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Seventy years ago I’d be oblivious to what was coming. Now I know too much and what I know sucks. Starting Sunday I started keeping an eye on Hurricane Earl, a category 4 storm that is now forecasted to pass extremely close offshore of Cape Cod. Very close.

The last forecast from the National Weather Service put Cape Cod on a hurricane watch – meteorological speak that it’s time to consider the options and possibilities. With a 33′ sloop sitting on a 500 pound mooring less than half a mile away, I am definitely considering the options and none of them, with 48 hours to go, are great. So this morning I went to the firehouse and asked the chief for some old firehose, grateful when he cut me off a couple sections of 2″ hose so I could split them and wrap them around the mooring pennants where they rub in the boat’s chocks. My son and I brought the boat into the town down and took down the sails and the bimini awning, anything to reduce the windage and prevent the wind from picking open the sails and causing definite mayhem. I’ll return tomorrow to lash things down and fret some more.

My options now are:

1. Stay on the mooring, hope the forecast holds, go to bed and pray the mooring holds for eight hours of 50 knot winds and some gusts over 60 miles per hour.  The tackle is only two years old, I’m on the outside edge of the mooring field, and right now the wind direction is out of the north, over land, so I will get some protection in the lee, but not a lot. The worst direction, if we were in the northeastern quadrant of the cyclone, would be south or southeast, then the entire length or fetch of the harbor would kick up some very big waves.  The other fear is the storm surge, but thankfully low tide is at 2 am, so the peak of the winds will come as the water is falling, not rising.
2. Stay on the mooring but also stay on the boat. This means actually sitting out the storm with a lifeline wrapped around me, tied to the helm, with a pair of swim goggles to keep the driving rain from blinding me, and then using the diesel and the throttle to keep the boat into the wind and the pressure off of the mooring. This is the crazy man option.
3. Try to get it pulled tomorrow morning, but that is not a sure thing — the hauler has to be in the mood and he is sure to have an extremely hectic day. That entails a trip to the dock, a visit by the crane truck to pull the mast, then a trip up into Prince’s Cove to be hauled and then parked in the back yard by the trees on four jackstands. Hurricane Bob in 1991 did some massive tree damage and who knows if the jackstands would keep the boat upright anyway. Hauling means no fall sailing – once out, then the boat is out and the season is over.
4. If it comes ashore — well, it comes ashore and the damage will be bad. Nothing to do but shrug and hope it doesn’t.

I’ve got a 18′ motorboat to pull — that will come out right at the last minute on Friday afternoon. A friend needs to borrow it to get his catboat tucked away into a hurricane hole inside of Shoestring Bay on the west side of town in the next series of bays. To make things more interesting I just became president of the association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, and tomorrow is going to be spent making sure the yacht club’s launches are taken care, of the dock is pulled, the kid’s boats are stowed, and then 50 Cotuit skiffs hauled and stored in the Ropes Field to ride things out.  Hurricane boat pulls are the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising. Several cars with trailers, a couple crews on the beach to de-rig and pull masts, another team on the water in motorboats hauling in the boats, then another crew with 4″ x 4″s to lift the boats on the trailers and another in the field to lift them off. Tomorrow ought to be busy, especially if this heavy heat persists.

The phone has been ringing all day, and everywhere you go the question is the same: “Do you think it will hit?” Smart money says it goes east off of Chatham, putting us in the northwest quadrant where the counter-clockwise spin means the winds will come in from the landside.  Forecast has it 30 miles southeast of Nantucket . That’s 50 miles from where I sit. Way too close. Way, way too close. Let’s hope it stays out there. A short jog to the west and complete devasation is a sure thing if it comes ashore. Bob was barely a hurricane and we were without lights for nearly a week, the tree damage was incredible, every pissed off homeless yellow jacket on the Cape was out for revenge …. and nearly every boat in the harbor was trashed and thrown onto the beach. If Earl does the same it will not be a very good September. All the food will spoil. People will snarl at each other in the gas lines at the gas station. I guess i need to go buy a chainsaw and a new power washer. The first lesson learned from Bob is wash the house as soon as possible given that every green leaf in the neighborhood gets shredded to confetti and pasted to the paint with salt spray. Lawn furniture to stow away … badminton nets, hummingbird feeders ….. tomorrow is going to be a long, long day.

Here’s the wind profile: The little flags point in the direction the wind will come from and the small bars indicate the wind velocity. Sustained winds over 70 mph make for a hurricane. The forecast has us gusting with peaks around 65 mph. Sunset to 3 am … it’s going to be a long nasty night. And if the power goes — well, no blogging for a long time to say the least.

