Down the road lives my buddy Jack, who is rumored to have been either an interrogator for the CIA or muscle for the Grateful Dead. Nobody knows. Maybe both. Maybe an interrogator for the Dead. Either way, he claims to have worked as an engineer, and says he's been to England and upstate New York, if that means anything.
Regardless of where he's been and whom he may have interrogated, he's pretty good with a saw and clamp (i.e. CIA), and he is consistently willing to humor me with my various projects, be they cabin building or sailboat restoration. His patience and care very nearly match my haste and ask-questions-later attitude.
Although I lived across the road from him for years, and saw him once in a while at the lobster pound (no, not a restaurant. Click the link below for a full essay on what a real pound is...) where I worked winters, it wasn't until I was rebuilding my first boat in the town parking lot that we became friends.
That first boat was a Cape Dory 25. It had irreparable damage caused by ice heaving in the keel combined with a very poor level of craftsmanship when built. Apparently, the CD boats are known for that; some are well made, some are not. This one was layed-up with resin-starved fiberglass (picture rebar without enough concrete), then, decades later, allowed to sit through a winter or ten filled with water. The bilge (the boat's basement, sans wine) filled, froze, and heaved. Probably over and over. Finally, it parted the fiberglass enough for water to get down the keel, where the lead ballast lived. There, it froze and heaved more and more, and this glaciation finally cracked the already-weak keel. Foolishly, I thought I could remedy this by cutting a hole in the keel the size of a rottweiler and re-building it.
In my early years as a hunting guide in Montana, I guided a fair number of supposed lifelong hunters who knew so little about hunting that I'd think they'd never set foot in the woods. But learning comes hard; so many get to a point, no matter how feeble that point is, and decide that they've learned what they need to know about a given situation, and the mind shuts-off.
Most of the sailors I've met between here and the Bahamas don't actually sail their vessels. They motor everywhere. Then there are the ones who sail and nothing but.
On a dock in Oriental, North Carolina, I met guys on both ends of that spectrum.
The first was Ivan and his wife and two sons aboard a salty steel sloop. I can't remember the wife's or kids' names. They all lived aboard, year round, in Alaska; it was their only home. They'd sailed through the North West passage that summer, and were headed to the Caribbean for the winter, then on through the Panama Canal in order to get back to Alaska the following summer. I learned a ton from Ivan, picking his brain about everything I could until he began hiding in the bushes when he saw me coming. They all knew their shit, and were wonderfully humble and lacking in hubris. The ocean will do that to you, I suppose. Unless you're one of those record-setting nitwits with more money than god.
A few years later, on the same dock, I met a Rhode Island couple in a fancy, got-all-the-gadgets, plush, newish yacht; quite the opposite of Ivan's vessel. It was a Jeanneau Sun Odyssey. He offered a fair amount of unwanted advice, and neglected to follow the basic cruising tenant that makes it abundantly clear that the guy in the conspicuously posh boat feeds and waters (cocktails) the riffraff cruisers like me. But did he so much as offer a cold beer or cocktail--complete with ice cubes, because he's got a freezer on board, no doubt, and I hadn't seen ice since who knows when--on the dock? Nope. But rich cruisers these days are too busy with their skylink or starlink or whatever internet access to pay attention to either tradition or riffraff. See, short years ago, these guys entertained themselves by hosting dudes like Erik the Shark Tooth Hunter aboard their yachts. Now, they don't need riffraff; they just sit on their boat couch's and watch youtube videos put out by sailors who fund their sailing by filming their entire lives.
The following day, we both left Oriental, and motored up the canal between the Neuce River and the Pamlico River on the Intracoastal Waterway. The friends on the Jeanneau had forgotten to get fuel in Oriental, so the guy hailed RE Mayo Seafoods on channel 16 on the boat radio. 16 is the Coast Guard channel, used for hailing and distress calls only--and monitored by the Coast Guard.
RE Mayo is a classic backwater commercial fishing (shrimp) facility along the waterway. Not a yachty sort of place. Not at all.
