Craftsmanship

I was testing a boat the other day at the little marina at Pier 66 in Ft. Lauderdale when a sight hove into view that blew me away and had a similar effect on the folks I was with. As a bunch of us strolled down one of the docks that adjoin the parking lot, having just destroyed a few sandwiches at a little waterside open-air cafe, I noticed a megayacht in the outboard fairway adrift for all intents and purposes, except for a couple of TowBoatU.S. vessels, one hawsered to the bow, the other bridled to the swim platform at the stern.

The two little boats had just pulled the megayacht into the fairway stern-first and were proceeding with their vast charge toward the inner end where we stood along a face dock. They looked like two mice harnessed to a huge, sleeping cat.

"Wow," said young Jon Viestenz, Product Manager for Cruisers Yachts, just about the same time I uttered an identical exclamation.

The sight was rather thrilling, actually, and put me in mind of a couple of tugs working a ship into a tight berth in an inner harbor.

The sound effects were cool. You could hear the studied laziness of the drawls of the two guys on the two TowBoats reverberating within the fairway from their respective VHFs. Had you only listened to them, you'd have thought they were playing a leisurely game of poker or shooting the breeze at the back of a feed store, instead of maneuvering a multimillion dollar vessel amid many other super-pricey vessels with wind gusts afoot and some swooshy currents running.

But what was even cooler was the lead boat. There was one solitary guy onboard and he was a consummate boathandler--I mean he was so good that at one point, with his port quarter maybe a foot from the stem of a whopping motoryacht and the push-knee on his bow a foot from the swim platform of the mega, he was able to precisely spin his boat in place--one engine ahead and the other astern--so he could show off just a tad and reposition for a slightly different angle of thrust.

Although the owners of the motoryacht charged out to the foredeck to look on with alarm, the pure, mathematical artistry of the guy in the TowBoat was so utterly apparent that Jon and I sort of looked at each other and simultaneously agreed, "They ain't got nothin' to worry about--not with somebody like that at the helm!"

Heck! I don't know if boat handling in close quarters is a sport or not, although it can devolve into some rather intense sportiness sometimes. But I tend to admire great boathandlers the way I admire great athletes, whether well known at the national level or not.

Craftsmanship is at the bottom of it all, of course: the ability to gracefully bend a hulking piece of waterborne machinery to one's will, no matter what conditions Mother Nature happens to be dishing out on any given day.

It's a beautiful, artsy thing to watch. And with time, practice, and a little bit of luck, it can be a beautiful thing to experience as well, even for a modestly-talented guy like myself, if only for a moment or two, here and there.

Beauty Beyond Consistency

Okay, I've been taking a few hits on my decision to have Betty's teak rails and trim wooded down, as they say. You know. Where some stalwart soul, with sandpaper, heat gun, power sander, and other assorted tools and ointments, removes all (or virtually all) the finish from the brightwork of a vessel at vast expense and with great and tedious expenditure of time.

"What about that story you wrote in PMY last year tellin' us all that synthetic varnish was the greatest thing since salty water," a friend and colleague protested. "Was that all baloney? What ever happened to good old-fashioned consistency?"

Huh! Obviously, the blog entry just previous to this little beauty was not as clear as it needed to be!

Yeah, the synthetics worked fine, even looked passable to the naked eye. But the trouble with the synthetics, at least on Betty's teak, is that there are (today, but not for long) just too many of them. I mean, the way I got it figured, there are products from Cetol, Armada, West Marine, and Epifanes slathered on by myself and others, to say nothing of the various paints and stains some wag slipped in to cover dark spots and other eyesores.

The result? These days, Betty's luscious brightwork is lookin' a little less than bright and maybe a little less than luscious. And on top of that, for one reason or another, I was constrained to miss my most recent reapplication-of-synthetic-varnish window, a sin of omission that's since allowed blisters, bubbles, and all other manner of horrors to pop up like measles.

So Betty's gonna get wooded down, no doubt about it. And I'm going with regular ol' mainstream varnish--not synthetic varnish--as her overcoat, in large part just because I've never seen my lovely old boat thus arrayed.

And besides, I'm 61 years young. Why the heck bother with consistency anyway? Is it not often unwise?

Gang. I'm just theorizing here, but I bet the day my wife and I see Betty gleaming in the sunshine with eight new layers of pure ol' maple-syrupy varnish on her teak is gonna be a star-spangled-bannered doozy.

"It's gonna cost a freakin' fortune," chides my friend and colleague, a warning the art lover in me prefers to loftily ignore.


I reiterate (with feeling): What the heck!

Awwww, What The Heck

See the caprail and rail on the starboard side here? Well, over the past couple of years I've made a big deal about using synthetic varnishes of one kind or another to keep the shine shinin' on such components and cut labor of the hands-on variety

I have backed up this nifty course of action by citing a maintenance philosophy I learned from a guy named Manley Fulcher, a lead AB (Able Bodied Seaman) on a tug I once worked aboard maybe 25 years ago. Manley didn't care about the finer points of cosmetics on the ol' Sara Hayes. He simply wanted surfaces susceptible to rot, rust, and other horrors covered up with paint (mostly) and varnish (sometimes), so to protect them from the ravages of the ferocious saltwater environment.

Well, guess what, Manley! I hope you are not reading this because I am going against my better judgement (and yours) straight into the realm of museum-grade maintenance--I have hired a professional varnish guy (I ain't got the time is my excuse) to wood down the totality of the Betty Jane's rails, caprails, nameboards, and trim pieces, thereby removing scads of various coatings (even a little paint here and there to cover up darkened mildewed spots) and rendering all ten acres of her glistening brightwork fresh as the driven snow or, since my home port's in Florida, rain.

