In the dark recesses of the lazarette, Bertram Levy is switching between a sharp plane and a scraper to level a piece of Locust on Stevedore, a stout 20-foot mini-trawler he’s building in his shop behind the Uptown Cinema in Port Townsend, Washington. To make the job easier, he dabs linseed oil onto the surface and waxes the threads of bronze screws before driving them in with a ratchet. “Locust is very hard,” he explains. “It’s terrific wood, because it won’t rot, but when you put in screws, they heat up and can shear off.”
Diligence and discipline characterize this energetic 84-year-old with a polymath’s mind who stands not quite 5 feet 2 inches tall. He is fit and can still tackle a long and strenuous project. Levy, always conscious of cost, has built small rowing and sailing craft since his youth, but Stevedore is his first powerboat.
He grew up in Freeport, New York, where he got an early start in boats and music, and learned about proportions and design from his father, a furrier by trade. He studied medicine at Duke and Stanford and then worked as a scientist. Feeling constricted by academia, Levy moved to Port Townsend in the mid-1970s. “I hitchhiked up the coast and at the end of the road, I had an optical orgasm coming over the hill,” he remembers.
In this town, Levy fit in, as boatbuilding and music—his other great passion—happily coexist. When he arrived, he had $5,000 to his name, enough to buy and remodel a house and start a medical practice. At a potluck dinner in 1977 he met his second wife, Bobbie Butler, a physical therapist and accomplished dancer.
In the early 1980s, he built a workshop for Able, a handsome 24-foot Lyle Hess-designed Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter, the smallest boat he’d consider for cruising the rugged waters of the Pacific Northwest. He and Bobbie also sailed the vessel to and from Hawaii. “I had not been on boats before I met Bertram,” she says. “But I trusted him, because he was relaxed.”
Levy has always loved sailing and has always pursued music. He plays three instruments—fiddle, banjo and bandoneon—and has performed for live audiences and on numerous albums. When he was introduced to Argentinian composer and virtuoso bandoneonist Astor Piazzolla, he plunged into tango. After he retired from his medical practice, he was looking for a new challenge, so he moved to Buenos Aires part-time to attend the Conservatorio Superior de Música Manuel de Falla. “I wanted to study there, because the bandoneon is very difficult and I was struggling to learn it,” he says. “It’s not like other instruments with a [fingering keyboard]. There are four patterns, and you must coordinate these in your brain. You can’t see anything, you can’t feel it, there’s nothing but buttons, so you must create these ideations.”
He applies a similar process to boatbuilding. He starts with a vision and chooses a name before selecting the design. After Able, he built Murrelet, a 19-foot double-ender for day sailing, planked smooth with Honduras mahogany. It was inspired by a design from K. Aage Nielsen and customized to Levy’s specifications by Danish boatbuilder Peter Christensen on Shaw Island. “The murrelet,” he says about the chosen name, “is an endangered species like me”. Built between 2009 and 2019 as an heirloom for his daughter Madeleine, he sails the boat frequently, pleased by her handling and performance.
After he sold Able, Levy needed another cruising vessel. He handed a very short brief to designer Paul Gartside, whom he had first met at the Classic Boat Festival in Victoria, British Columbia.
“It must be 20 feet because my shop is 30, and the name is Stevedore.” Levy chose that name because he wanted a workboat, a small, masculine craft that felt like a big boat, not like “a ping-pong ball,” he says.
Today, Levy scoffs at the suggestion that boatbuilding keeps him young. “That’s BS. I am getting older every day.”
He says he learned an important lesson at a young age when his mother was diagnosed with a serious illness. “She just made every minute count. I grew up that way. My daughter is like that too. We have a lot of energy to burn.”
May 2025
