Since it felt like spring today I actually started messing around with the boats, getting ready to launch the motorboat for some spring clamming and not looking forward to launching and rigging the new boat (more on that later). Boat work means dragging out the tools, so out came the ditty bag. I don’t know the etymology of the word “ditty” – but there is a good treatise on the subject by Louis Bartos, an Alaskan sailmarker. Clifford Ashley wrote about them, and gives instructions on how to make one. Some of the eyelet work and draw-string/ handle/lanyard knots cited by Ashley are very creative works of art.
As a kid learning sailing I was impressed when the sailing instructors and grown-ups came down to the beach with their ditty bags – canvas totes filled with tools for working on the rigging of boats. Bob Boden, John Peck, and some of the saltier people in the village had very well stocked ditty bags. At a minimum, a good rigger’s kit consists of:
A block of beeswax for waxing linen thread used in whipping, or finishing lines (aka ropes)
A fid, or marlinespike, for forcing open the strands of a line when splicing
A rigging knife – generally a blunt tipped, fairly stout blade, often with a marlinespike included
A sailor’s palm: a leather strap with a thumb hole and a metal base, think of a industrial thimble for pushing needles
Sailmaker needles: very big, sometimes three-sided, kept in a old tobacco tin with a cotton ball soaked in 3-in-1 oil to keep them from rusting
Marline – tarred twine that smells like nothing else in the world. Marline is the most salty, nautical smell I can think of. Lapsang Souchong tea tastes like marline smells.
I load my ditty bag up with some additional tools, including a special fid for splicing braided lines, an awl, a swaging tool for compressing wire cable sleeves, rubber mallet, and a small compartmentalized box filled with cotter pins, washers, and assorted stainless steel and silicon bronze hardware for random boat repairs. I use a canvas bag I bought from my local sailmaker, Squeateague Sailmakers in Cataumet near Buzzard’s Bay. It was made in India for Green Mountain Products, and is basically a white, mildewed rectangular tote with leather sewn around the handles and a ton of outside sleeves and pockets for easy access to tools and stuff. I use it a few times a year, when I need to splice lines, rig boats, or feel salty.
Last winter, at a local boat builders’ boatshow in Hyannis, I couldn’t resist picking up a new bag, one of the more clever conveyances I’ve ever seen. This is a Nantucket “Diddy Bagg“, The owner of the company was pretty enthusiastic and did a great demonstration of how the bag could be converted into nearly a dozen different configurations. I bought one on the spot, but have yet to do anything with it. It reminds me of that children’s book when the kangaroo needed more pockets and the man made her an apron with tons of little places to tuck stuff away. As they old timers said, “A place for everything and everything in its place.”
If I were really over the top and made a living as a rigger, my bag would have some esoteric tools like a seam rubber for creasing canvas, a wooden mallet and a caulking iron for laying oakum into seams, and a worm-and-parcel rig for covering manila hemp lines. There aren’t many riggers left who can do those old skills, but there is a small community of knot and marlinespike seamanship geeks online who share some interesting work and techniques. In a future post I’ll post a list of rigging suppliers, knot workers, and other marlinespike seamanship links that I’ve been stowing in my del.icio.us account. I’ve also started a new folder in my Google Reader of nautical blogs. More on that later too.
I thought I’d write more under the “seamanship” tag and start an informal series of profiles and vignettes on all things nautical, maritime and marlinespike.
In the mid-1960s it was fashionable to wear a Turk’s Head rope bracelet around one’s wrist. The bracelets were loose when slipped on in June, and tight, greenish-grey and smelly by September when they had to come off around Columbus Day. I’d sit in the classroom during Indian Summer and sniff mine, to remind myself of sailing and harbor life with the faint odor of clams, black mud, and old salt. Mrs. Shaps and Reid Higgins could tie them. Mrs. Shaps kept a spool of 1/8th cotton line in a bag and tied the Turk’s Heads while sunning herself at Loop Beach. Mister Higgins could tie very ornate, mathematical knots. Some were long tubes of precise layovers and unders that fit over the end of a curved catboat tiller. Robert Oldale, a friend from Wild Harbor and a scientist at the United States Geological Survey in Woods Hole specialized in sennits and bell pulls, beckets and button knots.
