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Living in Beaufort, NC, Rebuilding Boats

Why’d ya throw out your blow dryer?

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A couple of months ago, passing through Tennessee, we spent a night in a campground intended for horse people. The facilities were great, especially the restrooms. I wandered over to use the ladies’ room, and while I was washing my hands, I chatted with a woman who was blow-drying her hair. About an hour later, I went back for a shower. She was still there, styling her hair. I could hardly believe it.

It turned out that she shows horses professionally. As such, she is judged on her appearance and performance, as well as the horse’s. That weekend, she was just going to be trail-riding in the woods with her family, but to her mind, there was no way she could ever go out on a horse without doing full hair and makeup.

It was a fascinating conversation, during which I admitted that I hadn’t owned a blow-dryer in many years — my hair is too long to benefit from such treatment. I held back any comments about wasting a large portion of one’s life in a public restroom with a blow-dryer for company.

What does this have to do with working on Flutterby? OK, I’m getting there.

We have a giant hole in our deck that’s become something of a sore spot. Giant is relative — the hole is about the size of my hand. We’ve had lots of gully-washer thunderstorms, and this hole holds about a cup of water, no matter how we try to cover it up. A couple of days ago, we looked at each other across the soggy hole and said “We need a blow dryer.”

More damned shopping. I gnashed my teeth.

I mentioned this to my friend Pat as we were making plans to meet for lunch. “Maybe we’ll find a blow dryer at the thrift store,” I said, hopefully. I love shopping at thrift stores, and I hate shopping at places like Target and Wal-Mart. But Pat had a very reasonable objection: “Why would someone give it away if it still worked?”

So we got into the Squid Wagon and drove into town with two goals. One, have lunch with Pat and Belinda (happy thought), and two, buy a brand-new blow-dryer (tooth-gnashing thought).

When we arrived in town, it was hot. But Beaufort is an old town, with nice big trees overhanging slightly narrow streets. Instead of taking the first Giant Squid-sized parking space, I circled a couple of blocks, looking for a shady spot. At one point, I had to pull way over to allow the garbage truck to go by. The garbage men were wearing orange vests that said “Inmate” on the back, and they had very, very short hair. Not the kind of guys who would need a blow-dryer.

Finally, I found a shady space, just past a couple of garbage cans waiting to be emptied.

Barry got out of the van first, but for some reason, he was standing behind the vehicle. I could hear the chuckles start, then full-on belly-laughter, and when I walked around, he was pointing at the garbage can.

Sitting on top of the lid was a blow-dryer, the cord neatly-coiled. We looked at each other, and Barry’s laughter faded to a slight frown. “How will we know if it works?” he worried. “I’d hate to drive back to the boatyard, thinking we’ve solved our problem, only to find it’s useless.” I stared at the strange, miraculous find and thought about it.

“If it was broken, they would have put it inside the trash can. They put it on top, with the cord neatly coiled, hoping somebody would take it,” I said, slowly. “I bet it still works!”

With a shrug, Barry picked it up. Then he opened the door and placed it in the back of the van without taking a single step. It was meant to be. Perfect synchronicity.

Today, I took the blow-dryer up on the foredeck and tackled the giant hole (which I now call “the blow-dryer hole”). I put on my iPod and sat in the sunshine, watching the boats on the Waterway and the birds and the dolphins and our Finnish boatyard neighbors. As I blow-dried the hole, I thought of the woman in the Tennessee restroom. Thanks to a strange coincidence, I, too, have a blow-dryer, and I spend hours with it each day. I wonder if she could give me some tips for styling fiberglass?

Friends Along the Way, Limericks, Messing About in Boats

Third time’s the charm?

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There once was a fellow named Dan,
Who lived on a boat on jackstands.
“She leaks like a sieve,
But it’s no way to live,
I would much rather float, if I can.”

Our neighbor, Dan, has been launched twice and subsequently pulled out. Somehow, he keeps a cheerful attitude, despite the delays. His blog is at www.danzplan.com.

“Like a sieve” is my poetic license; his boat is really nice. But if it worked perfectly, we wouldn’t have met him in the boatyard!

