It's kind of cold to sail. So Peter Warburton sits out the season, in his third-floor studio, surrounded by lights, the kind that swivel and twist and make you want to engineer something.
He holds out his hand, which is something to see. Warburton is 6-feet, 4-inches tall. His hand is big and thick, with strong and indelicate digits. This isn't the hand of someone who plays piano, but, perhaps, of someone who moves one.
There's a dot there, a little bit of brown, like a freckle in his palm. It's a tiny piece of wood, but it's not a splinter.
"It's a winch," Warburton says.
If you can see it, imagine it on a boat -- an extraordinarily small one. It would have sails half the size of handkerchiefs, and their lines would loop around this little wooden winch.
Think land of the Lilliputians small. Now think Lemuel Gulliver large.
Warburton is at work, making model sail boats, the kind that compel attention, and command thousands of dollars.
These are not toys, but heirlooms.
"The main thing is we're creating an illusion," Warburton says.
By we, he means his model ship building brethen, which is not a large group.
"It's a dying art," he says.
Centuries ago, model boat building was essential. It was how boats were built. Tiny, detailed models were made, and from them, workers would duplicate their construction, often revealed in cross-section models, making real boats on a much bigger scale.
So here's the situation: big hands, tiny details.
"It's a huge challenge," Warburton says.
This would explain the jeweler's visor that hangs on one of those draftsmen's lights, and Warburton's other tools of his trade.
"It involves needlenose pliers," Warburton says. "And it involves a lot of tweezers."
It involves something more, maybe even something genetic, something even Warburton with all his strength is powerless to prevent: instinct.
"It's just plain in my blood," Warburton says. "I've tried to get away from sailing a few times in my life."
He failed, of course.
Warburton, now 45, began sailing at 8. He has attended classes on sail boats. He has built boats, too, and worked aboard them for years. He is the son of the late Barclay H. Warburton III, who founded the Black Pearl restaurant, owned the once Newport-based Black Pearl sail boat, and established the American Sail Training Association.
Warburton is from a sailing family.
At 19, after graduating from Tabor Academy in Marion, Mass., where he participated in its sail training program for three years, Warburton went west. He went to Washington state. He worked on the land, not the sea, doing odd jobs for a while. Then he saw a Tall Ships poster in a book store.
Sailors were wanted. So Warburton went back -- to sailing, and the East Coast. He sailed on the replica of the America yacht. After a few years, he tried to jump ship, so to speak, and get out of sailing once again.
This time, Warburton went to Florida. He spent 18 months in "golf school" to become a professional, only to graduate and go right back to sailing.
He has settled down now. Warburton knows his nature. He's not fighting it anymore. He's a sailor.
When he's not on sail boats, Warburton's building them -- tiny ones, so intricate and accurate you expect to see some quarter-inch sailors aboard.
"I know ships," Warburton says. "I understand them. I know what's correct."
Knowing what a ship model should look like and producing one are different. Around the same time Warburton began sailing, he began model making. He began with those plastic kits you see in stores.
"It was always boats," Warburton says. "I didn't make cars or planes."
In the fifth grade, Warburton joined the model club at his elementary school. In Salem, Mass., at a maritime museum, Warburton studied its model sail boats. In eighth grade, he made his first complicated plastic boat, the USS Constitution. Eventually, Warburton graduated to wooden model boat kits.
"They're basically a box with wood and some plans," Warburton says. "You've still got to do everything."
In 1987, at the age of 30, Warburton began making and selling custom model sail boats and professionally restoring antique ones, too.
So far, Warburton has made and sold 21 model sail boats. And here's the strange thing. He doesn't have a single model sail boat in his home.
"It is strange," Warburton says. "I've been in clubs with builders who can't part with their boats, and their houses are full of them. I keep them a while, look at them and let them go."
Warburton is working on three models at the moment. And while he enjoys Newport with its rich sailing history, he says he could do his work anywhere.
"I do a lot of work for people I've never seen," Warburton says.
People see his ads in sailing magazines or trade model ship building magazines. They send him a photo of their boats, and, if Warburton's lucky, they send plans of the boat, too, from which Warburton can make a model.
"I'm not a mathematician," Warburton says. "I get the scale right, but it takes me a little longer."
In his studio, a fan whirs at Warburton's feet and a breeze blows through an open window. Any model maker knows why: glue and paint.
"It really does get to you," he says. "It gives you a headache. It hasn't changed that much since I was a kid."
Building one of these model boats takes Warburton about 200 hours. That includes the woodworking, painting and rigging, which Warburton calls his forte.
Warburton takes his tweezers and pulls strings through sails and winches in a web of intricacy, complexity and dexterity.
"I don't consider myself a patient guy," Warburton says. "But I have patience for this."
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