laboratory, but one of its ongoing experiments was “in the field.” Meade’s personal boat, a 35’ trimaran called ADAGIO, was the fourth in his series of experimental craft. Weighing in at a then-miraculous 2,000 pounds, she was so lightly built that I privately doubted her longevity. However, in her 44 year career she has been campaigned aggressively in many of the Great Lakes racing fixtures, with an impressive record of success. In fact, she is still competitive even against far more powerful and expensive racing vessels built with aerospace composites. Indeed ADAGIO, which is all wood, totally bonded and coated with “modified” epoxy, is a shining example of the strength, fatigue resistance and durability achieved early-on with this technology.

In  the 1980s, Meade decided they should enter a competition sponsored by NASA and the DOE, to develop modern windmills for generating electricity. It seemed that the service life of windmill blades was a challenge, and having built several wing masts for boats, Meade thought they could build good windmill blades out of wood/epoxy. A lot was learned that applies to boats.

Other participants in this wind power quest were having trouble attaching their aluminum and composite blades to the steel hubs of the turbines, and some doubt was politely expressed as to how the Brothers might attach their wooden blades. To find out, they prepared a sample section of a laminated wood blade, and installed steel studs into oversize holes in the wood by simply potting them in with fiber-fortified epoxy. Jan took the sample to a testing laboratory designated by NASA, and later he told me of how their specimen was mounted on a big, cyclic testing machine. “They started pulling and pushing on those studs, and the test seemed to go on forever,” said Jan. “The machine’s operator was steadily upping the load, tired of waiting for our sample to fail. Then I noticed the sample was getting hot. I thought that would be the end of it, but the epoxy held on. Finally the guy became impatient and turned the machine way up. We were all bracing for the bang, and when it came it was from the machine!  Our epoxy busted NASA’s testing machine, and that really got their attention.”

Where cyclic stress is concerned, it seems that a hull that pounds through the waves across an ocean  is treated mercifully compared to the torture inflicted on an 80’ long windmill blade that whirls in the wind for years. Many fatigue failures have occurred in blades built by big outfits using the likes of helicopter technology and aerospace composites. This contrasts with a perfect record of no in-service failures in over 4,000 Gougeon wind blades made of laminated wood/epoxy. For boats, which do indeed suffer from fatigue,  this suggests that millions of cycles of reversing stress is a kind of punishment that wood/epoxy does not consider cruel or unusual.

The wind blade upshot was that the Gougeon lab acquired some serious equipment for testing the physical properties of all kinds of advanced materials. Under the direction of Gougeon engineer Bill Bertelsen, years of test data were confirmed by parallel tests at other laboratories, and this led ultimately to the first ASTM standards for measuring the various aspects of strength in a variety of composite materials including wood/epoxy. The Brothers found out what wood – as a modern engineering material – is really worth. This science supports Meade’s early, empirical hypothesis that laminated Wood/epoxy is the way to go for many challenging structures, especially when initial cost and long-term service life are included in the analysis.

All through the 1970s and 80s, Meade and Jan continued racing their own boats on waters both hard and soft. Ice boat repairs proved invaluable for observing failure modes, and their “ballroom” boat shop was also utilized in building custom boats for a diverse clientele. Talk about diverse; these projects included everything from a monohull two-tonner race boat to a Formula 40 trimaran, a speed trials proa, a Little Americas Cup catamaran and a large ocean racing/cruising trimaran.

The latter of these was the gallant ROGUE WAVE, a 60’ trimaran designed by Dick Newick, and owned and skippered by Phil Weld (both men are now deceased but remain two of America’s most venerated multihull proponents). With great good fortune, Meade and I were invited to join the crew of  this boat for the 1978 Tradewinds Race. This fixture, for multihulls only (no longer run) was a 900 mile dash around the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles where the March-April tradewinds afford the finest sailing conditions in the world. Our competition included lots of sea-seasoned multihulls large and small..