Think I’m over-reacting? Napatree Point – 1938

Vern Graebel, the founder of my ISP, Cape.com, was walking down the hill to Ropes Beach after a Cotuit Kettleer’s baseball game a few weeks ago. I caught up to him and we started talking about sailing and a particularly great spot to spend the night, Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island, the largest of the Elizabeths. I shared my fear of anchoring there and dragging during the night and how anchor-dragging-paranoia made it tough for me to get a good night’s sleep aboard the sloop.

“There’s an app for that,” Vern said, drawing his Motorola Droid out of his pocket. And indeed there was, “Anchor Alert” — an cool little $15 app that uses the GPS receiver in the smartphone to determine one’s position. You anchor, pay out so many feet of chain and line, determine the length of scope of that, and tell Anchor Alert which then draws a series of concentric circles with your “anchor” in the middle and an icon of your boat out the specified length from the mooring point. Using the GPS’s  accuracy rating, the program waits until you move N feet away from the radius of the circle formed by your anchor and boat. Slip 30 feet and you receive an alarm (or a SMS if you aren’t aboard).

I use my HTC EVO for a few other nautical tasks. I may need to invest in a decent waterproof case (I use a kayak bag to keep it dry now), and the battery life with the GPS enabled is pretty sucky. But …. it is amazingly useful for some essential tasks.

• Tides: I use “TideApp” to give me the times for high and lower water at any of the dozen locations I sail to. It also gives me essential data about the ebb and flow times of the current, an essential aid in navigation for determining the offset of one’s course caused by the lateral forces of the moving water.
• Chart Plotter: Okay, so it isn’t a $3000 binnacle mounted Garmin chart plotter with integrated radar — that has to wait for more flush financial times, but the Navionics USAEast chart pack is awesome for giving me an accurate and detailed fix on a valid NOAA nautical chart. This is a little expensive at around $15, but it is great to have a precise fix when I need it on the water. I use it sporadically because of the battery draw down, but suppose I could rig some 12v car adapter sort of rig to keep it going 100% of the time. Again — smartphones and the cockpit of a sloop in Nantucket Sound are not a felicitous combination, keeping the thing dry is a constant worry.
• Google Sky: “Give me a tall ship and star to steer her by …” It’s been years since I’ve taken a noon shot with a sextant (something I might brush back up on this winter), but knowing the stars while at sea is always good fun and Google’s star map is awesome to play with.

Any sailors out there have other apps to recommend?

If you own a sailboat sooner or later you’re going to have to get to the top of the mast to deal with some mistake or repair. Lost halyards, flaky anemometer connections, jammed genoa tracks or a bad roller reefing system — you look up, mouth agog, and curse the fact that someone, most likely you, is going to have to go aloft.

In the days I raced with my father on our Wianno Senior, the Snafu III (#140), his rule for going aloft was quite simple and brutal. If you lost the halyard (usually accomplished by forgetting to clip it to the head of the spinnaker and then wildly hauling the loose end to the top of the mast) theny you were the one who went up after it. Climbing a spruce mast by “shinning up” while underway in a three foot confused Nantucket Sound chop ranks among the more unpleasant things I’ve ever done, especially for me, the Cub Scout who had to have his fingers pried off the stairs to the fire watcher’s tower in Georgetown, Massachusetts in 1968. I am terrified of heights, it is, with no doubt, the single biggest phobia I have. I get freaked out watching people on window ledges in the movies, let alone experiencing vertiginous terror for real.

I’ve been hauled up a mast by making an impromptu Bosun’s Chair out of a bowline on a bight and stepping into the two rings. The resulting choke hold on my nether regions was amazingly unpleasant, and the feeling of being winched up the mast by a person on the deck is pretty terrifying. If they mess up and slip then down you. Crashing 20, 40 feet down onto a winch or worse. Going aloft is serious business. Consider what it was like in the days of sail to go aloft in the ratlines and climb out on the end of a yard arm to take in sail in a serious sea.  A simple ride up a mast is a breeze compared to what those jack tar’s went through in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Serious off shore voyagers like the late Bernard Moitessier install permanent mast rungs on their mast — think of backwards “7′s” bolted to the mast. This is very utilitarian and guarantees a fast run up the spar, especially underway, but I’m not inclined to drill out and through-rivet a series of such a solution on my 51′ tall Kenyon aluminum mast.

The solution? A real bosun’s chair. A $200 expense (I am not inclined to skimp just as I wouldn’t shop for a discount parachute) that gives me some firm support under the butt, a tool bag, and some certified hardware s the worst won’t happen while I’m aloft.  I’ll probably go with the Harken Bosun’s Chair, based on the video posted on YouTube by West Marine.

