Article content

Jeff Horley talks like a sailor. Which is to say his voice sounds grizzled, worn by the waves, burnished by the sun and rife with salty sea yarns from all the places he has seen from the cockpit of his sailboat.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or It took 26 years and $200K, but Jeff Horley's wooden sailboat — complete with Jacuzzi — is finally seaworthy Back to video

And yet, what he has seen, for the best part of the past three decades, is the inside of a rented warehouse and, lately, a custom geothermal heated shed on his rural property, not far from the yacht club in Sarnia, Ont., where he has spent 26 years landlocked, while building his 38-foot wooden sailboat. A dreamboat, really, complete with a Jacuzzi tub, stained-glass windows, room to sleep six and, finally, on this Sunday past, water beneath her Western Red Cedar, teak and African mahogany hull.

“She floats, so we got that much right,” says Mr. Horley, over a crackling cell phone, from a picnic table on the end of a dock not far from his prized possession.

“I didn’t get into this by accident. When I was 21 I determined that I wanted to build a new wooden boat. My old boat, the Craklin, was wood, and it was already getting pretty old and no one was really making wooden boats anymore and so I decided to make my own.”