The king of knots was the late Clifford Warren Ashley. Born in New Bedford, his Ashley Book of Knots stands as the masterpiece in marlinespike seamanship and knots: the craft of the sailor and the rigger, the tradesman and the teamster. The author Ashley was also an artist and illustrator, trained in the Brandywine School founded by Howard Pyle in Delaware. Pyle’s style and influence can be seen in the work of his students such as
N.C. Wyeth. and his love for seascapes such as Pyle’s masterpiece, Treasure Island, was passed to Ashley, who own experiences at sea as crew on a New Bedford whaler made his work among the most credible and accurate of any marine artist. Critic/blogger Paul Giambatta writes:
“He, of all the illustrators who painted wooden ships and iron men, really knew his subjects well from having lived with them all of his life. I think it’s what sets him apart from the others who painted ships and the men who sailed and worked them. Whether his illustrations have been derived from photos or sketched from life, it’s Ashley’s conviction and confidence that gives his work its power and credulity.”
His work on knots is truly encyclopedic, with dozens of variations on the same theme continuing diligently page by page, with Ashley’s precise but wonderful little illustrations enlivening tangles of bights and loops and tag ends being woven into a monkey’s fist or hangman’s noose. Serving and parceling – the art of covering rope with twine and tar to preserve a ship’s manila stays against the elements – is well covered, as is caulking, embroidery knots, buttons and splices. If it can be tied, it can be found in Ashley, who himself is credited with the invention of Ashley’s Stopper Knot.
Ashley returned from Delaware to live and work in the New Bedford/Fairhaven area during the twilight of the American whaling fishery, shipping out on one of the last true whaling expeditions to sail from New Bedford. His paintings are well represented on the walls of the New Bedford Whaling Museum (I am a soon to lapse member). The whaling museum just went very Web 2.0, launching a blog, Flickr stream, and twitter presence.
I’ve have followed Ashley and have managed to pull off some of his knots. I can tie most of the major sailing knots – bowline, square, reef, clove hitch, half-hitch, figure-8, sheetbend, sheepshank and monkey’s fist. For splices I can do: eye, back, short, and long. For decorative I have tied a turk’s head, a few sennits, and a crown knot, but never anything very pretty. I replaced the broken zipper pulls on my nine year-old EMS backpack with little monkey’s fists which work much better than the original equipment.
Past posts on marlinespike seamanship:
Marlinespike Seamanship: in which my father saves a skiing trip by demonstrating the long splice
It must be just a few weeks from spring because I have been obsessing about sailing. In this case, fast sailing. My buddy David R. and I share a love for extreme sailboats. He’s having a couple of Paper Jet 14 kits put together this winter at a local boat yard; that’s a single-handed trapeze dinghy styled on the Australian skiff concept. If I were to sail one of these I would need to start yoga classes now and wear goalie pads. David found the boat in a recent edition of WoodenBoat magazine — which typically drools over 100 year old antique boats and not little rocket ships. Oh to be 14 again.
Then I found this hydrofoil. I once delivered a 60′ plywood ocean-going catamaran from Cape Cod to Florida in November and it was the most frightening experience in my young life. This “boat” is flying at 47 knots (1 kn = 1.15 mph, ergo this boat is going 54 mph). People die doing this stuff. Where’s Kevin Costner with his gills when you need him?
Finally, it is still winter. Before I die I want to ride in an iceboat. But not one that sinks.
We pulled the boats in the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising — the Hurricane-Is-A-Coming Boat Pull — a ritual that involves at least six Cotuit Skiff owners simultaneously flipping out and amplifying weather rumors into a pending disaster worthy of a Jerry Bruckheimer/Chad Oban film. Strike up the bad electric guitar solo as these six adults anxiously unrig their antique sailboats while bemused rubberneckers drive past in their SUVs and snap pictures.
