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.<