Because he announced to his family and friends that he was going to build a proud wooden sailboat and take it around the world. And he was going to do it within hours of the sea, on the farm in western Massachusetts where his family has lived for five generations, harvesting lumber from the trees that surround it, just as his ancestors had built the houses and barns. what they use today. He called the project “Acorn to Arabella”, the name he had given the ship. Romantic.
Less romantic: the fact that Denette didn’t know anything about boats. She didn’t know how to sail either. She didn’t have any money either. All she had was a dream and some trees. Y Youtube.
Seven years later, Denette stands inside the Arabella’s kitchen, now less than a year from completion, one of four full-time employees buzzing around the massive patchwork shed built to house her. Denette and a boat carpenter, Kaylyn “KP” Palella, work on Arabella, with the other two working on content. Ben Fundis handles video editing (he also owns the Screening Room, an arthouse cinema in Newburyport) and Anne Bryant, who used to work for a wooden boat-building magazine, handles the website and social media. . On this day, there were also two paid interns hanging around, plus a boat builder from Maine.
Add it all up and you have the basic plot, setting, and stars of what is essentially a weekly TV show, one with 100,000 loyal viewers on YouTube.
From the very beginning, the first tree and the first video were cut in January 2016, Denette documented her progress at Youtubefirst with the help of a friend and then with a full-time video editor in Fundis, paying him out of pocket with what Denette earned as a route planner at a climbing gym.
“If we can inspire you, convince you to follow along and help us out a bit,” Denette wrote on the original website, laying out her bet, “then maybe, just maybe, we can quit our jobs and build full-time.”
Building the ship and the audience was slow until January 2018, when YouTube’s algorithm decided that people could enjoy watching Denette pour 4.5 tons of lead from a homemade crucible to make the ballast keel, the heavy counterweight at the bottom of the boat. .
Overnight, everything changed. Advertising and merchandising sales grew, as did the subscriber base, and from the nearly 3 million people who watched that video grew a stable audience that supported the project through donations, merchandise sales, and never missing a video. , something that became more important during the first days of the pandemic when looking the the steady progress on the ship brought a reassuring tranquility.
Recently, over 220 videos in the series, those viewers heard the announcement that Acorn to Arabella has an end date. Next June, in Mystic, Conn., Arabella will touch the sea for the first time, ending one story and beginning another.
“When I kick the bucket, if someone were to tell the story of my life, my hope is that the bucket would be the prologue,” Denette said.
There is much work to be done, but Arabella is already something to behold as it nears completion, filled with timber, almost every inch of trees that once lived on the farm, all financed through a modern form of ” busking”, as Denette describes it.
As she marvels at what Arabella has become, Denette says that what she treasures most is all the stories she already has to tell. The many different hands that have helped build her and the individual trees that make up her bones—he can tell you which ones she climbed as a child and how they were harvested, including the first lot she felled with her grandfather. When her grandfather was 20, he did the same to build the house Denette now lives in.
“The idea of cutting down trees and waiting for the wood to dry and waiting years to build something is what you did. I always had this appreciation that somebody went into the woods and cut down a tree and built this barn. Someone brought that into existence. Ships are just a more complicated mobile version of that.”
“And,” he added, “to harvest trees, build a boat, then have this boat take you anywhere in the world.” it is Romantic.”
There is no concrete plan for where Denette and her girlfriend will go when they head out to explore the world in Arabella, although they will start small. After all, he still doesn’t know how to sail.
What they do know is that they will continue to document their journey and make videos, continuing the story of the many people who are connected to Arabella and the dream that she represents. Denette said she has listened to ER doctors who watch the videos to unwind after a hard day; veterans who find solace in steady progress; sailors who say they haven’t been on the water in years but were inspired to get back out there.
Every spring, they host an open house for donors who support the project through Patreon, a membership platform. In May, about 800 people from all over the country attended.
Soon, the boathouse will be dismantled so that Arabella can be loaded onto a truck for the ocean, leaving behind a bare patch on the lawn, just as it was before. As that day draws closer, Denette can’t help but think of all those people who told her he was crazy, destined to fail.
“Now, it’s like…” he pauses to look at Arabella… “show me the ship you built.”
Billy Baker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.