We reported aboard at St. Martin, where I saw our vessel for the first time, and was struck by her beauty. She was in my opinion the finest offshore multihull of her day, and I was thrilled to be invited to sail in her. Meade knew this boat intimately, for she was built in the Gougeon shop at Bay City.

After stowing our duffel aboard, Meade emerged on deck in swim trunks and announced, “Well fellas, this is going to be my first taste of salt water,” and dove in. As he popped up, spluttering brine, I was jolted by the paradox that this ultimate seafaring yacht had been built by a Lakes sailor. But  before the race was over I became Meade’s student, and we emerged as shipmates on the best of terms.

We were both enrapt by ROGUE WAVE’s performance. She routinely logged speeds in the mid to upper teens, loping along as if she were half asleep. Most especially we marveled at her ability to sustain a breakneck pace when sailed close hauled against the trade wind waves of the open Atlantic, seven to nine-foot white horses rolling all the way from Africa. We shared the cockpit in the Caribbean moonlight, steering in a sensual séance as great veils of spray peeled high from the lee hull’s bow, sometimes coming down two boat lengths astern. Nevertheless, I was concerned about the extreme structural stresses being imposed on the vessel. Here she was, a sprawling 33’ wide and 60’ long, just booming through these waves. She felt solid as a block of wood, and we hadn’t heard a single snap or groan from her, but she simply would not heel to spill the wind in gusts.  All that stress was converted into speed, but to me, the loads seemed untenable and I was wanting to reduce sail. When I expressed my concern to Meade he said, “Well you know, stress is a function of weight as well as of speed. Her dry weight at launching was just less than ten thousand pounds. Watch her In the gusts. When we’re power reaching like this, she exceeds wind speed, just sailing out from under the wind. And close hauled, when the stress is the greatest, she slows down to twelve or so and her narrow hulls just  slice through the crests. She doesn’t have to climb over them. And as we’ve seen, downwind she just surfs away from the hot spots.”  Explained like that, after a while I could sense how stress was relieved by lightness.

We raced hard, and won all four legs. After a week of such sailing, and partying at the two obligatory stopovers, I was forced to conclude that Phil Weld was the most gung-ho skipper I had known, both at sea and ashore, and that Dick Newick was the most inspired of multihull designers. I also concluded that there was  absolutely no way this boat could normally sustain the driving we had given her unless she was so light, and there was no way to be that light – and still hold together — without something like epoxy. That, really, was how it happened for me.

In recent years, it has been my privilege to travel a bit with Meade in his small motor home. We once drove from Maine to Norfolk, stopping in what seemed like every blooming boat yard, marine supply and boat show on the coast.

Meade’s mission was to introduce their new, flexible epoxy resin system.

He would walk into an establishment, introduce himself, and browse while the staff scurried to summon management. Then, with his usual mix of humility and savoir-faire, he would pass out cleverly packaged samples of the new goo while explaining, “This stuff is a game changer, because you don’t have to start with dry wood or keep it dry.” That got the attention of those who understood epoxy’s main shortcoming. After their remarks he would continue. “It is for bonding joints, even in large timbers, that are going to swell and shrink repeatedly.” Then he would pass around a hefty chunk of laminated wood that had obviously been tortured in the lab by sustained exposure to multiple extremes of wet and dry. The wood was checked and darkened, yet the laminations were still absolutely bonded together as if evolved in some kind of extraterrestrial tree. The sample, and the salesman, were both disarmingly effective.

But Meade was not always casual. Along the way we visited a boatbuilding school in Newport, Rode Island, that specializes in restoring classic yachts. In the yard, and visible from a busy street, there were several large wooden vessels in various degrees of disintegration. The public display of these poor craft sent Meade into fits of anger. Pointing to a once-proud, carvel-built sailboat whose garboard areas were gaping wounds, he fumed, “Look at that. It was built like a basket, then  It was soaked in the sea, and now it’s a basket case! And it sits here like a (expletive deleted) billboard, advertising why people don’t want wood! If they only understood that now, wooden boats can be built like bowls instead of baskets.”

