It took just minutes for the iconic boat shack at Nick’s Cove to be consumed by flames. It’s taken two years, some fine craftsmanship, and the help of devoted customers to bring it back.
When the reconstructed building, a local landmark for decades, reopened this week, a propane stove had taken the place of the old wood-fired hearth whose embers likely led to the original shack’s demise on the blustery evening of Jan. 7, 2024.
The new building was carefully assembled to resemble the old one, but with structural changes that make it less vulnerable to earthquakes and fire.
All that remains of the old structure are three stones from the chimney, which were incorporated into the base of the new hearth.
An upright piano and the dinghy that hung from the ceiling were replaced with new ones thanks to customers who were heartbroken to see the old boat shack disappear.
For now, despite the public contributions, the look of the place is still a bit spare. It will take time for the weatherworn patina to return, and many of the old mementos are irreplaceable, including a rotary phone that customers used to call in their oyster orders to the restaurant at the other end of the 400-foot public pier.
Gordon Tindall, a Fairfax contractor and a longtime Nick’s Cove customer who is particularly fond of the burgers at the seafood joint, rebuilt the shack. He specializes in problem-solving and building things in tough places, like hilltops prone to mudslides—or long piers over tumultuous bays. He’s been enamored with building things since he was a kid playing with Lincoln Logs and Legos.
“If you tell me, ‘Hey, Gordon, how do we do this?’ I’ll walk right up and tell you just exactly how it has to go, and we’ll get it done one way or another,” he said.
The challenges of the project at Nick’s Cove involved designing a steel frame to fit inside double-layered, fireproofed walls, leveling the deck and transporting a 32-foot, 1,000-pound roof beam to the end of the pier.
“Between the steel manufacturer and the structural engineer, it took almost two and a half months to come up with a feasible, workable design for the frame,” Mr. Tindall said.
That was lightning quick compared to the time it took to find a roof beam long enough for the job. He worked with a beam broker—there actually is such a thing—to search far and wide for just the right piece of wood. The industry standard was just 22 feet, and for this job, that wouldn’t do.
“It took me almost six months to find somebody that would do it,” he said. “I had it milled out of a tree, and it’s one single timber, 32 feet long, and 8 by 14 inches. It took me talking to everybody that says they do custom beams. I actually went to Maine. I was in New York. I went to Canada. I was looking everywhere.”
Finally, he found someone here in Northern California. “He’s a one-off, kind of a rough-looking guy up in Albion who has a private mill, and he says, ‘I got trees. What do you want?’ I searched the whole damn nation, and I found it at the back door,” Mr. Tindall said.
The alternative to the custom-made beam was a laminated lunker that wasn’t up to Mr. Tindall’s aesthetic standards.
To hasten the seasoning of the interior woodwork, Mr. Tindall lightly burned the inside with a blowtorch. “That takes the grain off and makes it look a little bit aged,” he said. “I was really kind of nervous there. The thing burned down once, and I didn’t want to do it again, jeez.”
The original pier was built in the 1930s by Nicola “Nick” Kojich, an ambitious Croatian fisherman who arrived in San Francisco in 1906. He bounced around from Oakland to Pierce Point and eventually to the East Shore, where he established a fish packing plant and is said to have later produced bootleg liquor.
An all-female crew packed, smoked and salted herring for his new restaurant—Nick’s Cove. In 1950, the restaurant burned down and a new one was built on the same site.
Like Mr. Tindall, Scott Borski, a Point Reyes Station resident who crafted the new dining table for the rebuilt shack, was particular about his materials. He built the tabletop from a Monterey cypress that blew down in a neighbor’s yard along Highway 1. The legs were repurposed from material salvaged from a Stanford University building demolished several years ago. He calls it “smart wood.”
“The idea for me on this table was to keep it as local and repurposed as possible,” said Mr. Borski, who has been a Nick’s customer for 40 years.
In addition to building the table, Mr. Borski donated the antique dinghy that now hangs from the ceiling. He got it from a friend in Petaluma who intended to restore it but decided it was beyond repair.
On Sunday, three days before the official reopening, Mr. Borski was at the boat shack when Santa Claus paid his annual visit, mingling with several dozen kids who came to share their wish lists, sip hot chocolate and munch on shortbread cookies.
Someone banged away on the upright piano, which was actually in tune.
“I’ve been going to Nick’s since time immemorial,” Mr. Borski said. “My wife and I are really glad to see the boathouse reopen. We regard it as our happy place on the bay.”