And I don’t intend to use it. That’s what teenaged sons are are for.

Back from Venice and I felt the urge to get aquatic asap. So John Peck from Peck’s Boats arrived at 7:30 am and took away the boat on his trailer for a launch at the ramp at Prince’s Cove. I took the motorboat for insurance, in case the Yanmar wouldn’t start and it needed a tow back to Cotuit.

No problem. John bled the fuel system and after ten minutes of messing around I was backing out of the slip and cruising, sans mast, back to the Cotuit town down where another guy helped me step the mast and re-rig the yacht. Afternoon cruise around Grand Island with a six-pack of Sierra Nevada and all is well with the world.

John has some very cool trailer/winch set ups. The man is a hydraulic genius. He used to stuff my 25′ Wianno Senior into a two-bay garage every year.

As the grandson of a boat builder and the great-great-grandson of a whaling captain, boats sort of go with the territory around here and verge towards a sort of floating genetic disorder that can’t be helped. With the spring peepers peeping in their vernal pools and the ospreys circling the harbor, it’s time to get ready for the season ahead.

A couple weeks ago I played hooky one morning and did the most important errand of the year — the annual renewal of the mooring permits. If I miss the March 31 deadline the mooring is lost forever. These things are arguably the single most valuable part of a Cape Cod maritime lifestyle. No mooring. No boat. Or at least, no easy boat, just a lifetime of trailers and boat ramps. Twas not always this way. Prior to the great landrush of the 1970s the locals just tossed in a mushroom anchor with a length of chain and spliced rope and buoy and that was that. Then the tragedy of the commons occurred and the regulators stepped in. I nailed three moorings. One for the motorboat, one for the sailboat, and one for the skiff.

That’s just the beginning of the ordeal. A couple weekends ago I climbed onto the big boat with a box of razor blades and cut off the white boat condom. This was like opening King Tut’s tomb. I left the hatches open for the winter air to circulate through the bilge and cabin and keep the stench of mildew down. All was well. No water in the keel well. Batteries were run down. So I hooked up a trickle charger and started the process of bringing the thing back to life.

Oh the length of the to-do list for a fleet of boats. The motorboat needs a new registration, the engine is idling weird, the steering is tight and binding. The skeg of the dinghy needs to be re-epoxied and the transom is delaminating. A block of ice trashed the stern of my scull, the Empacher and that means peeling off the deck and getting inside with some Fiberglas and resin and then going through the tedious act of filling in the gel coat on the outside of the hull. Rigging needs replacing. Winches need to be broken down, repacked and greased. Do I want to drop a few thousand on a GPS chart plotter mounted on the binnacle? Do I really need that nice Edson destroyer wheel on the motorboat? (I bought a stainless steel knock off and all is well).

Bottom paint, that great toxic mess that I’ve breathed in and out for forty years, accounting no doubt for my short term memory issues and onery children, is now easily $100 a gallon and rising. Out come the rollers. The Tyvek painters suit. My son get deputized and winds up getting so much blue on him that my other son observes that he looks like he has had carnal knowledge with a Smurf.

The dogs get paint on them. The shell driveway gets paint on it. Paint on the iPod dock. Paint everywhere.

Hands stink of paint thinner.  Making a roast chicken and realizing as it is eaten that the dominant spice is not thyme but ablative bottom paint and thinner. Going into business meetings on Monday with green fingers is a very professional statement. Trashing every pair of pants I own with two part epoxy and gel coat repair goo means I look perpetually trashed.

Then there are matters mechanical. A decade of use on the old Honda four-stroke and its multiple trips to the local mechanic who shakes his head and advises me “that engine doesn’t owe you anything, time for another.” Well another costs $7,000 and I’d rather invest that in other things: like mortgages and taxes. So back the old Honda goes for another round of organ transplants and resuscitation.  If it was a human there would be picketers standing around it urging me and the mechanic to pull the plug.

Aside from the mechanics, I do most of the work myself. Boat yards are evil expensive, so when it comes time to  change propeller shaft anodes, repack stuffing boxes, sand and varnish rub rails — I do it and I don’t mind it. I fire up the Grundig YachtBoy radio, tune into a Sox pre-season game, and listen to Joe Castiglione call a game that doesn’t matter far away in Fort Myers. Son comes out and wants to listen to his weird electronic trance music. We bicker. I feel old……

Dinghy needs a new rub rail and the transom is delaminating. Need clamps. Need WEST epoxy. Need new NiCADS for the cordless drill. Weekends are an endless round of trips to the hardware store, marine supply, mechanic and PC for yet another Amazon order…..

