Beyond the Captain's Locker

Once the old pontoon was stripped down, there wasn't much left to look at. Just a platform, a pile of ideas, and a whole lot of work ahead of us.

I had a picture in my head of what I wanted this boat to become. I didn't have a set of professional plans telling me where every board should go. Much of Beyond the Dream was designed as I built it—measuring, cutting, standing back and looking at it, changing something when it didn't feel right, and occasionally discovering that what looked perfect in my head didn't work nearly as well once I built it.

Little by little, though, things began to change. The deck took shape. Walls started going up. Spaces that had existed only in my imagination began becoming real places we could actually stand in. For the first time, you could begin to look at this old pontoon and see the outline of the shanty boat it was going to become.

There were mistakes along the way. There were things I built twice, things I changed, and probably a few moments when common sense suggested I had completely lost my mind. But that's part of this story too. Beyond the Dream wasn't ordered from a catalog or built in a factory. It was built by hand, one decision and one problem at a time.

And somewhere during that process, it stopped feeling like a project.

It started feeling like our boat.