The Strange Voyage of the Fiddler's Dream
Strolling through the Port Townsend Boat Haven feels like a tour of other people's maritime fantasies, the shells of aging vessels that were supposed to rescue somebody from a complicated life and carry them off to Shangri-La. How many of those voyages end prematurely on a tattered blue plastic tarp tacked to this graveled graveyard?
But for every dream abandoned there is another realized, like that of Steve and Judy Dundas. Perched on a corner among the hauled-out fishing boats is their "Fiddler's Dream," an eye-catching, 48-foot schooner with a shapely, wineglass hull of deep blue steel, varnished fir spars, a deck and house crafted from hand-picked hardwoods, and a story to be told even before she's afloat.
Sometime this month, Fiddlers‚ Dream will be hoisted and lowered into Townsend Bay for her first sweet taste of seawater, thus completing the first leg of a strange saga that began four years ago on a mountaintop near Missoula, Montana. Along the way, she had to be skidded through the lodgepole pines, down a dirt road at the brink of a 300-foot cliff. But more on that later.
Fiddlers' Dream is the personal vision of Steve Dundas, a tall, quiet former Californian who describes himself as a iconoclastic loner. Some 35 years ago, he was drafted to play pro football, but instead found himself patrolling Vietnam's jungle rivers with the Navy Seals. After the Navy, he wandered the country, learned to sail with a friend in Maine, met his bride-to-be in Vermont, tried farming in Idaho and later in rural South Dakota, and finally took up woodworking in Missoula.
He and Judy loved Montana, especially their 40-acre homesite 1,000 feet above the town, bordered on three sides by the Rattlesnake Wilderness. But eventually they grew tired of the hard winters and began conjuring up a vision of a stout, sturdy sailing ship.
He studied scores of plans before deciding on a 75-year-old design by John Alden ˆ a beamy, gaff-rigged schooner with a classic sweeping sheer line. The choice had mostly to do with aesthetics. "The schooner rig may not be the most practical, but it is the prettiest on the planet," he argues.
Dundas had never built a boat. But he has spent much of his life as a farmer, doing what needs to be done. Judy, an experienced nurse, worked fulltime to support his habit.
While the hull was designed for wood, Dundas opted for steel. "It's cheap, durable, and I could build it myself," he says. He made the necessary conversions, lofted the design at full-scale onto plywood, ordered a truckload of 3/16-inch steel in 400-pound sheets, and went to work alongside the house, at the top of that mountain.
It took 20 months, 150 individually-cut sheets of steel and a full mile of welds, but eventually the deep-draft hull took shape. "It's not perfect," Dundas said. "Fitting and bending steel into a traditional hull is tough. If you look closely, you'll see my mistakes, some hard angles and edges. But most of that will be beneath the waterline."
Over time, Dundas became a familiar face at the local recycling center and tire shops, scavenging scraps of lead to be melted down for the 18,000-pound keel. The salon, galley, bunks and cabinetry took another two years. The result is sheer art, a rustic masterpiece constructed of Virginia oak, purple heartwood, black locust, cherry and more, much of it salvaged by friends or set aside by a nearby sawmill.
This year, as he applied finishing touches, the couple sold their Missoula place and bought an 11-acre homesite on Stuart Island in the San Juans. Which forced the issue. It was time to move that boat ˆ all 45,000 pounds of her ˆ off that mountain.
Dundas had tried to anticipate this challenge. He'd built the boat on a steel cradle set on skids, ssentially a custom-built steel sled. So, when the time came, he contracted with a well-known boat transporter who brought in a trailer and equipment. "They took one look at the road and turned white," he laughs. "Another outfit came in, moved it 20 feet, lifted it onto the trailer, and the trailer collapsed. They gave up."
Eventually, they found a local mover who reverted to Dundas' original idea ˆ to move it down the mountain on the sled. So off it went, one bulldozer pulling, another pushing along that narrow, dirt road, a mile and a half down the mountain. "It was a bit surreal," Dundas says, "watching this schooner move through the pine trees."
Finally, the bizarre contraption arrived at the valley floor, where it was loaded onto a trailer and trucked off to Port Townsend.
A month later, Steve and Judy Dundas are living in the boatyard, stepping masts, fitting sails from Carol Haase's loft at Point Hudson and applying finishing touches to the good ship Fiddlers Dream. If all goes right, she'll be sailing by late August.
It's been an amazing journey, Dundas says, but perhaps not so unusual in this salty corner of Puget Sound. "Port Townsend seems to attract real characters, people who aren‚t fazed by challenges," he says. "You walk through this boatyard, and I have to guess we see more interesting boats than any yard in the West."
Dundas could have saved a little time and money by shipping his schooner to another port. But Fiddlers Dream would not have fit well in those Seattle marinas jammed rail-to-rail with big, white luxury yachts that rarely leave their slips. Down at the Boat Haven, she's just another maritime fantasy waiting to be sailed and lived.
