He prefers to be on the sailboat every day, with nothing but water around him. At the mercy of water and wind. Because as soon as the sails are up, the surrender comes. And preferably in the spring, when nature opens up and ducks have young. At night at anchor, sleeping on the boat, waking up in the silence, in the void. “A weekend on the water feels like a week of vacation.”
But nowadays Jan van Duyn (51) of Zeilmakerij Dekker has little time for sailing. It is too busy in his shop in Zaandam for that. He used to work in a team of five, but most of them are retired. Now he is mostly alone; he gets help from a freelancer two days a week. And it is precisely in his favorite season, spring, that the crowds are greatest: everyone wants to get out on the water and prepare the sails. “When I ask when someone wants to sail again, the answer is always ‘tomorrow’.”
He doesn’t regret it. “Repairing and delivering sails is a nice second.” When it will be high summer, all sails are again suitable for sailing and everyone is happy on the water, he can also set out with the boat again. “Then I only occasionally have emergency surgery.”
Lack of successors
The sailmaker’s shop is located above a water sports shop that she used to be part of, and where Van Duyn worked for ten years. The owners wanted to get out of the sailmaking business eight years ago – they could hardly find any staff. “I thought it would be a nice challenge to take over. Sailing has always been my hobby. I had just never sat behind a sewing machine.”
The two part-timers who were still working there – now retired – taught Van Duyn how to use the machine. As an experienced sailor, he didn’t have to learn much about the sails themselves. “With the takeover I prevented the extinction of this sailmaker. It has been around for over 150 years now.” In 2021 Van Duyn made 327,300 euros turnover with the sailmaker.
Succession is a common problem in sail making, Van Duyn knows. “Many sailmakers are approaching the end of their working lives. I often get requests to take over a sailmaker’s business. In this industry, it is not self-evident that someone will follow you.”
Few young people are interested in the profession, says Van Duyn. “This is real work. Nowadays there are all different choices for young people, for example becoming a YouTuber. That says nothing about the youth of today, you know: in the past there was simply no choice.” In addition, there is no official training. If you want to get into the trade, you have to be apprenticed to an experienced sailmaker. This makes the profession vulnerable in a society that emphasizes school and study.
The exact number of nautical sailmakers in the Netherlands is unknown. The trade association for Ship Supplies Dealers, Sailmakers and Scheepsriggers has 68 members who are active in the sailmaker’s business, but not all of them are involved in water sports. Some make, for example, tent tarpaulins or sails for windmill blades.
The Hiswa, trade association for water sports companies, has fifty sail makers, only a part of which are specialized in rigging (ropes and sails for sailing boats). The association notices a “stagnation in new recruits” of professionals. While there is a need for it: since the corona crisis, the popularity of recreational sailing has increased considerably, according to a spokesperson. In 2021, the Water Sports Training Committee awarded almost 25,000 diplomas – a 140 percent growth compared to 2019. “The marinas are full.”
Less time to chat
Van Duyn: “I would love it if someone knocked on the door and said: I want to learn this trade too. Preferably a young person who can take over.” Working alone sometimes makes the crowds difficult to manage, he says. There is therefore “less time to chat, and I like to chat. After all, the store is a social event, a sailmaker in particular: people like to talk about their boat.” To a customer who is looking for fabric to make his own hood (a cover for the tarpaulin): “I have a job to finish today and I can’t do that anymore because I’m chatting with you.”
That job, that is a new window in a large, white tarpaulin. There is a burn hole in the old window. Indeed, he hardly gets around to it: just as he wants to grab the cutting scissors to cut off a piece of window film, the next customer walks in. It is someone with a broken camping tent, who soon wants to go camping in France for a week. He actually doesn’t have time for it, yet Van Duyn takes the tent. “I usually do sailing alone. But yes, if someone like that walks in, then I will too.”
The tent cloth goes on top of the pile that is already on one of the two work tables of fifteen by six meters. The table is about half covered with folded or rolled up sails to be repaired. The other table is almost completely covered by a white sail with blue edges.
A sail often carries a story with it, says Van Duyn. “For example, this one has withstood a lot of winds, it is an old competition sail. Also traditionally Dutch, a sixteen-square BM, which comes from a wooden boat of Dutch design.”
Six sewing machines are attached to the work tables. „For finer and coarser work. For double stitching, zigzag stitching, and for more or less strength.” Van Duyn finds working with the machine ‘wonderful’. “That machine goes so fast, and at the same time it is such precision work. They are really powerful things. One day I will break at least two needles, and that gives a bang. You also have to be careful with it, you sew right through your finger. Doesn’t hurt much, you know, but it’s a shock every time.”
The piece of window film has now been measured and cut out. A sail must have a wing profile, says Van Duyn – that deforms with the wind. Therefore, it consists of woven cloth. But the window must be dimensionally stable, and must therefore be coated: “Otherwise it will stretch like a balloon in the wind.”
From Van Duyn’s top floor, water sports are indispensable: he has a view of a jetty where the green sailing boat the Obelikx with its sails rolled up is bobbing on light waves. Across the water there is a water sports company and a sailing specialist (not for the sails, like Van Duyn, but for boat parts). The jetty is located in a branch of the Voorzaan, which in turn flows into the North Sea Canal. Customers often moor there, so that Van Duyn can measure the sails on the boat. “But sometimes I go myself, in my spare time, to the harbor where a customer’s boat is moored. Last week I was still in Zeeland.”
Handbags and pouches
Old, worn cloths lie in a corner. “Look, you can break this like that,” says Van Duyn as he pulls apart a piece of tarpaulin. “That can no longer be repaired.” He often uses the old cloths to make shopping bags, handbags and pencil cases with his fourteen-year-old daughter. “Then we sit here and tinker together.” His seventeen-year-old son often helps with measuring sails. “I would love it if one of my children took over the business one day. But that is not their ambition. Not yet, anyway.”
He jumps on the work table and drags the tarpaulin with the broken window to one of the smaller sewing machines. “It could be a fight, there is little space under this machine and it is a big sail.” But there is no other way: fixing the window requires “the finer work”. He puts on his glasses, takes a seat on the stool next to the machine and presses the pedal. Van Duyn guides the sail with both hands, faster and faster, until the zigzagging tap of the machine changes into a fast ‘roach’ and his thumb almost touches the needle.
He likes that tangibility of the craft so much. “It starts with a roll of cloth and then it suddenly becomes something. And not just anything: a sail, majestic and functional.”
He sees himself doing it for another fifteen, twenty years. “After that I’m going to sail around, with a boat on which I can live. Not too big, though. Well, it’s all just fantasies now. But the intention is to spend my last years on the water.”
Van Duyn cuts the old window out of the tarpaulin with a seam ripper, so that only the new, shiny window remains. Did he still get his job done?
#sailmaker #busy #sail