Phil Bolger, noted designer of boats from Gloucester

"This is certainly the best design I ever made," Mr. Bolger wrote. "When I come up for judgment and they stop me at the gate and ask, 'What's your excuse?' I'll tell them I designed the Gloucester Light Dory and they'll have to let me in."

Revered around the world for his writings, and for the range and acuity of his designs, he lived for many years on a boat in Gloucester Harbor, then moved into a house overlooking tidal marshes along the Jones River. At 81, he noticed that his mental faculties were beginning to slip. Last Sunday morning, Mr. Bolger stepped outside his house in Gloucester and used a handgun to take his life.

"What gives me comfort is that he did it on his terms," said his wife, Susanne Altenburger, whom he married 15 years ago. "The mind was not cooperating the way it should have and he got scared. I think he may have jumped a little bit early, but I don't know. I look back and think, this was coming a good while. He did say, 'I had a good run; I can't complain; I've had a good amount of good luck.' He said it last week, maybe in part to explain it to me."

While the Gloucester Light Dory was Mr. Bolger's favorite, among his most popular designs was a series of sharpies - narrow, flat-bottomed sailboats that are effective in shallow waters. At the drawing board, his designs flowed freely from dinghy to frigate, including the nearly 115-foot replica of a historic naval warship that was used in the 2003 movie "Master and Commander."

Through all his designs, and his life, ran a singular theme.

"I love to simplify things," he said in an interview for the spring 1983 edition of Nautical Quarterly. "And I think this is a minority outlook. I think the majority impulse is to make things more complicated."

Philip Cunningham Bolger was born in Gloucester, and his older brother gave him his first boats.

After finishing a year at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, Mr. Bolger joined the Army and was a combat engineer, then retuned to college. He graduated with a degree in history, a subject he turned to in his reading the rest of his life.

While at Bowdoin, Mr. Bolger sent a letter questioning certain details in a book by naval architect Lindsay Lord, who hired him as a draftsman after graduation. From there, Mr. Bolger went on to work with two other designers, John Hacker and L. Francis Herreshoff. All three mentors were among the best in the field in the mid-1900s.

Sometimes designing for businesses such as the Montgomery Boat Yard in Gloucester, and more often working alone, Mr. Bolger turned out plan after plan for all manner of vessels, beginning with a 32-foot sportfisherman that was published in the January 1952 issue of Yachting magazine.

"He did not want to be owned by anybody, including some very rich clients he had," Altenburger said. "Sometimes, he sent them to somebody else. He did not raise a family, so he didn't have to worry about mortgages and tuitions."

Instead, he focused on designs - some beautiful, some odd, and all elegant, according to scores of boaters who became his fans over the years.

"He was extremely inventive, and if you look through his body of work you would be astounded by the variety of it," said Holbrook Robinson, a longtime friend and a professor of French at Northeastern University. "Phil could go from high elegance to low funk in half an hour. He designed some very beautiful boats, and he designed boats that some people thought were the ugliest things they had ever seen, but which worked wonderfully well, and that's really at the center of his genius."

Some designs, like the naval warship, were enormous undertakings. Others were meant to accommodate amateurs who wanted to build their own boats. Mr. Bolger often tailored designs to generate few scraps after construction was finished.

"He would make patterns so that the person would cut pieces out of 4-by-8 plywood and there would be no wood left at the end, virtually nothing," Robinson said. "He felt it was a sin to waste material."

The same could be said of Mr. Bolger's approach to life. Living simply, he read hundreds of books, designed, and wrote. Some of those closest to Mr. Bolger knew him initially through his work, including Altenburger, who first read his work while a student in Seattle.

"We met each other, talked, and had a few exchanges - disputes, too, testing each other's mettle," she said.

They married in 1994 and became equal partners in design. Of late, they had tried to persuade Gloucester's fishing community to consider alternative approaches that might help the beleaguered industry, such as Mr. Bolger's design for a commercial fishing vessel that would be more fuel-efficient.

The couple also worked with the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C., on new designs for military landing craft utility boats.

As Mr. Bolger approached the end of his life, Altenburger said, "there was sort of a sober evaluation that was valuable. One of his standard lines was, 'Susanne, the past was never as good as it is today and I expect the future to be better.' "

A memorial service will be announced for Mr. Bolger, who despite spending most of his life in Gloucester was perhaps better known in nations distant from his North Shore home.

Spend time with small-oat enthusiasts on nearly any continent, Robinson said, "and you will find a coterie of people who think Phil Bolger is some sort of god. He was a cult figure."