So our boy hails them on 16, which is fine because the channel is for hailing, and asks if they have fuel. They say yes. Instead of switching channels, as is the law, he continues on 16--all boats can hear him because everyone keeps their radios tuned to 16.
Here's the conversation:
"Is their someone there to help me tie my boat up when we arrive?"
"No," says the woman on the other line. "Our crew's busy. Pump your fuel and pay in the office."
A pause. An audible sigh on the radio. "So, I have to do it myself? Can't you send someone to help?"
"Our crew is busy."
Another sigh into the mic. "Can you come help?"
"No. I'm in the office."
"So I have to get my wife to help?" the yachtsman says.
No response from RE Mayo.
"Ohh... she's not going to like this," he says. "And I don't like this either."
Then: "This is the United States Coast Guard. Channel 16 is for hailing and distress calls only. Switch your radio traffic to another channel. USCG out."
The yachtsman, still on 16: "Are you sure no one can help? I really don't want to ask her. She's down below. She won't be happy."
"Sir, the is the United States Coast Guard. Switch your traffic to another channel. USCG out."
A loud and dramatic sigh into the mic. At this point, I'm laughing so hard that I can't steer my boat; he's less than a mile ahead of me, but I can't see him.
"Okay," the Jeanneau dude says. "Fine. I'll ask her. Or I'll do it myself maybe. We're going to come in for a port side tie up. I just hope someone is there to help catch my lines..."
"This is the United States Coast Guard..."
Bare in mind, this is a husband and wife who called themselves experienced sailors. Somehow, they'd made it from Rhode Island to Florida and back to North Carolina. Amazing. I wonder what would happen if something went wrong aboard their boat.
Okay. Back to that old boat of mine...
I was working on the Cape Dory rather obsessively, as I do, and each day neighbor Jack would stop while on his afternoon walks. He'd linger and talk about the cabinets he was building, or how the helical incline of a screw compares to that of DNA (maybe?), or something about black holes and the orbital parameters of a telescope, or the parabolic nature of the stress-induced sweat molecules that were spurting from my head, or how he'd once cut a board 1/64th of an inch too short, but I was too busy and frazzled by the scope of my project to chat, and 1/64th of an inch sounded great to me while facing a 25' sailboat that should be the little spoon in a snuggle session with a dumpster.
Then, he began to offer help.
I declined. Over and over.
Until one day, with my back was against the wall, I said yes, damnit, I need help. And lots of it.
And Jack helped. And helped...
That was a long time ago. I never launched the Cape Dory, and I finally sold it to some scoundrels from New Hampshire who strong-armed me on the price while refusing to listen to what I had to say about the condition of the boat. I had, in fact, drilled a hole in the hull 2 days before they arrived in order to drain a hundred or so gallons of water out of her. I'd filled the hole with epoxy and fiberglassed it over.... But they were so busy being pushy about money that they didn't realize I'd have given them the thing just to be rid of it. Sometime later, my father told me that they'd ripped my grandfather off on a carpentry job. I believe that's the parabolic nature of ripping people off.
Now, three sailboats, a dozen or more years, and many big lunches and UCONN women's basketball games later, Jack and I are pretty tight (and no, he wasn't CIA, I don't think. Muscle for the Dead, probably.). I cut trees down for him, that stuff, and he does ridiculous amounts of woodwork to help me on my path toward whatever it is I'm slowly moving toward. And it's not just me; he helps a good many people around our little village, and told me recently that he saw his role as just that: being there to help others.
You don't hear that shit often. My friend Donna is probably the only other person I've heard say anything of the sort. She's also fond of saying, "It takes a community to raise a Keller."
Which is no joke.
So to follow the helix down: Last fall I showed up at Jack's workshop with a truckload of Polaris Jack parts and a heap of IOU's written on bar napkins. The boomkin and rudder cheeks were both crusted with forty years' worth of paint, oceanic crud, and South Carolina detritus, and so the old wood didn't fit very well alongside his cherry and tiger maple, but I reasoned that the mess would only help motivate him.
He eyeballed the boomkin and declared it a goner, which I knew, then muttered his classic line: "I suppose you're going to want a new..."
