In 1981, Greg Kerkof and Sheryl Alfson-Kerkof stopped off at Horatio’s for a drink on their way home from a guitar lesson in north Seattle.
Discussing their lack of success in finding the sailboat of their dreams, they started sketching plans on a cocktail napkin.
Three decades later, they are living at the Port Hadlock Marina aboard their dream boat, the Toccata.
They designed and built it from the deck up — meaning that, with a few exceptions, everything on the boat was made from scratch by the owners, from the bow fittings to the bathtub.
“We built it,” Greg Kerkof said.
“We didn’t buy it.”
In case you want to try this at home, consider that Greg is a skilled woodworker who worked for Boeing as an aircraft mechanic and in engineering.
Sheryl was lead X-ray technician at the University of Washington Medical Center.
The couple met sailing Yamaha 25s in Duck Dodger races on Lake Washington and married in 1980.
Looking in vain for a sailboat with the type of pilothouse they wanted, they spent two years designing the cutter.
It was not always smooth sailing.
“At times we had arguments, and Sheryl would throw up her hands and quit working on it,” Greg said.
“The whole trick is to resolve it.”
A major breakthrough was expanding the length of the boat from 47 to 50 feet to allow putting the guest stateroom aft of the pilothouse.
Forward of the pilothouse are the main salon, full bathroom, galley, master stateroom and forward stateroom — a total of 400 square feet.
For the woodwork and cabinetry, they used ash instead of teak, creating a light, spacious-feeling interior.
But because the boat was custom-designed, everything had to be built from scratch, including the windows.
“We couldn’t go to Home Depot,” Greg said.
The project started in Port Townsend with the purchase of the fiberglass hull, an Ed Munk Sr. design, from Bernie Arthur, then owner of Skookum Marine in Port Townsend.
Arthur let them build the deck while the hull was still in the mold, Greg said.
When that was done, Jan Andersen, a local trucker, towed the hull to the Kerkofs’ backyard in Mukilteo, where they built a shed over it.
They thought the project would be completed in a couple of years, Sheryl said, but when that had passed, they had to come up with a new answer to people asking when it would be finished.
“We’d say ‘Thursday,’” Greg said.
For the next seven years, they spent all their free time and vacations working on the boat, and had the cabin top on and most of the interior built.
But they had burned out and decided to take a break.
Both are licensed pilots and had always wanted to work on vintage racing planes.
Getting the chance to restore a P-51 Mustang, they didn’t touch the boat for eight years.
The plane crashed during an air race, and that, along with health issues, brought them back to boat-building.
“Greg had bypass surgery and shoulder and hip replacement,” Sheryl said.
“Sometimes he was working with one arm.”
The list goes beyond making all the cabinets, wall paneling and floors.
The couple ground and welded the stainless-steel bow and stern fittings.
They cut the windows from Lexan and made the stainless-steel frames.
They made molds and laid fiberglass to create the bathtub, refrigerator and freezer.
They made fiberglass hatch spigots, the “well” in the ceiling created by the opening.
Other touches include making a tongue-and-groove countertop for the galley from “Ralph’s maple,” a tree a neighbor had cut down, by cutting and routing the pieces after the tree was slabbed out by a mill.
Wanting a impervious surface behind the stove, they took a panel of stainless steel and etched a seascape onto it by covering it with contact paper, cutting the designs out with an X-ACTO knife and sandblasting it.
“We made everything but the boat rails, bow pulpit and the davits on the stern,” Greg said.
“Nobody ‘came in’ and did it.”
They also installed the engine and the hydraulic system, the shaft and propeller, and did all the wiring and plumbing, including installing Pullman bath fixtures in the guest stateroom.
On Oct. 30, 2009 — a Friday — the boat came out of the boat shed and was trailered to Port Townsend, where Carol Hasse of Port Townsend Sails and Liza Vizzini and Dan Kulin of Port Townsend Rigging took over.
“We built the boat, but they are the people who gave us wings,” Greg said.
They christened the cutter Toccata, a musical term defined as a free-wheeling composition that displays the technique of the performer.
From the Italian for “touch,” a toccata is characterized by virtuoso passages.
“It’s an appropriate name for a hand-built boat,” Sheryl said.
The couple said they still love the boat, which they have lived on for more than two years, first “on the hard” — a boating expression meaning out of the water — in Port Townsend and then at the Port Hadlock Marina.
They have made a couple of shake-down cruises to the San Juan Islands, Sheryl said, but returned to the boatyard in November to have the propeller and shaft replaced.
“WE replaced the propeller and shaft,” Greg corrected her.
They are now putting the finishing touches on the boat, with Greg using the roll-top desk he built as a work area.
The drawers holds navigational charts.
“When we started, they didn’t have GPS,” Sheryl said, referring to the Global Positioning System.
“Now we have GPS AND charts.”
The building project also outlasted six family pets — three cats and three dogs — including Skookum, who was a puppy when they bought the hull from Arthur.
Jake, an 8-year-old golden retriever, took over the watch from Ruby and serves as canine first mate.
This spring, the couple plan to go up the Inside Passage and stay in Alaska if they find a place they like better than Port Townsend.
They dubbed the lifeboat Fugue, meaning a flight from reality, but the reality is that the couple put their lives into building the boat.
“We never gave up,” Greg said.
Sheryl and Greg said they didn’t keep the napkin on which they sketched a dream 30 years ago, but it was very similar, they noted, to the way their Toccata turned out.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or e-mail: jjackson@olypen.com.
