I think if you substituted the number "40" for "20" it might be a more accurate statement.
Wood takes a lot of care, there's no way around it. By "care" I don't necessarily mean one has to work on it constantly, but one has to be aware of it constantly and ensure that things aren't happening that will cause one to have to work on it constantly.
While we never had any thought of purchasing a wood boat when we decided to buy our own cabin cruiser, the broker we hired to find a boat for us had a pretty good comparison summary I thought.
He said (I'm paraphrasing) "If you berth your boat outside and have a fiberglass boat and have to leave it for six months, when you come back it will be absolutely filthy but that's about it. If you have a wood boat, when you come back all sorts of problems may well have gotten a toehold and if you don't do anything about them right away the problems will get worse at an accelerating rate."
A generality, obviously. But over the 17-plus years we've had our cruiser we've had a few wood boats around us and the validity of our broker's statement has been well demonstrated.
Wood is a great material to build a boat from. But most recreational boaters don't want to screw with it. Or perhaps more accurately, they don't want to worry about having to screw with it.
Some years ago the maintenance director of Air Malta, in an interview about the 737s the airline flew at the time, told me their phrase for the 737 was "fly and forget." The plane was that reliable for them.
Fiberglass boats are the same way. Sure, the systems and engines and stuff can cause problems, but they're the same systems and engines and stuff that are in a wood cruiser.
But fiberglass--- being inert--- just sits there, year after year, and does nothing. Wood is not inert. Its cells are susceptible to moisture, dryness, heat, cold, deterioration, rot, even insects. Most of the structural problems fiberglass cruisers are susceptible to are caused by something other than the fiberglass. Wood coring seems to be the most common culprit.
Sure, fiberglass hulls can experience blistering but blisters are not only non-structural (in most cases) but they're relatively easy to fix.
I have nothing aesthetically against a well-designed (by my standards) wood boat. Almost all of my favorite individual boats over the decades have been wood (four examples below).
A past neighbor of ours had a big Hacker Craft runabout that he kept on a trailer inside an addition built onto his garage. The thing was absolutely gorgeous. And protected 99 percent of the time from rain, sun, cold, and UV, it stayed gorgeous.
There is a 40-something foot Chris Craft dating from (I assume) the 1950s or 60s that has been in our part of the harbor now for about 15 years. It had been boathouse kept in Seattle until a fellow bought it, drove it north, and lived on it in an outside slip for a number of years. He kept after it and it always looked quite good.
Then his circumstances changed and he moved ashore and put the boat up for sale. It took a long time to sell---- years--- and while he continued to come down and give it preventative care it slowly began to deteriorate in terms of appearance.
Finally it sold to a family who moved it to our dock. They do not ignore the boat, but it sits more than it gets paid attention to. And to my admittedly unprofessional eye, there are lots and lots of new little "problems" that I can see cropping up; sections of blackening wood, opening seams and joints in the topsides and deck, failing paint and varnish and so on.
There was also a fiberglass Chris Craft cruiser on our dock for many, many years. Perhaps 36-38 feet. The family that owned it used it occasionally at first but then it just sat. Turning green with algae, the finish was long gone from the little bit of exterior teak, the fiberglass topsides and hulls were streaked with soot, and so on. Every now and then someone would buy it and clean it up. And it always cleaned up quite nicely with a fairly minimal effort.
I think most boaters think a well-designed wood boat is terrific as long as it's someone else's wood boat.
For someone with the time, skills, tools, and desire to maintain a wood boat--- or with the money to have it maintained properly--- great. Or, if like our former neighbor, can manage to keep the boat completely protected from all the elements.
But most boaters aren't like that. Hell, we've barely been able to keep abreast of the demands of our own fiberglass cruiser. And the thing that takes the most care and feeding on this going-on-43-year-old boat? The wood. Fortunately, with the exception of the deck and cabin top cores, none of the wood on or in this boat is structural.
So I think the era of wood boats has long since passed. Even back in the 1970s when I was a young guy in Hawaii and getting into ocean fishing there were still a lot of locals with wood sportfish boats, known over there as haole sampans (haole being the Hawaiian word for white, aka Caucasian). And to a man, they hated them. Not because they were bad boats but because they couldn't wait to be able to afford a fiberglass boat that they wouldn't have to screw with anymore. They could just go fishing.
It's great there are still some folks left who like them enough to give them the care and feeding they require and, for the nice ones, deserve. But I suspect the number of people like that is dwindling rapidly.
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