It’s not that frantic. We’re pretty good at it. Conrad hauls his boats and his customers boats out of the water fully rigged and up the hill to his boat shop. Since he’s a boat builder he has a special trailer that makes skiff pulling a simple one-man operation. The rest of us — Dan, Jimmy, Brad, Tom, and me — play boat trailer roulette, pressing into service anything with wheels and a trailer hitch to get the job done. In a full-on hurricane boat pull during the summer season, dozens of people swing into action and we can move an entire fleet of 40 boats into the meadow atop Rope’s Hill in about three hours. Off season, as we are now after Labor Day, the remaining townie sailors have to play good Samaritan and pull the remaining fleet. Thankfully yesterday’s pull was minor as we’re only operating under a tropical storm watch and Hanna was pooping out in the Carolinas. Nevertheless, I had to pull my boats because of next week’s trip to Bangalore and the fact that two more storms — Ike and Josephine — are right behind Hanna.
Our last legit hurricane on the Cape was Category 1 (the weakest on the one-to-five scale) Bob in August of 1991. That is the one and only true hurricane to hit the Cape in my 50 years on the planet, but beginning in 1938 on through the early 50s, the Cape got pasted with some regularity, including some big damage to the Cotuit Skiff fleet. So, rather than risk a 60-year old nautical antique built by my grandfather in the hopes of getting a few more weekend sails in before Halloween, I pull.
So, here’s the drill. My son Fisher and I row out to the motorboat, tow the dinghy to the beach, motor back out to the skiff, untie and tow it ashore and do the same for the other boats. The first rule of boat pull is the first boats to get pulled are those belonging to people physically present and assisting. Boats being pulled for those absent — pity pulls — take low priority.
Fisher rides the skiff in and starts unrigging the sail while I anchor the motorboat. I fetch the ditty bag (sailor term for canvas bag of nautical tools) and start pulling out the mast wedges that hold the mast secure inside of the mast step. Forestay is unshackled. The halyards (ropes that raise and lower the sail) are unreeved. Fisher stands on deck, hugs the mast, lifts it out and we lower it down and into the cockpit of the boat along with the boom and the gaff. I get into the car attached to the trailer, back it down the ramp until the rear wheels touch the water, set the parking brake, jump out and pull out ten feet of winch rope. Fisher guides the hull onto the carpet covered bunks, gets the boat centered and I stick a rubber mallet with the winch line clove-hitched around the handle into the mast hole on the deck and start winding the boat carefully up onto the bunks. As soon as the boat is secure on the trailer, Fisher and I hop into the car and drive the boat out of the water, up the ramp and up Old Shore Road hill to Main Street, bang a left, go 50 feet and drive into my driveway.
Brother-in-law, brother, and college roommate/best man arrive in pickup truck. Hop out. Two guys on the bow. Two on the stern. Fisher on the saw horses. We lift on one-two-three, step over the trailer, put the gunwale or side of the skiff on the sawhorses, tip it up and over and then upside down, bottom up on the sawhorses. The horses are placed in the middle of the yard so when and if the trees come down they won’t land on the boat. The boat could, in theory, blow off of the horses, but the hull weighs 500 pounds and should be secure. Putting in a garage isn’t a smart move because a) the boat needs to be washed with freshwater first b) that takes too much time and c) the garages are too close to the treeline and could get smashed by a falling maple and really mess up the boat.
Then we jump back into the vehicles and drive back down the hill to do it a few more times on the other guys’ boats. Whole operation takes less than hour but can be made more complex when:
The gang drinks beer and tells stories in between boats.
Tools from my ditty bag are borrowed and dropped in the water
The trailer tire goes flat and a can of a Flat-Fix gunk needs to be located
The stem on the trailer tire rips off and the flat fixer is coated with white Flat-Fix gunk
Another trailer is found
More beer is drunk
People who don’t know how to back up a trailer are allowed to back up the trailer
Weekend Wally’s who don’t understand boat ramp etiquette slip in with their trailers and decide to give their boat a manicure on the ramp while the rest of us made loud suggestions that they move it elsewhere
Colleagues in North Carolina are reporting no big deal, their lights are still on, and Hanna is right to their east. We awoke to a good, unrelated rain storm, now everything is muggy and quiet, but the fun should begin around 7 pm. Tomorrow I should be able to relaunch the motorboat, and sun shine permitting, get in some beachtime before departing for the airport and my Bangalore flight at 6:30 pm.
The kids have been bitching the boat is running weird when they drag each other around on a tube (we used water skiis) and claimed engine trouble. I knew what the problem was — barnacles on the bottom because I had been too impetuous in launching in March without repainting with antifouling paint.