Living in a Boatyard, Living in Beaufort, NC, Rebuilding Boats

Social flutterbies

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The “lounge” here at the boatyard isn’t much. It’s back behind the office, in a cinderblock building. There’s a soda machine, a coin-operated washer and dryer, and a couple of cast-off tables and chairs. One corner has a shelf full of books to trade, and under the sink is the “free table,” where boaters can swap their unneeded junk for other boaters’ unneeded junk. Mainly, the lounge is an air-conditioned, grubby space that provides access to the restrooms and showers and a reliable old-fashioned landline telephone.

So when a small incongruous sign appeared in the lounge one Friday evening, saying “Potluck, Saturday 6 pm. BYO everything,” I chuckled. “That must be the Australians,” I commented to Barry.

Boats here in the yard come and go by way of the Travelift, which plucks them out of the water and gently carries them, in woven slings, to their assigned place in the yard. A few mornings earlier, alerted by the distinctive sound of the Travelift nearby, I popped my head out, prairie dog-style, and reported to Barry down below. “Honey Moon, Mooloolaba, Australia. Definitely a world cruiser.” We met Don and Aggie a little later. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.

The two of them have been cruising for decades. They’ve been on their current circumnavigation for a few years, having done the Red Sea route to the Mediterranean and then cruised the French Canals and Holland before coming across to the Caribbean. Down in Trinidad, they were looking for a spot to store their boat while they flew home, and they heard about Bock Marine. It was just what they were looking for, and only a few thousand miles away. No problem for someone who had sailed halfway around the world from Australia.

Once they were established in the yard, they launched into their list of projects, Aggie toting vast quantities of laundry on a small folding bike to the lounge. Whenever I walked past the washing machine, her distinctive koala-print bag was sitting on top. Don stayed close to the boat, working and supervising the sandblasting and welding. But they’d been through this process before, many times, so they paced themselves, allowing time for a social life. Hence the potluck.

That Saturday evening in the lounge, we discovered a number of people living and working in their boats who we hadn’t met. Albertine and Joop, from the Netherlands, were parked right next to the Travelift. Walter’s boat is near the bridge. We knew Dan, whose Alberg 35 is over in our area, but we hadn’t yet met Kevin, on Dynamic Duo. His catamaran was next to Dan. There’s a fellow named Steven, whose Irish accent is almost incomprehensible, and his partner, a woman from Taiwan who never speaks at all. They’re working on a huge mysterious sailboat back in the “sandpit,” as Steven calls it.

In addition to the folks at the potluck, I knew of five others who hadn’t attended. That meant that even on a Saturday evening, when the boatyard was closed, there were about 20 people working and staying on their boats here. We are all grinding and sanding and painting and building, and at the same time, we all have to sleep and eat and carry things up and down a ladder a hundred times a day. It’s a crazy lifestyle, and it’s nice to know we’re not alone.

After the potluck, the ice was broken. Every few evenings, we’d hear laughter coming from one boat or another, evidence of a little get-together. Albertine and Joop invited us to dinner on their boat, along with Don and Aggie. We watched the sun set over the water from the cockpit, enjoying drinks and Indonesian food. It was just like having dinner in a little marina, except for the 10-foot ladder. The next day, the Travelift picked them up and dropped them back in the water, and they headed north to New England.

Kevin launched a few days later. He spent the first night tied to the dock, and we went aboard for beers and conversation. What a joy to be on a boat that was actually floating!

I wanted to host a gathering, too, but our interior is so bad, we’re not even sleeping in the boat. So I hauled the barbecue out of storage and invited Gigi and Val and Don and Aggie over for hamburgers. There were two challenges: Where to attach the marine barbecue, and how to deal with a 25-knot breeze. I parked the van sideways as a giant windbreak, and then we rolled a 10-foot-tall scaffold over to it. Barry clamped the barbecue onto the scaffold (marine barbecues are designed to attach to rails or pipes and don’t have legs), and we spread our fixings and watermelon and beverages out on the scaffold. Then we made a circle of chairs and sat under the stars, eating and talking in the shadow of the boats.

