At the start of a voyage prudent sailors will write in their log From A towards B, not From A to B. This is because they know only too well that conditions can dramatically change during the course of the voyage and so they always have to be prepared to reconsider their goal. Their survival may depend on their adaptability.David Trubridge
While he was teaching himself furnituremaking in the north of England, David Trubridge also worked part-time as a forester on a local estate, tending the woodlot and learning all about trees. The old guy I worked for knew I was just getting started doing woodwork, and one day he said, Look, I know where theres an old oak tree down in the forest. Well borrow a tractor and trailer from a farmer one weekend, go down and get it, and cut it up at the mill for you. We went into the forest and he pointed to this pile of moss and ferns and said, Thats it. Thats the tree. I thought, Youre kidding. Well, Ill believe it when I see it. So we dragged this thing out from the undergrowth and onto the trailer and took it down to the sawmill. We sent it through the saw and split it down the middle; it opened up this beautiful wood inside and I saw for the first time the plank within the tree. And that was a moment of transition for me.
David Trubridges life has been marked by transitions. He grew up around the Isle of Wight, a center of sailing in Britain, and from an early age he was captivated by the great age of the clippers, those long-distance sailing ships. His love of boats eventually brought him to Newcastle University in northern England to study naval architecture. Then, in his last year of studies, he was in a bad car crash. He was hospitalized for a long time and just managed to complete his degree, but he was still convalescing and in no position to go get a job.
It was the early 1970s, and in England as in the U.S. a back-to-the land lifestyle was exerting a strong pull. With a group of friends from the university Trubridge moved out to the country and found some broken-down houses in which to live cheaply. An old barn in a nearby field was converted into a workshop, a few machines were purchased, and in the course of rebuilding the houses he began to acquire some craft skills.
He also started carving woodlarge rough-hewn carvings from chunks of oak and elm that he foundand began to think that he preferred that to working in a shipyard designing boats. Until I started carving I knew nothing about wood or grain. Learning to work it with chisels and gouges and mallets was enjoyable, and gave me a really good three-dimensional understanding about the nature of the material.
Though he wanted to pursue carving, he soon realized it would be a hard way to make a living, so he thought he could try turning: Theres plenty of wood around here. I can rough out a few bowls a week to pay for the bread and butter, and that will be a nice easy living.
But just turning bowls quickly became tedious, and once more he looked around. There was a local woodworker who made spinning wheels, and Trubridge built one out of curiosity. He enjoyed the construction process, and soon he was doing contract work, turning hundreds of spokes at a time and building spinning wheels. It was also a good way to build his manual skills. But that took time. Youve really got to do it repetitively so that its embedded in your muscles. I made quite a lot of spinning wheels. And that led into making rocking chairs and things like that with turned parts. I just migrated naturally into making furniture.
Trubridge immersed himself in the whole process of making, from forest to furniture. He gathered the trees locally, chose how the log was sawn to suit what he was building, and then dried it in his own kiln. He had a long enough waiting list to be able to plan the material for each project.
He began to develop his own furniture designs: contemporary in look, though firmly rooted in the English craft tradition. They were intuitive and untrained, influenced by organic forms and by sculptors like Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi. His market increased, and soon he was getting some notable commissions.
During this time he married Linda, a Fine Arts graduate, and they were living up in the Pennine mountains in northern England. When we first got there it was exhilarating, but after ten years that was beginning to wear. The weather could be just savage. We now had two young boys, Sam and William. Linda and I started thinking, If we stay here, we could just go on doing what were doing into retirement, and meanwhile, what have we seen of the world? The lure of sailing was coming back.

In 1981 they sold everything they had (except for Davids hand tools), bought a second-hand 45' steel yacht called Hornpipe, and set out on an open-ended voyage. Sam was four and William not quite two.
Their first real stop was in the British Virgin Islands. Through the yacht network, they met an English surgeon who had just bought a house, and over the next 18 months Trubridge worked right through that house, building every stick of furniture in it from cupboards to tables, desks, dressers, and even a four-poster bed.
The tropical lifestyle began to change his ideas about furniture. I cant help but be affected by the landscape and surroundings. The subdued, fairly conservative furniture I?had made grew out of the British tradition, but also out of that landscape. Here, it was like scales peeled off my eyes; things became possible that I never dreamed of in England. More adventurous, more free in thinking and just allowing my own ideas to take off a bit.
From the Caribbean they went through the Panama Canal, to the Galapagos Islands, then on through the Marquesas to Tahiti. Again they made a contact through the yachting community, and Trubridge found work for a year making furniture for an American couple in Moorea. The situation was idyllic but couldnt last; after their visas expired they had to move on once more.