In the 1975-76 school year, Trumbly obtained a sabbatical from Bates, during which he traveled extensively to boatyards and boat museums throughout the US and Europe. This video is one of his stock stories, about how he visited a shipyard in Amsterdam and saw the loftsman there using a “plumber’s rule” to measure the distances of points on one plan in the loft to transfer them to another plan. Trumbly describes showing the loftsman how to use marking staffs for transferring points.