When a boat goes back into the water, it’s a happy time. But it’s hard for me, because it means another friend is gone. What I find most depressing is when friends leave, but their boats stay here. I was depressed for a couple of days when Don and Aggie flew home to Australia, leaving their boat silent and tarped. And for another couple of days when Gigi and Val drove north to Quebec. This week was the worst, when the yard workers took their summer vacation as well. I miss the smiling faces of Randy and Larry and Dale!

But we are not completely alone. Over in the sandpit, we often see Steven working at the top of his mast, the tallest in the boatyard. He’s strangely attired in full foul-weather gear as he reeves halyards and adjusts rigging. Last year, he says, he went up unprotected and discovered a wasp’s nest. “The bastards never die, they just kept stinging me over and over, all the way down,” he complained.

Dan, on Arima, hurried to launch his boat before the yard closed for the week. But the next day, he found that his shaft was leaking, so he didn’t actually leave. He’s tied to the dock, bilge pumps running, waiting for the yard workers to return. I’m sorry for his misfortune, but it’s nice to see his smiling face around the place.

The best company in the boatyard right now is not even human. I don’t mean the palmetto bugs — we had a fat brown 2-inch visitor to the boat last week, and I could do without him. I mean the kitties.

When we arrived, the boatyard had three cats. Now that Gigi has gone north, I’ve taken on the job of feeding them early in the morning — 5:30 am, to be precise. “Hello, kitty!” I sing, coaxing a white-and-gray calico closer with treats. She nervously stuffs herself with dry cat food, her belly close to the ground. Then she stands up, looks around, and begins to make a strange meeowing-yowling noise.

It’s a kitten call! From across the parking lot, four babies tumble out of the “kitten hole” a small irregular opening that Dale cut for them in the wall of the steel work building. They scamper out and hide under the crane, and the black one ventures halfway across the parking lot. Then a big scary garbage truck comes by, and Mom quickly leads them back to safety.

Play time is over, both for us and for them. But it’s a gentle reminder that it’s not all work here in the boatyard. Social butterflies that we are, we will always find company, even of the feline kind.

Living in a Boatyard, Rebuilding Boats

It’s not like I’m counting

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(One, two, three, four, five…)

I have a personal vendetta against the guy who drilled all the holes in the deck of our boat.

(…six, seven, eight, nine…)

I admit, a boat needs a lot of holes drilled in the deck. Our deck bristles with interesting hardware, much of it through-bolted. There are handrails and fairleads and stanchions and cleats and clutches and winches. But the guy I want to throttle is the one who drilled all the EXTRA holes in our boat.

I’m guessing that his boss gave him a template and a drill. But he was a ham-handed idiot. Maybe it was his first day, and he’d never used a drill before. So he plopped the template down, and zippity-zap, lickety-split, he drilled a bunch of holes. Oops! In the wrong place!

(…ten, eleven, twelve…)

So he filled the holes in with some sort of goop. Not anything structural, but the paint would hide that on the top, and the headliners on the bottom. Maybe the boss knew, and maybe he didn’t. Then our ham-handed idiot put the template down again, in the right place, and drilled. Zzzzap! Oops! Crooked!? More non-structural goop, more drilling.

(…thirteen, fourteen, OK, I’ll stop now…)

No, I’m not counting. I just happened to notice that our two mast collars need a total of 16 bolt holes. So why did we find 24 extra, or 40 total holes, in the mast partners, a place that needs as much strength as possible?

The legacy of the ham-handed idiot continued when we took down the main cabin headliners. What’s this? A fairlead that needed three holes, but got six? And look, there’s a delaminated area! That’s because the rope clutches, which only needed 9 holes, had 18 — and the infamous “goop” that he put in the extra holes failed.

This is a reminder to all of us. When you screw up and take shortcuts, you can cause a lot of heartache down the road. And if your mistake is bad enough, someone might come after you later. They might sue you, or worse. What I have in mind for the ham-handed idiot is worse.

