“Staring into the dark, gaping, bottomless maw of insanity.”

That’s what Lawrence W. Cheek, a writer from Whidbey Island, WA says how a friend describes “the long days of deadly tedious filling and sanding” the hull (fairing) of his current boat building project.

Cheek wrote a great Preoccupations column for the January 9, 2010 New York Times (Finding an Answer in Rough Seas) about the benefits of building a boat other than having a boat at the end of the process. He calls it a “post graduate seminar in character building.”

It works pretty good for youth too!