Cotuit Skiffs on the run before the wind
The barnacles cause a lot of friction, are disgusting to look at, are a hazard if you try to climb aboard from the water, and make the propellor cavitate — or lose its bite in the water — because they disrupt the flow into the prop. So, out of the water came the boat, into the backyard, out came the pressure washer, and for an hour I whittled away at a pervasive mass of univalve parasites.
“Did you know barnacles have the longest penis of any organism on earth, relative to their size?” Asked number one son. (That makes two references to the male organ in one week on this blog, damning it to some netnanny filter for eternity).
Did he ask to help? Did he get down and dirty with the scraper? Did he smell like barnacle guts as the sun set in the west and my favorite question: “What’s for dinner?” was asked by number two son.
This morning I woke early, dragged the de-barnacled hull over the grass, and started looking for a can of green bottom paint. I really don’t want to drive to Hyannis this time of year — bad things happen there involving drivers from Quebec and lefthand turns. I found a can of green Woolsey copper paint — a relic from the 1950s that would definitely get the EPA and people in hazmat suits here if they knew I owned it. This was the real deal — stuff from my grandfather’s era, when smoking was good for you and exercise was bad because it enlarged your heart.
On it went, a gorgeous hue of green and then I discovered the keelson under the bow was severely worn down from too many groundings on the beach, so back into the shop I went to mix up a pot of WEST System epoxy. That went on, was smoothed down with wax paper and tacked into place while I finished the paint job by moving onto the boottop (see earlier post on waterlines and boot tops).
By this point its 90 degrees out, I am covered in green and red paint, have it in my hair, am sweating into my eyes which makes them ren, and up drives my step-sister with some Chinese VIPs. After a hearty round of introductions and vague promises to go on a boat ride, I went back to Project Nautical, finished up, and by noon was ready for my workout. I sponged myself off with a rag soaked in paint thinner and set out in my garage gym/boat shop to row 10,000 meters on the erg. Wrong. The man/air moisture transfer equilibrium was waaaay out of whack and I easily dropped a gallon of sweat in the first 2,500 meters, and being sicked by the fumes and the smell of the bottom paint, I bagged it, came in side, showered and discovered one can actually continue to perspire in the shower.
Boat was launched, brief ride, but I was too fried to go to the beach, so I went to the grocery store with the other senior citizens and walked around in the air conditioning for an hour.
The first race of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club is Friday, the Fourth of July, and a winter’s worth of procrastination comes down to a final few days of rushed boat painting so I can get #19, the Chugworm, painted, launched and rigged in time for the starting gun. I’ve been picking away at the boat since May, but I never seem to get it together until the final week, best intentions of working on the boat in the fall and winter notwithstanding.
Today I finished off the hull, tomorrow I’ll sand and varnish the spars: the boom, the mast, and the gaff. Hull work is fun. All shine and precise line work. Thanks to some masking tape and my secret weapons – a foam roller and a little disposable foam brush – I can get the hull, the bottom, and the waterline, or more nautically, the boot top, done in an afternoon.
So, I set the instant messaging status to “away from computer,” finished up my last calls, and hit the garage for a few hours of fumes and brushwork. When I sand a boat I like to listen to fairly obnoxious music – stuff like Alice in Chains, Fu Manchu, Queens of the Stone Age – head banger music I can blast and hear over the electric sanders. Painting, now that I think about it, should be much more artistic. Say some Verdi or Rossini – but for some reason I blew $75 on the complete iTunes collection of Industrial (a genre best suited for ergometer rowing) and so I listened to Throbbing Gristle, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and Skinny Puppy while I did my Michelangelo impersonation.
The hull gets a single coat of thinned marine enamel ($50 a quart) applied with a 4″ foam roller. That goes on smooth but a little bubbly, so I flatten the coat down with a good china bristle brush. While that dries I open the $300 gallon of Petitt white antifouling paint. That’s right. $300. At least I only use about a pint per year, but still. White bottom paint is one of the stupider things in the world. I mean, here I am painting the bottom of the boat so barnacles and slime won’t grow on it. Which will happen anyway – so a white bottom is like trying to feed hogs while dressed like Tom Wolfe in a white linen suit. You will get dirty and you will look silly.
