The sail inventory includes an A-sail for off-the-wind performance.

Billy Back photo

The Van Dam shop is the quietest boatyard you’ll ever visit. Apart from the intermittent whir of machines, the shop felt more like a library. Everyone was engrossed in their work, hands constantly in motion, barely looking up even at the appearance of a rare visitor. 

Van Dam looks for two qualities in its employees, the ability to get excited by doing something new and an unwillingness to ever call their best work perfect, Ben said. They come from boatyards around the country, or even straight out of training programs such as IYRS or the Landing School, braving the harsh Northern Michigan winters to spend 40-hour-plus weeks sanding planks and seaming wood in the Van Dam shop.

Van Dan custom made Italmas’s wheel, with each spoke reinforced with carbon rod for added strength.

Billy Back photo

“Our guys are artists,” Ben said. “One of our overarching principles is that you’re never going to make anything perfect. But trying to make it perfect, for us, that’s the fun.” 

This craftsmanship is on full display on Italmas. Much of the custom hardware, from the embossed stainless plates and custom opening portlights, is crafted in the company’s metal fabrication shop. Belowdecks, she has a small U-shaped galley to port, a centerline folding table with settees and pilot berths amidships and a head and V-berth cabin forward. But it is the elegant joinery and gleaming varnish that make this a warm and inviting space. 

The company considers the owner as part of the family. Far from resenting intrusion from the client, Ben said his crew welcomed the questions asked by Italmas’ owner during his visits to the shop. 

“He was egging us on—he’d say to the crewmember, ‘Now, you’re going to make sure those wire runs are nice and parallel, right?’ We gobble that up, because he was willing to let us go really deep down the rabbit hole,” Ben said.

Obsessive craftsmanship doesn’t happen quickly, and Pearson draws a hard line against rushing the process. 

“You can’t have a Van Dam boat with the click of a button,” he said. “What we do is some of the best and most skilled work in the world, and that takes time.” 

Italmas is a marriage of traditional design and materials with cutting-edge technology. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rig. The 77-foot spar built of gleaming Sitka spruce while the boom, which weighs just 10 pounds, is built of carbon fiber with spruce cladding that matches the spar.

This blend of modern and traditional is quite polarizing among the wooden boat community. 

“You can’t imagine the number of people who hate on this boat,” Pearson said. “For every one person that says ‘Wow, that boom is beautiful,’ another will say, ‘Wait, you clad that around carbon fiber? That’s blasphemous.’”

Her interior is African mahogany, with a maple and sipo cabin sole.

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“For a true traditionalist, they’re never going to resonate with what we’re doing here,” Ben said. “We have a few people in the industry who pooh-pooh us because we don’t build in the traditional way. But having repaired a ton of those boats, I know the problems with that. If those boatbuilders back then had epoxy and carbon fiber, they would have been using it.” 

For a small shop, success depends on finding the right partnerships to execute each one-of-a-kind vision. For Italmas, Van Dam partnered with Bob Stephens and Paul Waring, which made their names by pushing the envelope of traditional design. That shared vision meant that there were no compromises to getting the look or the feel they were going for—a classically styled wooden sailboat with the functionality of a modern cruising sloop. 

“The underwater profile, the sail-handling ability, push-button rolling-furling—the whole thing sails like a modern boat. It handles wonderfully—it’s fast, it points great, it sails well in light and heavy air,” Ben said. 

“It’s an antique with modern guts,” Waring said.

Italmas will spend the summers daysailing from her homeport of Boyne City, while Van Dam moves on to the next projects that include Victoria Z, a take off Alpha Z, and Sunray, a power cruiser in the style of Chris-Craft classic designs.

“We only build one or two boats a year,” Pearson said. “And we won’t build the same boat twice.” 

The Van Dam-built The Ghost heads out for a spin.

Billy Back photo