Waterfront: Salty Sounds

Some of us are born into the boating life, others find their way into it—or it finds them. Anthony Daniels grew up around the water, and to some degree around boats, but found himself ultimately working in the marine industry by way of general contracting. After early career gigs in roofing, flooring and everything in between, a quick window on the boatbuilding life opened via the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport, and later, Mystic Seaport, where he found himself restoring—more like rebuilding, as he tells it—Mayflower II, the famed 1950s-era replica of the pilgrim ship that made landfall near the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1620.

An aspiring musician in another walk of life, Daniels was later in the midst of restoring Windfall, a 1952 German-built Beetle Cat sailing skiff in 2014 when he got the inkling to build a parlor guitar. “I salvaged all the material and built an acoustic guitar, modeled after a small-body Martin, parlor D-15M that I have. I just basically laid it on the ground and outlined it,” Daniels told me this past fall. “As boatbuilding goes, you pull the lines off the boat and you put it on the floor and then you loft it and you can build it back together. So I applied that–my very rudimentary understanding of it at the time as I was a student of wooden-boat culture.

When all was said and done, Daniels had spent just about two months on his little “side project.” In early 2015 he posted to Instagram: “With the exception of the hardware, frets, nut/saddle, etc … this guitar is built from wood salvaged from a Beetle Cat restoration/rebuild. The boat was built in Germany by Abeking and Rasmussen for Concordia Company in 1952. Fortunately for me, they planked the whole thing in Honduras mahogany! That boat was one of a kind, but a lost cause. Doomed to firewood, I took what I could and built a guitar. The face is built from the flats of the garboard planks; the sides and back from the centerboard trunk and sole; the neck is oak from the keel/stem transition shaped and coated with special clear West System epoxy for fretboard ... don’t know how it will hold up but I’m experimenting here.”

It’s safe to say the little guitar, which he named Windfall in honor of the little sailboat, is still strumming. Granted, he now affectionately refers to her as “Boat Guitar.” “Now I’m a little more seasoned and I’ve learned where I made my mistakes, and where I didn’t,” he said. “Yeah, it’s a good guitar. It’s a little salty sounding, but that’s the character of it coming from the bottom of a 70-year-old boat.”

Though Daniels still builds boats on the side, he said he’s more recently found himself with a wife and two children, and, to his own surprise, a job writing environmental pollution insurance policies. “It’s interesting because insurance all started through the shipping industry and cargo being lost,” he said. “It’s this ironic, full-circle thing for someone like me who can’t sit still and is a maker by nature. I never thought I’d have an insurance job, but when I look at the specifics of what I do now, it’s actually not so boring. It’s exciting, and I see contractors, tradesmen, marine cargo and shipyards, and all that experience has made me a technical specialist.”

Lacking the time to maintain a wood-planked boat, Daniels has instead made a bit of a compromise by way of a 16-foot Tiverton, Rhode Island-built Stur-Dee Dory. It’s a compromise I’m all too familiar with. Coming from a wooden-boat-adoring family, an identical 2000 Stur-Dee faux-lapstrake Dory was our clan’s concession when a labor-intensive wooden skiff was simply—and obviously—out of the question. Still, living at the mouth of the Connecticut River, Daniels’ Stur-Dee turns enough heads in the very same way ours does, however much worse for wear and tear the Burke family’s vintage craft may be.

We exchange mutual woes in dealing with fiberglass-wrapped plywood, which, if not quite as consuming as a true wooden hull, is nonetheless its own headache. The flotation is easily compromised, and, as we age, respectively, the seating arrangements don’t exactly accommodate ailing spines. Oh, to be 13 again on my then-brand-new skiff. Still, neither of us can complain. After all, Daniels has built and restored boats big and small, and I’ve made a career out of this life in salt in my own right, and neither of these existences is any small blessing. Daniels did say that though his life’s ambitions as a marine-salvage luthier have been put on hold, he hasn’t lost sight of the gorgeous little Martin D-15-inspired axe he concocted a decade ago. Before we part ways I urge him to make another, alluding that I may even commission one someday soon. He assures me he has plans. I’ll be standing by.

This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of Power & Motoryacht magazine.

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