A Vessel For His Dreams Engineer Building Seagoing Boat At Home

From the pilothouse of his yacht, Vic Hager can nearly see the farmhouse on Paradise Ridge where he grew up.

He can also look over his neighbors’ roofs, keep track of backyard barbecues, driveway basketball games and people mowing their lawns.

Two-thirds of the way up a suburban ridge, he is building an ocean-going vessel. He’s the Noah of Conestoga Street.

For four years this ark has been gradually rising from his driveway. Now it dominates the neighborhood like a reproach to men of lesser dreams.

“I have this philosophy, and it’s gotten me in trouble a few times,” says Hager, 56. “But I believe if there’s a job somebody can do, there’s no reason I can’t do that job.”

“Marivic” is what he’ll call the vessel, a combination of his wife Marilyn’s name and his own. She shares the dream of cruising the West Coast from Alaska to Mexico in their retirement years.

He is a facilities engineer with the U.S. Forest Service and knows how to design structures. He’s a voracious information gatherer and an organized thinker when it comes to solving problems.

So far such talents have been sufficient to keep his suburban shipyard in business, and it looks like most of the hard work is done.

The boat is 45 feet long, 15 and half feet wide and nearly as tall as Hager’s two-story house.

There are 19,000 pounds of steel in it now. < When it is complete and fully outfitted, the boat will weigh 45,000 pounds.

He says the construction prompts his two daughters to say, “That’s just dad. He likes to undertake a big project.” His 11-year-old grandson in Seattle loves to come over and help Grandpa with the boat.

Even the neighbors seem to enjoy the unique accent to their neighborhood. “They’ve been so supportive all the way through it. I’ve not heard any negative comments,” Hager says. “They drop by all the time. But I’ve been very careful. If I have a noisy job, like grinding welds, I’ll take a day off work and do it during the day when the neighborhood’s empty.”

And there is, he points out, an advantage to having such a prominent landmark.

“Once it’s gone, the pizza man is going to have a hard time delivering around here. Now you can just tell him ‘It’s three houses past the big boat.”’

Now, orange rust covers the boat - by design, Hager says. It’s nature’s way of helping him prime the surface for painting. But one day the hull will be a gleaming white with blue trim. The two 200-horsepower diesel engines in his garage will be aboard, and the frank, bare steel dotted with welds will be invisible behind three woodtrimmed staterooms, a salon and galley.

On that day - he hopes within a couple years - Hager will knock the corner off a landscaped hillside that comes down to his driveway to make room for a semi-truck and trailer with a crane to load the “Marivic” and take it to a Lewiston marina. Another crane will pluck it from the trailer and deposit it in the Snake River. There will be a tense moment then as the boat settles into the water and Hager learns if all his design calculations were correct. Then he will set sail down the Snake and Columbia, getting to know his boat. He’ll bring it up the Washington coast and moor it off some waterfront property he owns at Oak Harbor.

But leaving will be sad, too, he says, because a large part of the joy of the Marivic has been building her.