I didn't answer. Like a dog staring at a steak, words are redundant.
So we pulled the bronze brackets and the stainless hardware off of the boomkin, and chatted about a new one. I had some hackamatack (aka eastern tamarack or larch) at my house, and mentioned that as an option. Douglas-fir wood be nice as well... if we were in Montana.
Jack didn't want to mess with my scrappy hackamatack, so we decided on white oak for both the boomkin and the rudder cheeks--it'd be strong as could be and rot resistant.
Once Jack dismissed me so that he could make his sketches and think in peace without my flippant jokes, I returned to the boat to begin cutting the water tank out of her. The tank was original, and installed under the cabin sole (floor) when they were building the boat, so it was entirely inaccessible. As the much-told story goes, back when they were building these early-ish fiberglass boats, nobody knew that the hulls would last forever (save for that Cape Dory)--but the rest of the boat would not. Kind of like today's plastic bottles--what's inside gets gone but the shell lasts forever.
Hence the boat rebuilds.
Polaris Jack's water tank was a 35 gallon aluminum coffin that was corroded inside and out; totally unfit for drinking water. To remove it, I needed to cut the interior of the boat apart.
I began by trying to cut the teak sole, or floor, out in a single piece; when that didn't work, I thought I could remove the teak in several pieces in order to repurpose the beautiful wood. Still no luck; the teak was glued down to a plywood subfloor with some mega-glue (resorcinol, I believe) that was stronger than the wood fiber itself, so as I tried to remove the teak everything broke and splintered. Once I'd chewed my way through that, I could see that the plywood subfloor was fiberglassed to the hull and screwed to wood stringers that ran perpendicular to the center line of the hull in the same manner as a floor joist in a house.
I then cut the plywood subfloor out in sections. Scroll through the pics below to see the process.
As I've said in the past--and as anyone who has remodeled a house knows--this degree of destruction can be overwhelming and even disheartening. So while all of this ripping and breaking and smashing was happening, I found consolation in stopping in at Jack's shop to chitchat and eye the beautiful parts that would one day go back on the boat. And sometimes get a pretty good sandwich.
I waited until the boat was in the shop to fully remove the tank, and once it was inside, I didn't want to mess with draining the 15 gallons or so of water that I'd neglected to pump out when I had the chance, so I had to hoist the tank out with all of that extra wait aboard. My friend Tim, who usually helps with this type of lifting, was probably sunbathing and sucking on smoothies in Long Beach. Or, alternatively, safely flying hundreds of people around the country in a big airplane.
The last picture in the series shows the rope I used to pull the tank up and out, and the stringers I set to hold it halfway up.
But I didn't have it too bad. At the dock in Portland where I lived years earlier, I knew a guy named Maury who had a cabin cruiser he lived aboard. He had shag carpets, red lighting, and a huge cat that he was apt to snuggle with late at night, bare chested for every passer-by to see. He lucked into a big Hatteras trawler that had caught fire, and bought it super cheap in order to convert into a live-aboard. A houseboat of sorts.
Maury had the trawler hauled-out just down the road at Portland Yacht Services (I think), which isn't cheap, so he had to work fast to do what needed to be done and get the boat back in the water. It was mid-winter, and bitter, bitter cold. He was stripping the boat of the fire damage. Down there too was the holding tank for the head (i.e. the septic tank). It hadn't been emptied in who-knows-how long, and it was very big. It was made of fiberglass. So Maury, the shag carpet cat snuggler, pointed a big salamander heater at it to thaw the frozen loaf, and then he cut the top of the tank off with a skillsaw. He then ladled buckets-full out, carried them up the ship ladder to deck, out the door, down the length of the 50-plus feet of boat, and poured the contents into a dumpster, where it quickly froze. Up and down, ladling shit in buckets in zero degree weather, blasting the Little Drummer Boy on repeat the entire time.
I didn't have it so bad with 15 gallons of water.
And Maury actually made that boat into a beautiful live-aboard. There's a lesson in there somewhere.
So there's that. Soon, the boat will begin going back together, and there will be lots more of Jack's handy-work to showcase (hopefully).