After a much needed break from boat work, I'm finally back to working on Polaris Jack. And I'm finally able to reflect on the work done thus far without too many boat-induced PTSD symptoms cropping up. Which is to say, I began sleeping through the nights without waking up to fiberglass nightmares.
So I'll get this site caught up on what's going on with the boat... and perhaps a few side trips as well.
--Work underway on Polaris Jack in the town parking lot, South Addison, Maine. March, 2023
The rebuild started last fall, when I'd decided to use the boat for charter cruises. It'd be a big project--in addition to an ever-growing list of small things, Polaris needed a new water tank (fairly major surgery), a full repair of the hull-to-deck joint (very major), a new boomkin, a rudder overhaul... and the list goes on. I'll get to the list--and to what things like a "boomkin" are, as these posts progress.
An old circumnavigator friend once told me that owning a sailboat is a combination of home ownership and marriage. So it follows that rebuilding a sailboat is like going to couples therapy sans the therapist while renovating your home sans the construction crew; true, some people actually enjoy it. But people also seem to enjoy things like listening to the news and eating at McDonald's, so one never knows.
My old Tartan 34c, Jade, on a mooring in Belfast after the rebuild.
Me, I just want to go sailing. And I suppose that sometimes we all need to jump in way over our heads just to make sure we can still find a way out. I'd rebuilt a boat before--my old Tartan 34c--and I'd sworn up and down that I'd never, ever do it again.
But here I am. As they say, there's a fine line between bravery and stupidity, and I'm busy looking for that way out.
That's boat work.
The Polaris Jack rebuild would involve lots of fiberglass work, and since dealing with fiberglass is on the list of things I will definitely no longer do, I decided instead to do something that I'd never done before: borrow money in order to hire someone to work on my boat. Brilliant, right? Not so much.
Me, hiding from fiberglass dust and fumes.
Fortunately, Downeast Maine is the epicenter of lobster boat building (and, therefore, fiberglass work). If there was a creation myth surrounding the lobster boat hull, it would almost certainly involve lobster boats emerging from the sea in the waters surrounding Beals Island, Maine. It's a long story, but it begins with a guy named Will Frost who began building boats during Prohibition so that the local rumrunners could outrun the law. Legend has it that he was eventually building boats for both sides, though somehow the rumrunners' boats were always a touch faster. Those hulls would evolve into the modern lobster boat.
I called Peter Taylor at Taylored Boats, right here in Addison. He came down to see my boat; the lobster season had been slow, so money was tight in the industry, and Peter's shop had nothing on the schedule. He'd never had a sailboat in his shop before, but the work I needed him to do wasn't sailboat specific. After chatting for an hour or so about Polaris Jack, we made a plan to have the boat hauled to his shop. We'd work on the boat there--he'd do the fiberglass, I'd do the other stuff.
Polaris Jack, the first sailboat to be worked on in the shop at Taylored Boats, Addison, Maine. February, 2023
Peter's British, with an accent as strong as the tea he drinks. After looking the boat over, he declared the projects to be "a bunch of pidley shit."
But, as I said, Peter had never in his life worked on a sailboat. So even though I hoped like crazy he was right, I knew deep down that he was very, very wrong.