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At one
point during a conversation touching on events in a career spanning nearly
half a century, naval architect Dave Martin disappeared into the studio
adjoining his comfortable home in the seaside community of Brigantine,
New Jersey, to return with a scale model of a fast, efficient sportfisherman
hull. An instant later he was sprawled next to the up-ended model on the
carpeted floor of his living room, eagerly displaying the hull’s
innovations. Martin is over six feet tall with a robust build and a pair
of outsized, weathered hands you’d think belonged to a blacksmith.
As he ran them over the smoothly sculpted, precisely engineered miniature,
he looked like an elder Gulliver who in hale maturity had learned to direct
his colossal strength to graceful ends.
At age
70 Martin is among the most influential naval architects in the American
pleasureboat industry, and there is a dignity in his bearing I imagine
develops naturally 45 years into an accomplished career. But as he crouched
intently on his knees over the model, I felt certain of one thing above
all else: Dave Martin has never been confined to the limits of his drawing
board.
Martin
attributes his success to diverse technical knowledge combined with a
hands-on philosophy. More than once he emphasized to me his concern that
young people in his profession now leave college with a wealth of mathematical
and scientific knowledge yet are wholly unprepared from a practical point
of view. He worried that they don’t receive enough of the fundamental,
concrete training—in skills such as drafting and line drawing—that
saw him through hard times early in his career and contributed to important
breakthroughs later. But the more we talked, the more I began to believe
that Martin’s true fear is that the kind of education he received—an
extraordinary combination of grass-roots boatyard experience, determined
scholarship, and the direct influences of some of the most original designers
on the East Coast—is impossible to come by today.
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