Month: November 2024

Cousin Pete dropped off a bucket of quahogs yesterday. So what was a guy to do on a sunny November Friday afternoon but sit outside on the back steps with a clam knife and open them them up for a nice batch of chowder? Pure bliss. Even the schnauzer was into it.

After shucking about six dozen clams into a bowl, taking care to reserve their juices — or “liquor” as my grandfather called the precious gray essence de clam — I drove up to Stop & Shop to buy a bag of potatoes, some yellow onions, a couple of cans of evaporated milk and a hunk of salt pork.

Salt pork used to be in the meat case near the linguica and other processed pig products, but alas none was to be found. I asked the nice man re-stocking the chicken bin if there was any hiding in back but he shrugged and informed me the stuff is now banned in Massachusetts.

Banned? Are you shitting me? On what grounds? This was the protein of choice for Cape Cod whalemen, packed in barrels for the long ride to the Pacific. Glistening squares of white pig fat encrusted with handfuls of salt. A cardiac surgeons annuity. The second most important ingredient in a true clam chowder after the clams.

So I searched and sure enough I learned that last year the goo-goo’s on Beacon Hill banned the sale of salt pork and some other pig products thanks to a moronic referendum passed in 2016 by the tree huggers and dirt worshippers among us.

F#&k that noise! I can learn how to make my own just like I make my own pancetta and bacon and sausage. So off to the cookbook shelf to find Michael Ruhlman’s Charcuterie, where he writes:

“Salt pork was one of the most important cured items in Europe, especially so in the age of great exploration because, properly handled, it would last in its brine for up to two years (or even longer, according to some sources) at room temperature. When the cook wanted to use it, he simply removed a piece from its brine, soaked it in water, and simmered it long and slow.”

Salt pork is an essential ingredient for a true Cape Cod clam chowder. It’s diced, fried, and removed for use as a garnish on the finished product. It imparts a wonderful flavor to the onions and potatoes and there is no substitute (in my case I had a nice piece of home-made pancetta which will have to do for now.)

Imagine if the voters of the Commonwealth had banned this stuff in the 1830s? There would have been riots on the docks of New Bedford and Nantucket.

Here’s a link to my disquisition on the topic of a proper clam chowder from 20o7. I’m so pissed off I might even write a letter to RFK Jr. and beseech our new health czar to make Cape Cod chowder great again.

Background

My grandfather Henry Chatfield Churbuck built a dozen Cotuit Skiffs in 1948. At the time they were the latest additions to Cotuit’s fleet of the 14-foot “flatiron skiff” gaff-cat rigged racing boats designed by local boat builder Stanley Butler in the early 1900s. One of Henry’s twelve boats, the Snafu II, was reserved for my father, who raced her for a few years before selling it to the Wright family in the mid-1950s.

When I was ten years old the old boat was bought back from the Wrights — and I sailed and raced her up until my early 30s.

She has been rebuilt and repaired several times since she was first built. A fiberglass deck was put on in the early 70s, but rotted the decking beneath it and was replaced by local builder Dick Pierce in the late 70s in a major refit that included a new centerboard trunk, keelson, and coaming.

In the late 80s a cracked hull strake was repaired and a new mast step installed along with a plywood bottom by an utter hack of a boat builder at the Cape Cod Maritime Museum. He used stainless steel lag bolts and left the heads exposed on the bottom, and somewhere along the way the coaming cracked and began to split.

Diagnosis

The boat hasn’t been sailed for two decades, so last summer my son and I put her into the shop and started to remove layers of yellow paint to get an idea of how much rot, iron sickness, and other hidden issues were hiding. The rub rails were removed, the canvas deck stripped off, and the old ash coaming pried off of the deck beams and carlins. Out came the heat gun and many hours of peeling paint which revealed a little rot under the gunwale amidships in the old white cedar, and some serious rot on the white oak transom.

I ordered a bolt of Dynel (synthetic canvas) for the deck, and drove off Cape to a specialty lumber supplier in Stoughton for two ten-foot lengths of ash for the coaming, and white oak for the transom and rub rails.

The transom

The transom was made from two pieces of white oak held together with bronze rods. I cut out the bottom, rotten piece with a rotary saw and set to work dealing with the rotten hood ends of the strakes where the old iron boat nails had leached into the surrounding cedar. I drilled out the nails and filled the voids with pieces of hardwood dowels impregnated with penetrating epoxy (TotalBoat CPES)

A new transom was cut on the miter saw, coated with penetrating epoxy and glued in place with WEST System epoxy thickened with microballoons.

I added an oak stern post — per the plans, to strengthen the two transom planks and avoid the challenges of drilling long 18″ holes through the edges of them to accept new bronze rods. I want to learn how to do bronze rod plank work, but I figured the combination of the beefy stern post and the epoxy would do the job of holding the stern together and withstanding the considerable force of the rudder’s pintles in the gudgeons.