Once the wooding down is done, multiple coats of regular old-fashioned varnish will be applied...with great and expensive artistry. More details will be forthcoming since I have suggested that I lend my time to the job on weekends. Why not pay and work at the same time, thus adding insult to injury?<

Varnish heads in the marina are overjoyed, of course. They tell me I am going to be blown away by the final product, a product that will make my synthetic efforts look crass, even unclean and unwholesome.

Hmmmm...while I am not sure about this, I am pretty sure I'm gonna be blown away by the ultimate price of my little voyage into high-end beautification! Stay tuned.<

Fixin' Old Teak Decks

Quite frankly I'm not sure whether I invented this particular method or not (probably not) but it seems to be workin'. Let's say you own a classic (old boat) like the Betty Jane and you're seeing some dark staining around the bungs that cover the screws securing the planks to the deck.

Yikes! Right? The staining means water is getting past the bungs more than likely and the darn things need replacing.

Well yeah, but what if there's not enough clearance over the head of the screw to make replacement with a reasonably thick bung possible? Whataya do then?

Here's my nifty little modus operandi. I remove the old bung with a screw driver, pocket knife or some other groovy tool. Then I back the screw out and (this is the inventive part in my humble, yet excited opinion) cut a smidgen off using the tool shown above.

The next step entails using a 3/8" countersink (or some other countersink that fits your situation) to deepen the bung hole by the same smidgen you just cut off the screw. The point here, of course, is to keep your planks secure but not turn the screw over-far into the cored laminate underneath and set up a deplorable deal wherein water leaks around the screw and invades the coring. Double yikes!

The rest is straightforward. You dip the cut-off screw in marine silicone, insert it back into its hole, tighten the dang thing down squeezing silicone out, slather a new bung with epoxy (I use West System's wondrous stuff), and set the bung in the hole with a hammer--Whop! Once the epoxy sets and the new bung's solid, you simply whack it flat with a chisel and sand down with 220 grit sandpaper.

Sound complicated? Heck, I've replaced as many as 15 plugs in a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon!

To Catch A Rat

There's a first time for everything, right? My good buddy Bruce Prevatt and I zoomed over to Panama City so we could take a ride in his Pursuit 2500 fishboat on Saturday and meet with an interesting fellow by the name of Capt. Ric Corley, a guy who's got a few sea stories that'd boggle the mind of Homer. Anyhoo, after talking/dining with the Cap for a few hours on Friday evening and sleeping a few more Friday night, Bruce and I met next morning for breakfast and the ride.

And the ride was good, albeit rough. Winds were still blowing sportily. During the night I'd rested poorly onboard the ol' Betty Jane mostly due to the wind which was blowing a steady 40 mph with gusts going higher...in the marina! Being a retired naval officer (flyboy not water-winger) Bruce had rested well at the BOQ on the Navy base in PC. So the breezes out on the water cleared the cobwebs from my frazzled, up-half-the-night-checkin'-mooring-lines consciousness and semi-brought me up to speed mentally. They seemed to supercharge ol' Bruce's consciousness, though.

Supercharge? Yup! When we got back to the dock he was so dang enthused about everything that he simply had to show me his genius scheme for nailing the dirty rat that ate half of his electrical wiring (to the tune of $750 in damages and repairs) last fall while his boat sat around in dry-stack storage at the Navy base marina.

"Just in case the darn varmint comes back or he's still around," Bruce explained, after fishing the above implement of destruction from a locker, "This oughta get him."

Now I've seen a few rat traps on ships and larger commercial vessels of dicey character, but this was the first time in my life I'd come across a trap large enough to snag a robust rat-type rodent on a 25-footer pleasure boat.

Is there some deep meaning to it all? Does Bruce's naval background enter into the whole affair in some way? Or hmmmmmmm...wonder if Capt. Corley ever trapped any rats while sailing the North Atlantic?

More On That Windshield Panel

Some years ago I sea trialed a great little 30-something cruiser with one big problem--the dang windshield had absolutely no vent or opening for the wafty breezes to pass through. Consequently, the air conditioning system onboard could not even begin to contend with the heat generated by the intense Florida sun. Sweat city!

What I like about my boat is this center windshield panel that lifts like a trap door. It's especially lovely at anchor. Unlike many boats that'll lay side-to in most any sort of sea condition when at anchor, Betty holds her nose into wind and seas virtually always. Hence, she sets herself up for wondrous ventilation if you simply open that center panel.

See the cellphone laying just above the wheel? Big freakin' mistake, gang. My take on boating is you leave all or most complexity ashore, especially technological. The concept of hauling onboard all the electronic communications ephemera we use today to drive each other nuts is totally foreign to my nature. Only reason I can give for the cellphone here is a brief lapse in judgment.
I'll try never to let it happen again.

Salty Reading

Yeah, I'll admit I'm nuts about boats. One reason I love my current beauty is her ability to put me into the tugboat mentality. I used to work on tugs and sometimes, when I'm lucky, like I was this past weekend, the ol' Betty Jane lets me pretend I'm still workin' on one of the tugs I used to get such a kick out of.

The weather was gorgeous for this little jaunt, as you can see. And Betty was runnin' like a top, thanks to a recent bottom job at a local boat yard. On this particular day my wife and I were headed for Shell Island, a favorite anchorage. We enjoy coasting in towards the shore, dropping' the hook in a little over a fathom of water, and then just relaxin'. My wife likes reading the New York Times while sitting in a deck chair in the cockpit. I usually read one of my good seafarin' guys. Like right now I'm reading Desperate Voyage by John Caldwell. Nothin's better than laying on the settee in the teaky saloon, with the front windshield panel open to let the breeze blow through, reading a great and salty book.

Made it back to the marina without incident, by the way. Had fun, and that's what counts.