When boats were mostly built out of wood, tightly packed strands of cotton kept water from seeping between boards and timbers. With an iron wedge and a mallet to drive it, caulkers painstakingly sealed the seams of small boats and ocean ships. In a plastic shed, behind State Road in Vineyard Haven, with a crew of workers, Gary and Kristi Maynard are rebuilding the 115 year-old boat Violet for the second time. Frank Rapoza is there to caulk it tight.
“I worked on Violet when it was restored the last time,” Frank said, not really stopping from caulking to talk. He was on his knees on the section of deck, between the cabinhouses, that Gary had just finished laying down in new fir boards. The sun coming through the sheet of plastic over his head was strong enough in the middle of March to put Frank in a T-shirt.
In one hand he held an old mallet that shined from regular use. In the fingers of his other hand, he lightly held a caulking iron. With the iron he pushed strands of hemp fiber into the mouth of an open seam between boards, then with taps from his mallet he neatly packed fiber strands across the top of the opening. With harder taps he drove the length of fiber to the bottom of the seam where it would cover cotton that had been banged in previously.
Strands of hemp that have been treated with pine tar are called oakum and are only used on big boats. Oakum compresses less easily than cotton. You can bang it in harder. Thicker hulls and decks can absorb the force necessary to tension large planks against one another.
Frank first apprenticed with master caulkers while working at the Mystic Seaport Museum in his early twenties. Capt. Bob Douglas somehow managed to come up the Mystic River one day in the schooner Shenandoah. Walking around the yard he met Frank and convinced him to come work in Vineyard Haven. Bob needed help restoring two old boats he had recently bought in Europe and shipped to the Island. Violet was one of them.
At the time, Frank was ready and mobile. He lived aboard a 26-foot Navy lifeboat he had rigged to sail as a ketch. The boat was called Black Moses. Frank packed up his tools and sailed to Vineyard Haven.
“In the summer I lived on my boat,” he recalled. “Bob gave me a spot on the Coastwise Dock. In the winter I had a little room above the Tavern.”
His lodging above the Black Dog Tavern would have been his first winter not aboard his boat in three years.
“The seventies,” Frank recalled. “A lot of 20-somethings living aboard their boats. People who were sailing through would stop and hang out. It was really a scene.”
Captain Douglas, the tall ship Shenandoah’s commander and designer, and founder of the Black Dog franchise, bought Violet in 1977 in Cork, Ireland. The boat was built in Scotland for a fisherman who named it for his baby daughter. The design was a popular Scottish style of two-masted boat they called Zulus. In the 19th century the name was a taunt to English rivals. The Scots Zulus mostly fished for herring. They were able to stand up to the tough seas of the northern Scottish coast, yet fit to race back to a harbor for the best prices.
Frank grew up in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
“The Concordia yard was just down the street,” he said. “I always wanted to be a boatbuilder.”
When he graduated from high school in 1970, Frank went to work for the Concordia Company. Though most of the famous yawls were built in Germany, the yard on Buzzards Bay built a range of fine yachts.
“I was hired on as a shipwright,” he said. “I worked there for three years, but the interesting projects dried up at some point and they had me building Beetlecats. That’s when I went to Mystic.”
Beetlecats are 12-foot open sailboats. They are still common around New England, usually brightly painted, on moorings in marshy edges too shallow for other boats.
“You don’t learn anything building Beetlecats,” Frank said. “It was a production line. We built five at a time.”
After his apprenticeships at Mystic, Frank continued to travel when people needed help caulking traditional ships, but after living at the Coastwise dock and working on Violet, his home base was Vineyard Haven. There in the sun on Violet’s deck, between shots with his long, iron-ringed mallet, Frank said, “I’m not going to travel anymore. I got tired of that. But I love caulking boats. I feel very lucky I got to do it and make a living.”
Gary and Kristi, after hauling Violet into the shed in November, have rebuilt a large proportion of the boat. Many of the parts they replaced this winter they installed over 30 years ago. The stem Frank installed when he first arrived on the Island is still in there, now with a fresh coat of oil and new planks fastened around it.
This article appears in March 27, 2026.
A true craftsman,not many around like him anymore