The bottom paint goes on pretty fast and dries even faster. I mask off the boot top with very expensive ($25 a roll) masking tape that is rubberized to curve and stretch. As the hull and bottom set up, I pop off the tape (before it dries on) and get ready to do the boot top. Now boot tops were, in my family, work left to the more precise painters, like my grandmother or my wife. They’d go at it with expensive sable brushes and approach it like surgery. Me, if left to my own devices, would botch the job and commit a laugher of a line which would get laughed at all summer long.
I have since improved and can paint, by hand, a yellow stripe in about 30 minutes per side, with only an occasional swipe of the drip rag to catch my misses and sags.
The final result isn’t too bad. There is always something on a wooden boat to criticize, especially one built in 1948, and I always have to remind myself, the boat will never look as nice all summer.
So, spars tomorrow, launch and rig Friday morning before the parade, get the sail on after lunch and make the 2:30 (in Cotuit we start much later than the scheduled time) starting line for the first sail of the summer.
It’s that time of year when I begin to dream of winter projects above and beyond making a living and keeping the wolf from the door. Today, with my skiff in the garage awaiting some surgery and TLC, I started the annual pining for a wooden boat project — a strip built kayak perhaps, another skiff, a Mackenzie Cuttyhunk bass boat ….
These are thoughts that get me in trouble with my wife. Then I found this website, one devoted to rescuing old hulks. I found my project, it awaits me on Long Island.
“The Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation is dedicated to placement, saving, locating, researching, wishing, learning and dreaming of wooden boats. All boats are free.Wooden Boats beyond a certain point of condition and/or age are becoming rare. After years without proper care, they are sawn up, burned, or buried. It is our hope that this site can centralize connections between current owners placing boats with people searching for boats.”
When I find the time I’ll attempt to post on the history of the Mackenzie bass boat, a Cape Cod design built in the 1960s. These are the boats “designed by a fish,” that fish being the striped bass.
Tomorrow, September 21, marks the Fall Equinox. Sixty-nine years ago to the day my grandparents and my father rode out the greatest storm to ever strike New England, while to the west 600 people perished. It was a disaster my grandparents never forgot, something they didn’t talk about much, but with a tinge of fear, making it the ghost story of my childhood, a scary story reinforced by scrapbooks of photographs of storm damage and commemorative editions of the New Bedford Standard Times that detailed the destruction through photographs of wrecked beach cottages, submerged autos, and yachts cast incongruously across highways and train tracks. I pored over those photographs, and asked out loud when something as dramatic might happen again. I was shushed. It’s bad luck to whistle up a storm.
I am reading a good book, A Wind to Shake the World, by Everett S. Allen, the late journalist and Martha’s Vineyard native who spent his career at the Standard-Times, starting as a cub reporter on the day the hurricane struck. The fact this was a hurricane with no name (it occurred before the days when the National Weather Service dubbed them names such as Katrina and Andrew) may account for a lot of the mystery surrounding it. It was the most powerful hurricane to ever hit the eastern seaboard north of North Carolina. It happened unexpectedly, there were no forecasts and it literally caught people unaware, on the beach, closing their summer cottages at the end of the season. People in New York and Boston were unaware of what was happening to their south and east. It was days before the news became known and relief could arrive. It was the storm that punctuated the misery of the Depression, the storm which ended any semblance of colonial bucolic New England that remained, that the Currier & Ives version of New England that existed before the Interstate, an isolated corner of working farms, scrub forests, rich men’s mansions, and remote beaches. It was simply the Storm of ’38.
Driving home to Cape Cod last night from New York City (my flight to Hyannis was cancelled due to fog), was an eerie experience, especially once I passed New Haven and began to flick past the towns which had been devastated by the storm 69 years ago, a landscape tortured and which I read about that morning on the flight to LaGuardia.
Long Island was hit first, around three in the afternoon. New York City saw some strong winds and flooding, but the damage got worse to the east. Fire Island. Point of Woods — the barrier island that runs like a tenuous finger between the Atlantic and the bay behind it was flooded by a tidal wave 35-feet tall, wiping cottages and their occupants off of the sand dunes, blowing them north to the mainland. The Hamptons were hard hit, but Montauk, the commercial fishing haven at the very terminus of Long Island was ruined. Bodies were blown across Block Island Sound to Rhode Island. After the storm, police sent messages downwind to Montauk, seeking identification of victims such as this:
“The little boy found was between 36 and 37 inches tall, weighing forty pounds and was between two and three years old. His hair was medium brown, inclined to be wavy…He wore a dark blue suit with white pearl buttons … the message was addressed to [Montauk] because it was to windward, in terms of the hurricane.”
