Character Studies is an INDY series about familiar faces around the Triangle—and the stories you may not know about them.
Tucked away in a small cove, inside a sea of parking on Ramseur Street in Durham, are a pair of nautical vessels, covered by tarps. The boats are docked next to a two-story brick apartment.
The boats’ captain is Durham native William “Coke” Ariail III, an artist, craftsman, film producer, and military veteran.
Over the past two years, passersby in the surface parking lot behind Toast and Rubies on Five Points may have caught a glimpse of Ariail working on his most recent ship, a 12-foot SCAMP (Small Craft Advisor Magazine Project) sailing dinghy. A jovial 83-year-old with a scraggly white beard and youthful exuberance, Ariail, who also owns and lives at the apartment, would fit right in on Gilligan’s Island or aboard the Black Pearl.
Sailing dinghies are small recreational boats that have been in use for hundreds of years, typically powered by wind sails or a small motor. Novice sailors find cruising dinghies to be easy to navigate because of their stability. Some more advanced riders engineer their boats for racing competitions. The SCAMP-style dinghy was developed in 2010 by Craig Wagner and Josh Colvin, publishers of the Small Craft Advisor magazine, with the help of New Zealand boat designer John Welsford. At first, only the boat’s designs were available, but now, interested sailors can buy premade kits or fully built boats.
“I saw the SCAMP sailing dinghies online, and I just fell in love with it,” Ariail said. “But I need three boats like I need a hole in the head.”
Ariail first got his sea legs in 1980 after moving from Durham to Virginia near the Chesapeake Bay, where he took a job as a contractor for a telephone company. He rented a small home from the owner of a marina that was about 100 yards from the water, Ariail said, and after seeing a few boats for sale in a car and truck trade magazine, Ariail took the plunge. He bought a Cal 21 recreational keelboat made of fiberglass for $3,000—the first boat in his fleet—and a “how to sail” instruction manual.
Ariail moved back to Durham in 1983 and bought his apartment during a time when downtown Durham was occupied mostly by day laborers looking to pick up work.
In the decades since Ariail first purchased the Cal 21, he’s owned five boats in total; a 28-foot Southern Cross he called Sweet Dreams that was destroyed in 2011 by Hurricane Irene; a 12-foot “car topper” sailing dinghy that he built and named Katydid after his second wife Kate, whom he married on Sweet Dreams; a Bayfield 25 keelboat that he keeps docked in Oriental called the Pungo Pearl; and now, of course, the Mercat Snug (the name a portmanteau of mermaid and cat), his newly minted 12-foot SCAMP sailboat.
This particular model of SCAMP boats can retail for as high as $20,000, Ariail said, completely built out and furnished. But the plans to design it yourself were only a couple hundred bucks—a drop in the bucket, comparatively. Ariail, who retired in 2011 after working for over a decade as a film producer with the Veterans Affairs office in Washington, D.C., had the time to sink his teeth into a new project.
Serving as Ariail’s first mate throughout the process was his stepson, Charlie Engle, a renowned ultramarathon runner who was featured as one of three adventurists in the 2007 documentary Running the Sahara. Engle, who grew up in Southern Pines and now lives in Durham, suggested the two of them tackle the construction of the Mercat Snug together.
“There’s no way I can refuse this, because normally, even though he’s here, we’d see each other maybe two or three times a year,” Ariail said. After Engle’s son was born in 1993, Ariail built his grandson a cradle in the form of a model sailboat, the only boat he’s built that rocked back and forth by design. “This way, we’d be seeing each other at least two or three times a month.”
What Ariail saved in cost he paid for in time, but spending that quality time with his stepson was well worth the trade-off.
The Mercat Snug is made out of birch marine plywood. The outside is layered with fiberglass, and two to three coats of epoxy on the inside protect the wood from weathering and abrasions over time. Ariail used the “stitch and glue” technique, which he likens to a surgical procedure, weaving large plastic ties to piece together the plywood and hold it in place before sealing them tight and cutting the excess ties.
Imperfections, he said, are unavoidable.
“It’s the old joke about carpenters: The mark of a good carpenter isn’t how many mistakes he makes but how well he can cover them up,” Ariail said, chuckling as he recalled the errors he’s made along the way. “Man, I can’t tell you the places we went ‘Who measured that?’ … It takes a modicum of skill. But you don’t have to be a furniture-grade craftsman at all.”
Ariail went scouring in his favorite bamboo patch to find the optimal stalk to make his mast. He was familiar with the tensile strength of the material, having grown up near bamboo forests that he would harvest for crafting fishing poles and toy swords as a kid. The Katydid also features a bamboo mast. In 2019, a poem he wrote, “Bamboo Wind,” was brought to life through an interactive art installation at the Fruit with bamboo abound. The bamboo for the Mercat Snug was treated with fiberglass sleeves and epoxy, similar to the rest of the ship, to prevent the wood from expanding and contracting with seasonal temperature changes.
After a few coats of acrylic urethane exterior house paint, and a mermaid figurehead affixed to the bow, the Mercat Snug was completed in a year. She departed on her maiden voyage this past January, with Ariail, Engle, and Durham-based filmmaker D.L. Anderson there to capture the moment on film.
At 83, getting the boat out is more tedious than before, but the tranquility of the open waters is a siren call Ariail can’t ignore. Floating along the waves, at the mercy of Mother Nature’s mood swings, brings you to be, “in the most real sense, one with your environment,” said Ariail, and offers him the opportunity for deep reflection, with only the soundtrack of the natural world to underscore his thoughts.
“I think people nowadays are uncomfortable with silence,” Ariail said. “You go into somebody’s house and there’s a TV on, if not two of them, and they’re not in the room, they’re not listening, they’re not watching, but they can’t bear silence. I like being in company, and I like being with people, but I also need a fair amount of silence.”
“On my sailboat, even the big one that’s got a motor, I can’t wait to get out there, get the sails up, get the motor off and all you’ve got is the sound of the birds and the waves,” he continued. “To me, it can be so peaceful to allow your mind to clear itself, and go wherever it wants to, and I love it. It’s like a form of healing and centering, and of finding an inner peace.”
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