Here’s another bit of counting: Twenty-seven. That’s how long ago this criminal drilling happened. If he’s not yet retired, maybe I can track him down. Here’s what I would do: I’d drill a couple of holes in his head, and stick some bolts in, like Frankenstein. I’ll only miss-drill once or twice, but I’ve got a tube of 3M 5200 here. That should be good enough to keep his brains from leaking out. If he ever had any.

Living in a Boatyard, Rebuilding Boats

Help wanted: Rastafarian contortionist

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When all our work in the forepeak is done, I’m sure Barry’s memories will be of a challenging engineering project. We took out hardware, ground out fiberglass and balsa, added fiberglass, and replaced hardware. There were challenges and bumps in the road, but the end result is a sturdy, well-found boat.

Here’s the female version of it. Be warned. It’s a lot more, er, emotional.

I knew from the beginning that the bow pulpit needed to be removed and rebedded — the first time we looked at the boat, I had crawled into the v-berth, stuck my head partway into the forepeak, and said to Barry, “Eeewwwww — what are those ugly stains?” Despite the fact that I couldn’t get my head in there, I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that we would have to remove the forward mast (ch-ching!) to do so.

OK, once the mast was out, this should be a simple, straightforward task. Ha! Not so fast, lady.

To get into this tiny bit of space, you have to lay on your back in the v-berth and slide into the forepeak through an access hatch that’s only about eighteen inches wide. Once your butt is through, you can sit up, but that does NOT make it comfortable. Your nose is now pressed against the bulkhead, and your tools and supplies are on the other side of that access hatch. If you’ve left them more than 6 inches away, you’ll have to reach them with your toes, because elbows don’t bend in that direction.

Years ago, we saw a fellow at Key West doing something he called “Rasta Yoga.” On Mallory Pier, at sunset, he would slowly fold his entire body into a plexiglass cube that was about 18 inches on a side. I now wonder if his day job involved climbing into forepeaks.

Anyway, Barry weaseled his way into the space, wearing the full Tyvek bunny suit and respirator. Then I passed the angle grinder through the hole left by the mast, and he started grinding away over his head. And feeling extremely guilty, I left. The entire boat was full of toxic dust, so I had no choice. Really.

To assuage my guilt, I volunteered to vacuum up the mess when he was done. At the end of the day, he peeled off the bunny suit, which no longer looked so cute and clean, and slouched off to the showers with a tell-tale red mark around his face from the respirator. I climbed into my own bunny suit and immediately started to sweat like a pig. The fit was lousy — the crotch was hanging somewhere around my knees, so I had to shuffle with my feet together. That didn’t matter, since I had to crawl on my hands and knees to get into the v-berth anyway. Then I rolled over on my back and slid into the forepeak, using the technique described above.

Damn. There I was, nose against the bulkhead, with no vacuum cleaner. Even if it was close enough to grab with my toes, I couldn’t fit it through the access hatch. So back out I went. I stuffed the vacuum in, slid myself on top of it (ouch!), then twisted around until it was on my lap. There are a lot of things (and people) I’d rather have in my lap than a wet-dry vac! And a screaming baby would have been much quieter.

When I finally came out, I have never felt less glamorous. I gave off clouds of fiberglass dust, and I felt like a toxic Pigpen. When I caught sight of myself in the mirror, I was horrified. The worst part was the hideous knit thingie we call the “head sock.” Bald would be prettier.

This trade-off continued for days, Barry, then me, then Barry, then me. Finally, Barry set up his mixing station on deck, creating batches of epoxy, painting them on the fiberglass pieces, and passing the resulting mess down to me through the mast hole. This was partly because of my guilt at letting him do the grinding, and partly because of history.

Back in 1990, we needed to make some repairs to our daysailer. We bought fiberglass and epoxy and read the instructions, and either of us could have applied it. But Barry was wearing contacts that day and had no eye protection. I had seven stitches in my thumb from a bagel-cutting accident, but we talked it over, and we knew that the one who applies the fiberglass wears gloves, anyway. And so our roles were established: Barry-the-mixer-of-epoxy (who only gets it on his gloves) and me, the-one-who-applies-the-fiberglass (and ends up wearing it everywhere).