A short walk down to the waterfront gave him time to cool off, and behold! Floating there as the centerpiece in the very seat of American yachting was WHITE HAWK, the famous Bruce King-designed, cold molded ketch. Glistening with classicism, she was the first (of now many) large, traditional wooden yachts to be built like a bowl with his good goo. After the other billboard, we were both very much relieved to see this one.

On another junket in the motor home, Meade and I traveled from Seattle to San Francisco. Enroute we stopped at the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum at Evergreen, Washington, to see the Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes’ WW II debacle. All interior surfaces of this enormous wooden aircraft are meticulously sealed with varnish mixed with aluminum flake, the best moisture barrier coating available at the time. Meade said of it, “As wooden structures go, this thing is a masterpiece, but it has to be preserved in this climate controlled building. It’s like those British Mosquito Bombers of the 1940s. They were all laminated wood, and they could fly right away from the German fighter planes. But if they had to be left out in the weather, especially in the tropics, they would go soft from absorbing moisture. Actually, with enough time in those conditions, no coating material can entirely exclude moisture, but today’s epoxy coatings come close. So now, thank goodness, we can have boats that are built like wooden aircraft and can live in a marine environment.”

Along the Oregon coast, Meade remarked at the sheer size of the redwood trees, and I realized that he had never seen the real redwoods. Below Crescent City, California,  we diverted inland to mosey down The Avenue of The Giants, where his  advanced concept of wood was transcended. For hours we strolled through groves whose hoary boles approached the girth of buildings, their upper stories disappearing into misty canopies. The trees seemed occupied by silent spirit residents. Meade’s exclamations, as he craned his gaze upward, were emitted as breathy, reverent mumbles. “Good God,” he repeatedly whispered, and he meant it.  What moved him most was the sight of a fallen redwood labeled as being some 2,000 years old when it fell. Its bark and sapwood had crumbled but its heartwood, lying shoulder high, was intact. Growing over it, with enormous root sinews straddling the corpse, was yet another redwood tree, very much alive, itself aged roughly 2,000 years. After apprehending the meaning of this phenomenon, Meade said, “You know, redwood is practically rot proof. Like a lot of noble species it contains a natural toxin that fungus can’t tolerate, and lying on the floor here in a temperate rain forest, this log has enjoyed a stable moisture content. But thousands of years!?  Really!  And the sheer size of them!”

Later he returned to the subject saying, “You know, those trees are natural evidence of what we’ve been yapping about for years. The redwoods are about the lightest in weight of all the western conifers. Nature puts no limit on their geometry, so they can be as big as they want without getting too heavy to hold themselves up. Just growing there like that, they tell us why wooden hulls can be thick, and for that reason stiff. Of course, stiffness is the first need of a hull, so  wooden hulls can be stiff without being heavy. All we have to do is stabilize the moisture content.”

Back on the road, Meade called his wife and insisted she fly post haste to San Francisco. From there he whisked her back northward to visit, again for him but the first time for her, The Avenue Of The Giants.

In the late 1990s, both Meade and Jan acquired modest winter homes on Florida’s West Coast. The resulting annual migrations effectively doubled their time on soft water – seawater yet – and led to a new sequence of their personal, always developmental, boats. Built in the big shop at Bay City, these craft were intended for regular trailering back and forth between summer use in Michigan and winter use in Florida. This series includes two 35’ outboard-powered catamaran “pontoon boats,”  a nifty tortured plywood monohull sailboat, Meade’s series of very sophisticated sailing canoes, and Jan’s series of three unique trimarans including his last boat, a 40’ re-rightable, water-ballasted, trailerable, sailing trimaran (Sidebar).

