The inspirational photo: in an ideal world, this is what the skiff will look like.

THE SAGA OF SANTIAGO'S SKIFF
By Noëlle Goodman-Morris

Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, but did she ever have to find the perfect wooden 1950s-style, plank-sided, flat-backed, flat-bottomed, 11-foot-long Cuban skiff that's both theatrically engaging and technically safe?

Follow the voyage of Long Wharf Theatre's properties staff as they embark on a journey in search of an elusive boat. They have dedicated the better part of the past several weeks to finding the central prop for Eric Ting and Craig Siebels' (who also serve as director and scenic designer, respectively) adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

Here, Jackie Farrelly, Properties Manager, Bill Ruth, Properties Carpenter, and Kelly Shamburg, Properties Resident, describe their quest to find the "perfect" boat for Santiago, the old man who depends on the boat as a best friend.

PART ONE: CALLING ALL SKIFFS

JACKIE: I was just so sure: we're in Connecticut. We'll find a boat.

KELLY: We put out some fliers a couple of weeks ago just saying that Long Wharf Theatre was doing Old Man and the Sea and wanted skiffs. We advertised at a bunch of places: different marinas, boatyards, boater's world, tackle places. From New Haven down to the New York/Fairfield southern coast.

JACKIE: As luck would have it, there was a carpenter named Frank Conley [who] happens to belong to the New Haven Boat Club and he took our flier and scanned it and sent it out to their email tree. And I thought, 'Oh, something will come up.'

Frank went out to a couple of boatyards to look for us, because he was interested. He met a few people who said, 'Oh, I cut one just like that up in the fall because . . . wood only lasts so long.' That happened more than once.

Frank still sent out the flier and a guy named Steve Joseph got in touch with us. He works at the Sound School. And Steve said, 'Well, I might have something you can borrow, but you can't drill a hole in it.' It's like Cinderella's slipper. Nothing quite fits. And Eric wanted a real boat with a real story that has a history all its own. Nice idea. But then it couldn't do all the things that it needed to do.

KELLY: The boat that Craig designed was to be between 10 and 12 feet [long] and was to have plank siding, a flat back and a flat bottom. Most boats are rounded underneath. Or the peapod boat comes to a point on both ends. But we're looking for a skiff. And that's harder to find.

PART TWO: THE SEARCH FOR CINDERELLA

JACKIE: We started on Freecycle. Someone got in touch with us and gave us the number of someone else to call. That's the thing: it's all word of mouth.

KELLY: So we [also] decided to go out on foot. Bill and I started here in New Haven and stopped at each town and marina along the way [north]. We spent two days driving around. The first day we made it up to Stonington. Nothing there. Along the way, in Mystic, everywhere you went, someone had a suggestion of where else to go. It was kind of like a treasure hunt. In some places, everyone looked at you like you had 10 eyes when you asked for a wooden boat because they're just not around any more.

We got one lead that we were really excited about. A guy said to us, 'There's this guy who's a little crazy, but he has this old wooden boat shop and it's the only place that makes wooden boats anymore.' It was called something ridiculous like 'The Old Wooden Boat Place of Mystic.' It looked like a movie set because there was a dock that went straight into the Sound, but it was completely enclosed by trees. The house looked like it was built out of old wooden boat parts and it had sheds built out of boat hulls and everything there seemed to have been built out of boat wreckage. He showed us six boats, but none of them were exactly right. We left fliers and moved on.

JACKIE: I went out to Noank the other day. We got a call from a gentleman saying he had a wood skiff for $250 and we could take it away. I'm like, 'That's pretty cheap.' Got out there . . . it's a skiff, it's a rowing skiff . . . it's for lakes or rivers. It's too shallow, not macho enough. He had a total of eight boats on his property, none of them right: either too big or too little . . . one was a garbage scowl, so it's just a rectangle. I was just like, 'If I could just combine all the boats together…

PART THREE: EUREKA! WE'VE FOUND IT
. . . if only the boat would stay together . . .

KELLY: We found out that boats that we wanted happened to either be antiques because someone has preserved them so well, or they are rotted in someone's backyard - like Peter's boat.

JACKIE: "The best boat we've come across in our search, the best looking boat . . . we were going to lop one end off of it. Eric loved that it was all dilapidated . . . but it was so dry-rotted that you could break it in your hands. There was no way to glue it all together and have it safe enough for people to be in it and fly. Then someone on Freecycle said 'We don't have one, but call this guy, Peter.' So we called Peter and we were like, 'You don't know us, but these people said. . . .' And it turns out that a million years ago he rented apartments to Long Wharf Theatre people. So he donated his boat, but the minute Bill got it into his shop to fix it, the boat fell apart. It was so bad that it went into the trash last week.

PART FOUR: WHEN IN DOUBT, DO IT YOURSELF

JACKIE: We'll be building one. There's so much structure that needs goes into it now that we've gotten into it. Meaning that Mike [Wyant, Technical Director of Long Wharf Theatre] has been figuring it out and Bill is figuring it out.

We're considering welding a skeleton. We don't think we're actually going to be able to build it in the 'traditional style,' which was the plan, and then install supports where we need them. Now we think we're going to have a lot of structure, which will be fine. It will make the boat a lot heavier, but who cares? We've never done this before.

It drives me crazy to not find the boat. It's the fish. The search for the boat is the search for the marlin. How big is it? Was it ever really there? It's weird. It's mystery to me. I never thought it would be this hard in Connecticut. It's probably been one of the most difficult searches we've ever had and we still haven't found it. We're not done looking. We're not giving up. Bill has to start building knowing that we're still looking.

PART FIVE: PRACTICAL PERFECTION
Construction in the Shop

BILL: I've built a boat before, just not a real boat. The challenges in this particular boat are such that . . . there's certainly a balance between the theatricality of it and the practicality of it . . . how real it should be. And that's something I'm just figuring out as I go.

You know, we want a boat that looks the part, but it also has to do some things that a normal boat wouldn't have to do. This will be mounted on a series of springs to simulate rocking on an ocean and the support structures for those will be built into the boat, retrofitted after I'm done with most of it.

The boat will be resting on structures that will be resting on those springs, [whereas] a normal boat would rest on water and gains at least some of its strength from water pressure pushing on it from all sides. There are definitely concerns that there won't be any water pressure, that the boat will have to take some abuse from the action of the play, and that it won't have the strength that being in the water would provide, so those are things we have to account for as we go.

And the fact that we want these springs and for it not to be immediately obvious what's going on, but also stable and safe.

It's definitely a fun challenge. As I get to know my boat, I'm thinking about a name for it. I think she's Penny. I don't know yet. She's not all there yet. But she seems like a Penny. I know more about her everyday.

PART SIX: IT WILL ALL WORK OUT IN THE END

JACKIE: In the end, it's not just about this boat. It's not just about the set, it's not just about the lights, it's not just about the sound. We'll need every single element to tell the story.

This design I think is going to be magical. Beautiful. I'm expecting a gorgeous product. For me, even as a craftsperson after all these years, I can't necessarily see how it's all going to come together. But Eric doesn't doesn't see them as separate elements and that is an amazing quality in a director, to know the cause and effect.

As technicians, we're often saying, 'Well, your boat is running into my lights' or 'I gotta put a speaker in that.' But Eric is remarkable in how he can see everything will compliment [everything else]. But it's going to be cool, right?