I call it “toxic decoupage.”

Unfortunately, I hadn’t applied a lot of fiberglass since 1990, and I’d never applied it upside down, in a space only suited to a Rastafarian contortionist. And I’d never applied it in the dark — we were so desperate to put something IN instead of grinding stuff OUT that we started at dusk.

The result was a mistake. No, call it a learning process. Actually, it was just a huge mess. I had dripped epoxy everywhere — my arms, my head, my face, my chest. I’m surprised I could still breathe through the glop-covered respirator. I’d carefully donned safety glasses, but somehow had gotten epoxy on my eyelashes! And although I managed to emerge clean from the bunny suit, the suit itself had to be trashed. When the epoxy hardened, the zipper was history.

Worse, we discovered in the daylight the next day that the layup was just about useless, full of air bubbles and voids. Barry suited up, picked up the grinder again, and removed most of my work. I nearly cried, but wrote a limerick instead.

Me, an emotional, whining complaining female? Nah, just the willing victim of a challenging engineering project.

Living in Beaufort, NC, Rebuilding Boats

The high cost of fuel for flying pigs

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A couple of weeks ago, we were sitting in the air-conditioned lounge between fiberglassing projects. We were wearing what Barry and I call our “itchy-scratchy” clothes, ratty things we only wear for the nastiest, messiest jobs. For me, that means denim shorts with a hole in the rear, an old t-shirt large enough to fit an elephant, and sandals.

A fellow walked in, and I glanced up from my notebook and said hello, absently. Then I looked at him again.

It was over 100 degrees, and he looked cool as a cucumber. He was wearing tooled leather cowboy boots and black jeans, with the kind of dress shirt you see at a country and western dance, or a square dance. It had shiny button covers and fancy trim along the yoke.

I realized I was staring, and I blurted out, “You sure don’t look like you’re working on a boat today!”

“No, I came on my motorcycle to show my boat to a prospective buyer,” he replied. He explained that he had a powerboat for sale out in the storage lot, the place we jokingly call “the field of broken dreams.”

A few years ago, when shopping for a boat, he was that extremely rare breed of boater who would consider either a powerboat or sailboat. He’d found a sailboat he liked, but the asking price was too high. He thought of making a lowball offer, but didn’t want to offend the seller. So he walked away from the sailboat. Later, it sold for the amount he would have offered. He kicked himself, but it was too late. He’d just bought a powerboat, a tri-cabin cruiser.

Now his powerboat is for sale. He can’t afford to use it, his dream broken by the high cost of fuel.

Occasionally, sailors buy powerboats, when they get old and tired of hoisting and trimming sails. Rarely does a powerboater buy a sailboat, but these are unusual times.

There was a very large Hunter sailboat tied up at the dock last week, and Val and Gigi wandered out to see it. “We were surprised to see all the lights on, but none of the hatches were open,” she said. “Then we realized it had two air conditioners, so of course the hatches were closed!”

They chatted with the couple on board, who were taking their new boat home to Texas and had recently run aground and needed repairs. They had sold their powerboat, because the cost of fuel was so high, and now they were going to try sailing. Given the size and complexity of the boat, they were certainly jumping in with both feet. But it was what Barry and I call a “furniture boat,” lots of pretty woodwork and fancy electrical systems, designed for the dock, not the waves.

The problem is, it’s just not natural to make a sailor out of a powerboater. A few years back, I had a coworker with a 25-foot planing powerboat. At the time, we had the Northern Crow, a gutsy little 25-foot sailboat.

Initially, I’d come in on Monday and compare notes with Gary. We’d spent a day ghosting to Poulsbo, watching for favorable currents, while he’d zipped up to Port Townsend in a couple of hours. But after a few months, I started coming in on Monday and seeing a long face. “How was your weekend, Gary? Did you take the boat out?” I’d ask. And his answer was always, “No, I couldn’t afford the fuel this weekend. The kids needed…” At the time, gas prices were half of what they are today, but he had teenaged boys in the house who ate up all his money.