I fit some chine logs along the corner of the bottom and transom with pieces added up along the ends of the cedar strakes. Everything will eventually be secured with bronze screws driven up through the bottom and into the side strakes. The seat will be rebuilt with a slot cut through it for a boom crutch.

Deck covering

After dealing with the transom replacement I turned to the deck. The underlying plywood installed by Dick Pierce was in excellent shape, so I cut the Dynel into two pieces (the deck is too wide for a single roll to cover), painted half the deck with a thin skim layer of WEST epoxy, then laid out the fabric, troweling onto the surface another thin layer of epoxy until the weave was impregnated and the cloth was solidly tacked down with no bubbles or wrinkles. I used an electric stapler with Monel staples to lock down the edge along the gunwale and the inside of the cockpit. When the first half of the deck cured, I repeated the process on the other half, this time taking care to lay down a straight seam from the mast hole back to the cockpit between the two halves of Dynel.

Half of the deck covered and epoxied in place.

When the decking was in place I trimmed the excess with a hot knife and finished with a thinned coat of platinum grey marine paint.

I cut down a piece of 1/2″ white oak into 1″ rub rails, drilled and countersunk the strips, coated with penetrating epoxy and then, over the course of a nice warm week, gave them six coats of varnish. I’ll wait until the hull is faired, primed, and painted before installing them, probably next spring.

After priming the hull with two-part epoxy primer from TotalBoat, I faired the dings and scratches with Swedish Putty from Fine Paints of Europe. It’s hard to see all the flaws in the hull until it’s primed and sanded and the TotalBoat epoxy goes on thick but sands down beautifully with 220-grit sanding discs on an oscillating sander.

The steamy part

Then came the moment I was dreading. Steaming the ash coaming. My son Fisher ordered some steel five-gallon jerry cans from eBay and while they were en route I began studying everything I could about steam boxes and the arcane science of bending wood. Because I was going to steam a ten-foot plank I was looking at constructing a 12-foot long box out of plywood. Then someone writing on Woodenboat’s forum suggested foam insulation panels and that seemed like the way to go until I remembered a YouTube video from Louis Sauzedde’s excellent Tips from Shipwright series where he steamed wood in a plastic bag. Having just used my vacuum food sealing machine to seal up five pounds of Canadian bacon I smoked in the smoker, I had a 50-foot roll of food bag material which can be used for sous vide cooking. I figured if I could boil food in the bag, then I could boil wood in it too. So it was off to West Marine for a four foot length of heavy duty exhaust hose, and I was in business.

I pre-drilled two holes in the center of the plank to align it with the centerline of the boat, slid it into a 12-foot piece of bag, and suspended it with clothes line from two saw horses. The hose was taped into the center of the bag, the burner was lit, and within 15 minutes steam started to flow.

The rule of thumb is an hour of steaming for every inch of thickness, so with a half-inch thick plank I set a timer for 30 minutes and while I waited smeared a bead of Dolfinite bedding compound around the inside of the deck frame.

There was some debate about giving the plank 45 minutes of steam, but having read that the lignin (the compound is akin to the natural “glue” that binds wood together) could be overcooked, I decided to pull the plank at 35 minutes.

Time was of the essence. So, with my son and best friend assisting me, and everyone wearing work gloves, we slit the end of the bag, slid the plank out, and rushed it to the waiting boat.

For some reason I had it in my mind that the plank would be like a noodle and fairly easy to bend to fit. It was not. It fought us for an hour, bending into the boat with some muscle but feeling like it wanted to explode into splinters at any moment. Clamps wouldn’t pull the plank flush with the deck, and whoever the genius was that smeared Dolfinite around the opening deserved a failing grade, leading my son to dub the brown goo “boat diarrhea.” Just as we were about to give up and head to the lumber yard for a new piece of ash I wished out loud for a comealong strap to crank the stubborn plank into place. “One second, ” said my son, who went to his truck and grabbed a ratchet strap.

With one end of the strap anchored to a screw driver inside of the mast step, and the other end hooked around the aft end of the plank, we cranked it into place, whacked it with a rubber mallet to get it aligned just so, and with high-fives all around, finally declared victory after an hour of struggle and swearing.

The following day I cut and shaped the aft ends of the coaming, cutting the curves and notching them to fit into the transom. The screws were driven, the holes bunged with plugs, and the edges chamfered with a hand plane.

The curved piece will be joined to the two end pieces by butt blocks screwed to the inside and outside of the coaming.

That concludes the woodworking part of the restoration (until I make new spars this winter). With a few days in the high 60s, I’ll finish fairing the hull with fairing compound, Swedish putty, and another coat of two-part epoxy primer, then sand it all down with 220-grit sandpaper and try to get a coat of the custom yellow paint I had made up by George Kirby paint in New Bedford.

All in all a very therapeutic exercise in ancestor worship. Once this project is finished I’m going to turn my attention to another Churbuck-built skiff, number 42, the Dolphin.

Stay tuned for more over the the winter.