Across Long Island Sound, in Connecticut, where I drove through the early morning hours, New Haven, the Elm City, lost 42 percent of its trees, losing a beauty it was renowned for. Crossing the bridge in Old Saybrook, over the Connecticut River, I thought of Nils Ek, the captain of the 48-foot cruiser Marpo, who perished while trying to save another man’s yacht.
“After striking the bulkhead two or three times, the craft disappeared, and no trace of her was found after the storm. She is presumed to have slid off into deep water and probably was carried far downstream underwater. Whether Captain Ek fell overboard or had gone below to determine what was wrong with his engine will never be known.”
In New London, the destruction was absolute, sealed by a fire which carried away the commercial center of downtown during the worst of the 120 mph winds. In Mystic, the next town, fish were found in kitchen drawers of flooded houses. A Boston bound train was washed off its tracks outside of Stonington but no passengers were lost and the passengers — mainly prep school students — found refuge in the village. Rhode Island was hit the hardest.
Over 100 perished in Westerly where the high school was turned into a morgue, the shorefront at the Charlestown Breach and Point Judith seemed to take the brunt of the blow. The day after, Allen described the scene:
“Along the shore road back to Misquamicut, the remains of houses are scattered deep on the shore of Brightman’s Pond. Gangs of men comb the coves and fields for bodies; hundreds more are expected to join the search tomorrow, for nearly thirty dead are still missing …”
The story was the same to the east: Narragansett, Wickford, Newport.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “So it goes.”
Downtown Providence was flooded to the second floors of the downtown office buildings. Looters rampaged after the waters receded. People died in Westport, at Horseneck Beach. Padanarum, the yachting center west of New Bedford, was the scene of much maritime mayhem, as the most beautiful yachts ever imagined were dashed against the bridge and causeway at the head of the harbor.
The storm hit on a school day, and on Conanicut Island in JamestownBristol , Rhode Island, a school bus was flooded. Eight children died. And so it went.
Town after town ravaged by a storm which in the course of three hours — coinciding with high tide — pushed a 35-foot tall water of water before it, drowning those unfortunate enough to be trapped in their collapsing homes, killing fishermen caught unaware at sea, and gruesomely gashing and impaling those caught outdoors with flying debris. A women securing her window bled to death when the glass shattered and cut her jugular vein.
The saddest story related by Allen and the hardest for me to bear as I drove home, occurred beneath the Bourne Bridge, the southernmost span over the Cape Cod Canal. There a house which had washed off its foundation a couple miles to the south, fetched up. When rescuers cut a hole in the roof they discovered four elderly women and an 11-year old boy, drowned in the attic. With them was a local man, about my age . He had been visiting elderly people in his neighborhood, helping them secure their homes and tying up their skiffs. His name was Hayward Wilson.
“At midnight, they found five bodies on the second floor; all had drowned. A bloody bruise was on Wilson’s forehead and his hands were badly bruised and lacerated; he had made a last desperate effort to break through the roof to get the women and little boy out of their water-filled prison.”
He was posthumously awarded the Carnegie Medal for Heroism , the reverse side of which reads: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
That bridge was the hardest to cross. With every highway sign, another one of Allen’s anecdotes of tragedy and death, heroism and survival came back to me. I’ll never be able to look at the southern New England shore the same way again.
These pictures say it all. Napatree Point, Rhode Island before the storm.
And after (note the wooden groins, or planks in both pictures for reference.
I pulled #19 out of the water on Sunday’s hightide. It was sad. Now my Friday afternoon hooky excuse is on a trailer, awaiting three other stout backs to lift her off and onto some sawhorses. I think I’ll do some woodwork on her this fall before tucking her away for the winter on the dirt floor boat shed (never store a wooden boat over a concrete floor, all the moisture in the wood desiccates and a dry boat will rot).