Some of these remarkable craft have appeared at the Cedar Key Small Boat Event. Held at a sleepy, historic, beachfront town west of Gainesville, this no-frills gathering is for committed aficionados of trailerable and car-toppable watercraft. At these shindigs, upwards of two hundred people pass through the small boat filter as if given preference at the Pearly Gates, and “find themselves” at Cedar Key. They also find that this haven happens to include their personal zoo of little ships from another world, many of them owner-built, of wood/epoxy.

On Saturday of the first weekend in May, the fleet embarks for an uninhabited island just a half mile offshore. There the boats line up along a sandy concourse for a muted cacophony of owner’s sermons that purposely preach to the choir. Together with sustenance and hydration, a trove of boat buff wisdom is enthusiastically exchanged.

On these occasions, it is easy to identify Meade. Having sustained several minor surgeries for treatment of sun-caused skin lesions, he appears in an extremely sun-protective get up, floppy hat, light-excluding khaki shirt and pants with wide suspenders, high socks and water shoes, gauntlet gloves and – here’s the clincher –total zinc oxide whiteface. Looking like an albino African safari bwana, he presides with dignity over the continuously rotating conflab of devotees who mill around his, and/or Jan’s, latest floating creations. Of course their boats, and their epoxies, are not the only ones displayed at Cedar Key, but as with the LAUNCHINGS pages bound herein, it is wood/epoxy know-how that is truly on display.

The current Gougeon armada results from “retirement.” After 40 years in manufacturing, marketing, labor relations and business negotiations, Meade sustained a heart attack and Jan’s health also declined. Joel had long since left the Company to pursue a distinguished career in Michigan politics, and Meade and Jan concluded it was time to “success themselves” from the office and the lab, back into their original posts in the boat shop. Consummate craftsmen both, they agreed that, “Shop time is sanity time.”

Meade’s retirement, in 2001, left the Company in very businesslike circumstances. Today the manufacturing department ships several new epoxy products world wide, and all production is now ISO-certified to assure consistency. The new management team presides over an employee-owned (ESOP) company that is renowned for its practical, technical, educational customer support;. There is the new Tech Center where, among other duties, the staff of 11 conduct tests of exotic composites for clients world wide. The entrance to this Tech Center building is adorned with a cast aluminum plaque that reads, “…dedicated to the memory of Jan C. Gougeon, a natural engineer who laid the foundation for our work in advanced materials.”

That commemoration sent me overboard, where I’m still swimming in the Gougeon wake, looking back yet trying to catch up. So how, really, does one “catch up” with Meade Gougeon? Perhaps only by beholding where he’s been leading us for over 40 years. Along the way, I think he gave wood back to us. We almost lost it after WWII when all those derelict, prewar wooden boats sparked the fiberglass revolution, against which Meade has spent his life in open opposition. In this sense, he is a counterrevolutionary craftsman, and his timing is right again for things to come.

For example, our current urge to customize everything — especially our boats — as expressions of identity, makes the sameness of production-molded vessels less interesting today. Furthermore, watercraft technology is moving so fast that mass produced designs can quickly fail to meet contemporary expectations of appearance and — most important – performance, in both speed and in energy efficiency. Surely this helps explain the present popularity of our one-offs, our kit-built, owner-built and custom-built boats, all in an otherwise drastically depressed marine marketplace. Doesn’t this suggest a future trend?

“Epoxy” can be a sticky word in some boatbuilding circles, for it tends to mummify tradition, skills preservation and nostalgia. However,  the nautical moguls of the past would probably give their oilskins for a jug or two of this stuff, for they, too, were working on the cutting edge of wood technology. Nowadays, with thanks in large part to those men and this Magazine, the modern marriage of epoxy to wood has again made wood what it has been for ages: the most accessible, workable, economical, durable, renewable and lovable engineering material for the future of humankind. This gift now returns to us because Meade Gougeon, his brothers, family and staff, all strove – and are striving still – to tack downwind, close hauled, through life.

For illustrations and a sidebar, readers are invited to see the print edition of  WoodenBoat, issue # 242.