A boatload of resolve: Peters Township resident builds his own Merlin Rocket dinghy

Eric Shereda in the boat that he constructed by hand.

Shereda’s boat plans.
Beauty can be in the eye of the creator as well as the beholder.
“I’ll stand out here in the evenings when I’m working on it, after I’m done,” Peters Township resident Eric Shereda says, “and just kind of gaze at it.”
What started as a set of no-frills plans, an assortment of wood types and – please pardon the expression – a boatload of resolve has come together as a magnificent manifestation of something Shereda has dreamed of doing since he was a youngster.
Almost ready to ride the waves this summer is his 14-foot-long, seven-foot wide Merlin Rocket sailboat, the product of three years’ worth of work and a lifetime’s love of navigating the water.
It’s in his blood. “My dad started sailing when he was rather young and got my uncle hooked,” he explains. “My uncle took it one step further and ended up building his own sailboat, a 36-footer, in the backyard.”
That would be David Shereda, who subsequently embarked with his family on pretty much of a world tour aboard the sloop Blackberry.
Back at home in Virginia, Eric’s father, the late Paul Shereda, had a 26-footer named Debutante. “He sold it when I was 3. All I can remember sailing when I was young on those types of boats was the heeling over,” Eric remembers about the steep lean to port or starboard, “and I didn’t like it.”

Eric Shereda in 1975.
What he did like was the idea of one day building a boat of his own, and he actually got started on it in drafting class when he was 16. “I drew up a boat very similar to this one,” he says about his new creation, “called an International 14, that I’d seen in a magazine called WoodenBoat, one of my uncle’s magazines.”
Fast-forward three decades.
“I have kids now, and I look back at pictures of when I was young and think, my kids aren’t sailing,” Shereda says. “We’re doing other things, but we’re not doing what I remember doing when I was a kid, fond memories.”
And so his interest was reignited, complete with his own WoodenBoat subscription. “First magazine out, this was in it,” he recalls, with a friendly tap on his Merlin Rocket. “It’s almost identical to the one I designed when I was 16. The bow is straight up and down. It really slices through the waves.”
For edification, the Merlin Rocket is a 14-foot dinghy sailed primarily in the United Kingdom.
“The hull number on this one ends up being 3798, so they have more than 3,800 hulls built now,” Shereda says, adding a primary point of pride: “I’m the fourth one in the United States.”
He gives credit where it’s due to the man who built the third Merlin Rocket in this country: Julio Arana of Austin, Texas, who blogged about the experience under the title “So You Want to Build a Sailboat.”
“Very great blog,” Shereda acknowledges. “Probably if I wouldn’t have read his blog and seen all the pictures that he put in there – step-by-step, practically – I wouldn’t have done it.”
Both the boat builders ordered their plans from the same British gentleman, Keith Callaghan, who has been designing and constructing Merlin Rockets since 1965. The plans didn’t exactly come with instructions, though, which Shereda discovered when he received them just before his family went on vacation.

Eric Shereda’s boat.
“It rained most of the week, so I’m sitting there at the table, poring over these plans, measuring things in CAD and figuring things out, where all the pieces go,” he recalls. “As it’s gotten closer to the end, you know where everything goes, and you hardly ever look at them unless you need a specific measurement for something. It’s amazing how much I don’t look at the plans toward the end.”
He has built his boat mainly with marine plywood, with flourishes of mahogany and oak. Everything is held together by exceptionally strong-bonding epoxy. “It’s all wood,” he explains, in contrast to many of today’s boats built with glass-reinforced plastic or buoyant metals. “There are no screws in it. There are no nails in it.”
With the sail, mast and rigging in place, Shereda plans to take the boat out this summer on Pymatuning Lake, where he’s a member of the Pymatuning Yacht Club in Jamestown, Mercer County.
“It’s going to be a learning curve for me, because it’s a very high-performance boat,” he says. “Then maybe if a couple of people I take out on it like it, they might say, ‘I want one, too.'”
Shereda’s three children, the two oldest of whom take sailing lessons, look forward to Dad finally getting the boat on the water after watching him work on it for so long. “One of my goals is, as they progress in sailing, that this will be one of the boats they will basically go out and have fun on,” he explains, “which is another reason why I need a second one: so I can race against them.”