There once was a fellow named Larry,
Who, when asked if he’s happy, says, “Very!”
After many a year,
His old high school dear,
Has accepted his offer to marry.
==
Larry is one of my favorite guys here at Bock Marine, and he’s just returned from his honeymoon. Congratulations to the new couple!
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.
I have offered the white bunny suit,
A bite of some nice, tasty fruit,
But in order to grind,
His whole mouth is behind,
Plexiglass, so the question is moot.
===
Says Barry, “I love my 3M 6800 respirator!”
It started with a deck leak where the bolts hold the bow pulpit onto the boat. Then we removed the bow cleats and two big bolts holding on the anchoring platform. Then the grinding began, wearing full protective gear.
I’ve had much better times in a different bunny suit…and Meps had a great time with just the head a while back. But this is a different time, and it calls for another kind of bunny suit. I actually like it, especially the riot police style facemask which lets me both see and breath at the same time. And while this stuff isn’t fun, it really improves my life/health while I’m grinding fiberglass and doing fiberglass and epoxy repairs, which has been job #1 lately.
Actually, the balsa core wasn’t damaged far from the bolts, but it was kinda rotten for an inch or so around the bolts. I have to call that “good news” since it means that the water and rot didn’t migrate very far. Unfortunately, it was still a pretty big grinding job because where some of the bolts go through, the core was angled at 45 degrees, which made for a very poor place to bolt something on. So I had to grind it out in a much larger area to make a flat-ish area under the bolts, then bevel the area around that. Up in the forepeak, this is even more grinding, because there are two layers of balsa core (about two inches think) for extra strength where it holds the main mast up, so the bevel just goes on and on and on.
This makes it sound like a simple job, probably done quickly. But of course, it wasn’t–first, the grinding happened in three or four strages as I figured out how big my problem was and how much bevel I needed, and that coarse sanding disks on my grinder work better than the abrasive disks for this job….with about four trips to the hardware stores trying to figure out exactly which attachments I needed for the grinder. (Thanks again for the grinder, Tom!) Then there is the fiberglass and epoxy layup.
Since I had put on the full suit of gear and started grinding away in temperatures too hot for the job, Meps took the uncomfortable job of climbing into the forepeak laying on her back and fiberglassing over her head while I mixed epoxy and saturated cloth on deck and passed it down. The first time it seemed easy, but that was before I took a careful look and then ground out quite a few voids. The net result was that the first layup didn’t actually leave much on the boat, but we learned a lot: 1. Don’t lay up fiberglass at dusk, when you can’t see it. 2. If you are doing it overhead, use plenty of resin so it saturates well. 3. Grind those holes smoother so it won’t make voids at the transition points. 4. Start with thickened epoxy in the corners like a fillet to help with those voids too.
So I went back to grinding, then Meps went back to glassing. Ultimately, if I remember correctly, there were three more gooey upside-down layups with glass cloth and epoxy. Then I realized that the new backing plates wouldn’t sit flat. Oops, I neglected to mention that in addition to the angle under some bolts, there were only fender washers underneath, and we didn’t think that was up to the job….so we made backing plates from 3/16″ aluminum plate…I know 3/16 is overkill, but that was the size of the scrap available in the boatyard. So back to putting the backing plates on–the flat area that was supposed to be above them was smaller than they were, so first we tried putting on some layers of chopped strand mat with epoxy to build up a flat area, but that didn’t do enough. So after letting it cure and grinding it for the next coat to stick, we added a layer of thickened epoxy. Still the backing plates didn’t quite fit flush. Grind it again so it had a little more tooth, and move on.
Then came the next step–fitting the bow pulpit back on. It got bent a little in its history somehow, and that is probably why it wants to spring its feet apart–when you attach one foot, the other three don’t want to go where they belong any more. So with a bit of wrestling, I got some holes drilled that were almost aligned–I could get all 12 bolts through, and they didn’t ALL bind up at once, at least after I had re-drilled three or four holes to enlarge them. Then we tried to fit the backing plates onto the bottom….I mostly ground those holes larger with the Dremel instead of re-drilling them. Finally we cleaned everything up, waxed the bolts and nuts, and added a last layer of thickened epoxy to both fill the space and glue the backing plates to the underside of the deck.
When that was done, we removed the bolts and drilled the holes out again (the epoxy had formed threads on the bottom, and I wanted open holes to put nuts and washers on the bottom). Then one last grinding job — removing the frozen epoxy “goobers” — and a very careful final cleanup.
The bow pulpit is now installed, mounted with expensive marine caulk and 12 brand-new 316 stainless steel bolts, nuts, and washers. Finally one thing is ready to go back to sea–way too much of the work so far has been in the direction of taking things apart instead of putting them back together.
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.
We’re stuck in the library here,
The problem is liquid, I fear.
It’s raining like cats
And dogs. We’ve no hats,
So we’ll just have to read ’til it’s clear.
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.
“They tell me,” said good Doctor Freud,
“You’re becoming a bit paranoid,”
“You worry and weep,
“You wail in your sleep,
“That you’ve left a huge fiberglass void.”
It’s true, I’ve become obsessed. I lay awake at night, wondering if the layup I’ve just done will be acceptable to Barry, the Grinding Man. If it’s not, he grinds it out and I try again. Working in a space that’s only a couple of feet wide and a couple of feet high, trying to get the stuff to adhere to surfaces above my head, wearing a respirator and full Tyvek bunny suit, with temperatures over 90, is like working in hell. I must be crazy, but I think it’s worth it.