I often teased him, saying, “How about a sailboat?” but it was a joke. He’d take up sailing when pigs fly.

Eventually, Gary got fired and had a mid-life crisis. He ran off with his stepson’s girlfriend, and his wife bitterly filed for divorce. She sold the boat.

I wonder if Gary or the fellow in the cowboy boots will ever have another boat. Given the price of fuel — high and going higher — the answer might just be, when pigs fly.

Living in Beaufort, NC, Rebuilding Boats

Burnout

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Barry came to me with a long face. “Er, I have some bad news.” He paused, leaving me to wonder just how bad this news was going to be. Sometimes, I wish he would just blurt it out, instead of making me wonder how bad it was. I found myself checking to make sure all his fingers were still attached.

“I killed your Dremel.”

Well, that wasn’t so terrible. I was a little sentimental about it, because it was a gift from my sister, and it was the only power tool in our arsenal that Barry and I both called “mine.” But we could easily buy another one.

So the next day, we got in the van and drove to the hardware store, about 15 miles, to buy another Dremel. Mission accomplished, we headed for a nearby restaurant for lunch. I was driving, and then Barry said, from the passenger seat, “Uh-oh.”

The only thing I hate more than “I have some bad news” is “Uh-oh.”

And one more thing we both hate is power windows. Unfortunately, the Squid Wagon has them. For months, I’d refused to use the one on the driver’s side. It was so slow, I was sure it was going to break and get stuck in the “down” position, and then it would rain. Now Barry followed his “Uh-oh” by telling me that the passenger window was stuck in the down position. This was followed by a rumble of thunder.

The window was going to be a much bigger headache than the Dremel. Frantic, we drove to the nearest Ford dealer.

“We don’t keep such old motors in stock, but I can order you one,” said the parts manager, smiling.

“I’m not certain the motor’s what I need…” said Barry.

“Electrical parts are non-returnable,” said the parts manager, and I realized the smile was robotic.

“I’ll go home and figure it out, and we’ll call you to order it in the morning,” said Barry.

“Nope, I can’t accept a credit card over the phone,” said the smiling, robotic parts manager. So we’d have to come back in person to order it, then come back in person to pick it up? At this point, Barry had to leave the store, unable to say anything besides, “Grrrrrrrrrrr.”

Luckily, the motor was in stock, cheaper, at an auto parts store.

The rain held off; it hadn’t actually rained in two week. Then, that night, before Barry could figure out how to install the new motor, it poured buckets on our sorry plastic-covered window. He finished the installation between showers the next day. He said “Grrrrrrrrrr” a lot.

And then it was my turn. I was using our tiny, lame saber saw to cut some aluminum backing plates. The motor started running more and more slowly, until it couldn’t cut any more. Well, it might still cut butter, but only if it was soft, and you wanted to cut butter with a saber saw.

This was turning into a bad week for motors.

At this point, I had to decide what to say to Barry. Should I start with “I have some bad news,” or simply “Uh-oh?” I opted for a different method.

“Barry!” I hollered. An alien looked down at me from the deck, wearing a white Tyvek bunny suit, full-face respirator, and ear muffs. His mouth was invisible behind the respirator, but I saw his jaw move. I guess he said, “What?”

“I killed the saber saw,” I shouted, twice, three times, waving the dead saw at him. Suddenly, he took off the respirator and the ear muffs. He was grinning.

“You killed it? Really? That’s great!”

He’d been wanting to replace that lame piece of junk for years, and I had just given him the excuse. The next day, he was exceedingly cheerful as we got into the van, and I got into the mood by playing with the passenger window. Up, down, up, down…wheeeee! We tooled around town and finally chose a 6.0 amp Skil brand saber saw. Then we rewarded ourselves some more with dinner, internet, and a phone chat with a Seattle friend. A lovely day, unlike the one when we replaced the Dremel.

It would have been an appropriate coincidence for the driver’s window motor to die that day, but it’s still working, although only fast enough to cut soft butter. So maybe our run of bad motor luck is over. May all the other motors on the boat live long and prosper, and best of luck with your motors, too.