FREAS PHOTOGRAPHY
As the latest custodian of Hindu, Josh Rowan had been running the schooner out of Provincetown in the summer and Key West in the winter since doing some major work back in 2011. However, the boat needed more. Rowan’s carefully-laid plans for a full rebuild were upended when Hindu struck a semi-submerged derelict in 2020 while returning to Provincetown, suffering major damage. Marlinspike: First, tell us why Hindu is important. Why are you rebuilding the 97-year-old Hindu, instead of building a new boat? Josh Rowan: That is a great question. I’ll give you my answer and then Erin will give you hers. [Third voice, unintelligible] Uh, it’s not all me! That’s not true! I mean… everybody has something in their lives that may not be logical, but is driven by desire. Hindu fulfills, like, three niches for me. One is, she’s a quiet beauty, a subtle, not like a slap-you-in-the-face kind of beauty. She’s perfect in every way. And she is so different and unique in her construction and in her build quality. For example: she should not be as fast as she is, for how she’s built. She’s built like a tank! And yet she can keep up with boats like Brilliant. And Aldens that are built with half the weight. That goes to show that that the designer was on to something. On the engineering side of things, there are her hockey32
stick futtocks, which are totally weird, but Bowdoin has them, Ladona has them. It was a method of construction that allowed for the sole to be a little bit lower, so you could have a smaller boat and still have headroom without big deck houses. MS: When you say “hockey stick” you mean that the futtock flattens out at the bottom and becomes the floor? JR: Yeah. The futtock looks almost identical to a hockey stick. There’s a foot coming from each side, the forward foot on starboard and the after foot on port. They come across and then they’re bolted together and then bolted down through the keel. That becomes in essence the floor. So you don’t have to have these 24” high floors, in order to get that structure in the bottom of the boat. MS: Are you finding it difficult, as you replace frames, to find stock with that curvature? JR: Yeah, that has been the trickiest part of our acquisitions of lumber so far: finding boards that have as little run out as possible in those areas, and are wide enough to land on the keel and then run out three feet across to the other side of the boat. You’re talking about a 30” wide board. MS: Seems like a tall order.
MarlinspikeMagazine.com
