Quill Goldman
The barefoot boatbuilder
Quill is an authentic Gulf Islands man; he was born and raised in the remote Marina Island in the northern Strait of Georgia. His parents were squatters and built their house on the beach in the 1970s.
When Quill was one year old, Scott Paper Company bought the island and loggers moved in to clear the land. Tree planters came next and Quill grew up in this community of workers. The life was wild: “I was getting to school with a sailboat. Where I grew up, everybody needed a boat to get around.” Later, Quill moved to Nanaimo and started to work on boats at the marina, not really knowing what he was doing and was charging less than the cost most times.
When three people contacted him in a week about a new boatbuilding school on Gabriola, he decided to investigate. “So I came, checked it out and it was looking like what I wanted to do!”
After a six-month course he was certified as a boatbuilder and had learned the fundamentals.
“You build a boat while you’re in school. You see the process then, after this course, the main question you ask yourself is how much time do you want to give to this? For me, it became my trade.”
He’s not the only one; the school has left a huge print on Gabriola Island, as every year, two or three men went to the school for six months to learn a new trade. Often, they fell in love with the place and decided to stay on.
After school, Quill lived on a 15ft catamaran for a season, while building a cabin on Cortes Island. Then he delivered a boat to England and jumped aboard a maxi yacht, racing around Europe. He spent time in Cowes working on a 60ft catamaran.
“It was awesome, I discovered another side of sailing that I didn’t know,” said Quill.
When Quill returned he teamed up with another building school graduate, Richard Lyons. “We built a shop at the shipyard, registered our company, and Barefoot Wooden Boats was born! I was living in a loft just above the shop, and life was great. We chose the name, Barefoot, because of our hippie lifestyle we have on the islands. Always sailing barefoot.”
After being forced out of their first premises, they moved the company to Richard’s land and built a number of traditional sailboats.
“We were living together, building boats together, sailing boats together. It was a great friendship. Richard died in 2008 and I decided to buy his property. My son was born a few years later in this house.”
In 2015, Quill created a very different plywood boat, the Barefoot 5.8, designed to combine classic style and modern performance. With a couple of friends he sailed a prototype, designed by Tad Roberts, named Dick Smiley, in the R2AK, a 750-mile, unsupported, engineless race from Port Townsend, Washington, along the entire coastline of western Canada to Ketchikan in Alaska.
“The race was won and we were still a hundred miles from the finishing line enjoying sailing at our own rhythm and making stopovers to sleep properly or drink a beer in a pub, not really thinking about the race – but we finally did it!” recalls Quill.