I am wishing this heat wave would end,
But my far-flung friends don’t comprehend.
Candy says, “Chile’s chilly!”
Nita says, “Fifties, really!”
So I’ll just attach heat and click SEND.
We had to flee the melting heat, so we ducked into an air-conditioned library. While there, two emails came in, one from South America and one from Seattle. Both were complaining about how cold it is, and despite glares from the librarians, we couldn’t stop laughing.
Every once in a while, I have to turn my head to the side and shake all the excess brain fluff out of my ear. I also have to clean out all the small info-snippets that have gathered in our traveling notebook. So the following post is sort of like the soup you make after cleaning out the refrigerator.
—
I recently found the receipt for some postcards I bought at Graceland. At the time, I hadn’t noticed the name of the store at the top of the receipt: “Welcome To My World.” Considering that Elvis Presley is dead, I’m wondering, what does that signify?
—
At a Wal-Mart near Bentonville, Arkansas, we had a strange experience. As we walked in, instead of a regular greeter, an older woman walked up to us and said, “Happy Earth Day! Would you like a clothespin?” We accepted this strange gift, on which she’d handwritten, “Save energy! Hang clothes out to dry!”
A day later, checking into a campground, we were handed an 8-1/2×11 sheet of paper, single-spaced, with campground rules. Rule number 13 was, “…use the washers and dryers provided in the laundry room. Clotheslines are very dangerous and things hung outside to dry can blow away in the wind, or be unsightly to other campers.” (the emphasis is theirs) Laughing, Barry clipped the rules sheet to our notebook with the clothespin, leaving me to ruminate on the paradox.
—
Favorite street names: Side Street, Friendly Street, Liberal Avenue. The first two were in Eugene. The third one could have been, but wasn’t.
—
Favorite billboards: Two checkboxes, reading “Stick head in sand” and “Fight global warming.”
And: Lose 3000 pounds in one day! Donate your car to…
And: Be an Oklahoma State Trooper — company car provided!
—
Most common question from strangers on our trip across the country: “Is that a boat?”
Answer most likely to be met with a chuckle: “Yep, my wife built it.”
—
I put a magnetic peace sign on the back of our van, my quiet statement about the Iraq war. However, I was confused, and I put it on upside-down, with the three prongs up. My sister, who also has one, laughed at me, but I still wasn’t absolutely certain that she was right. After I’d seen at least six peace signs along I-5, all of them with the prongs down, I flipped it over, embarrassed. How could I have lived through the 70’s and not noticed?
—
Funniest missing comma: “This road adopted by Wal-mart Marina.”
—
Funniest Texas sign: “Don’t mess with Texas. Up to $2000 fine for littering.”
—
Strangest highway equipment: On Highway 1, along the California coast, rockslides are so common that they use something like a snowplow to clear the roads. We dubbed them “rockplows.”
—
Favorite exit signs: “Santa Claus Lane, next exit.”
Also, “Mexico, next exit.” Don’t you wonder what the one on the other side says?
—
Best question on a billboard: “Have you ever met an honest mortician?”
—
Three great business names: HAYKINGDOM, Insane Autos, Aggressive Towing
—
If cows could read, and if they appreciated fine wrought-iron work, maybe the lovely archway that says “Cattle Town” over the entrance to the feedlot would make them think they’re going to a nice place. I doubt it, though.
—
Weirdest church name: Bovina United Methodist Church (I bet the sermons are very mooooving!)
—
Two beautiful California things I saw firsthand: Fields of purple artichokes and whales spouting in the Pacific Ocean.
—
Not an April fools’ joke: On April 1, 2008, we stopped at 1 Infinite Loop Drive, also known as Apple Headquarters. This was not to pay homage to the maker of our new computer, but to have lunch with Todd, who we’d not seen in 17 years. He looks exactly like he did when he graduated from college, one advantage to losing one’s hair young.
—
Dumb question, smart answer: Driving through Arizona date country, Meps asked, “If dates come from palm trees, and coconuts come from palm trees, are dates related to coconuts?” Barry answered, “As much as peaches are related to oranges, I guess.”
—
Friona, Official Cheeseburger Capital of Texas.
Twenty miles later: Welcome to Hereford, Beef Capitol of the World. Sorry, the folks in Friona say it only counts if it’s official.
—
Most propitious lunch stop: We received an email in February from our friend, Drew, that read “Rudy’s BBQ is a must stop. All other BBQ including Mary’s (his wife, rumored to make the best homemade BBQ in Seattle) is judged by this Texas Standard.” Two months later, we happened to be passing Rudy’s, outside El Paso, precisely at lunchtime when our stomachs were growling.
—
In Oregon, where all gas is pumped by attendants, we started chatting with the man pumping our diesel. He asked where we were headed, and when we told him “North Carolina, via San Diego” he told us about a trip he once took. They drove from Grant’s Pass to Charleston, South Carolina and back, over 6000 miles, in 5 days. He seemed proud to have “seen” the entire USA.
Since we purchased the Squid Wagon in Florida and took it to Seattle by way of Newfoundland, our trusty Ford van has not crossed the USA, it has actually circumnavigated it. Compared to the fellow from Grant’s Pass, though, we’re slow. We’ve only traveled twice the distance, or 12,000 miles. But it took us four and a half months for the northern leg, and a speedy five weeks for the southern.