But it’s spring and I am back in the water. The rowing machine is about to fall silent and the scull will live again. The motorboat is back on its mooring, bobbing off of the landing, and the big sloop awaits the completion of the town dock project so the riggers can drop the mast into the step and send me on my way.

Now to find that sail cover and get it to the local canvas guy …..

Saturday and the sun was beaming down and melting the grey snowdrifts. The boat looked lonely. I put the battery on a charger, emptied last season’s remaining gasoline into a jerry can, and refilled the tank with three gallons of new gas and a shot of ethanol treatment.

Backed up to the trailer, connected the hitch, and 500 yards later was backing down a snow covered ramp into Cotuit Bay. I pushed off with an oar, anchored in deeper water, and for three minutes coaxed the dormant Honda back to life with the choke and throttle. When I was 100 percent sure it wouldn’t fart out when I was in the middle of the harbor I came back into the beach, loaded the two terriers aboard, and took off for Dead Neck, the barrier island at the head of the bay.

As my son said when he declined my offer to accompany me, “You are only doing this so you can say you are the first to do it.”

That was not the motivation. Anyway, there is a simple thrill to doing this in February:

I anchored near Cupid’s Cove, the ancient inlet (now clamming cove) out to Nantucket Sound, careful to keep the boat off the beach so I wouldn’t have to push it off if the tide went out. I offloaded the dogs (who went into immediate mania and starting biting my boots) and satisfied the boat would be there when returned, headed off for a complete circumperambulation of the Island.

I brought a garbage bag and scavenged all the plastic I could find from the wrack line where the moon tides had deposited it.   There was more man-made trash on the inside, bayside of the island, reflective of where the people are in the winter and where the prevailing northerly winds blow from

Around the Point of the island (which received a bit of a trim from the dredge this winter to widen the channel) and down the outside of the beach, flawless and without footprints, just the overwash signs of high tides and winter storms. After a half mile of walking with the wind in the sun I took off my coat. The trash bag was getting full. Halfway down the beach and I popped up on a dune to see if the boat was still where it was supposed to be. It was.

And onwards down to Osterville and the Wianno Cut, where the dredged spoils from the Cotuit end of the island were pumped to shore up the dwindling beach in front of Bunny Mellon’s house.

Without some beachgrass that too will wash away, thanks to the jetties built 100 years ago that now block the natural ebb and flow of the coastal sands.  I sat down for a second, patted the dogs on the head, and then headed back towards the boat.

The dogs and I crossed the island at Cupid’s Cove, where some ice still lingered, and with our bag of trash made it back to the boat. Which was now riding at anchor in much deeper water than I left it. The solutions were:

a. undress , wade out, start boat, return to beach and get dressed again

b. take off boots and socks and attempt to roll jeans up above knees

c. just wade out, flood the boots, and climb aboard and then cruise back home at warp speed before hypothermia set in

I opted for plan C and soaked my self right up to the belt line. flopped into the boat, emptying the seawater out of the boots and onto my face. I was very happy to be the only person on the water at this point as an audience would not have been appreciated.

I phoned home, told my son to meet me at the ramp with the trailer, and fifteen minutes was back home in the shower.

So ended a good beach walk and motorboat ride in February.

Taking advantage of the last clement temperatures of the fall, I sacrificed my lunch hour to the wrapping and decommissioning of my sailboat for the winter ahead.  This is my first “considerable” piece of Fiberglas, and it hulks, ominous and white, in the nook between the old tin garages, propped up by four stands, a big block of wood beneath its keel. The plastic came in a big hernia-inducing roll, and was melted onto the boat with a heat gun that roared like a horror movie sound effect. The tactile pleasures of ironing out wrinkles with a jet of blue propane is up there with the fun of popping bubble wrap until you remember that bubble wrap doesn’t melt and stick to your skin like magma.

My buddies Jim and Bruce did the hard work, changing the oil in the diesel Yanmar engine and flushing the water system with pink non-toxic antifreeze. All hatches are opened, all drawers, doors, companionways, lazarettes and bilges have been exposed to the dessicating winter air and now it sits, drum-like and pulsing in the gusts of wind, a white plastic reminder that the days are about to get longer and I will be afloat in five months or so.

I found this time-lapse video on gCaptain.com, one of my favorite nautical blogs. This was made by a Houston Ship Channel pilot, Lou Vest (who is an amazing photographer) by setting a Nikon D300 to take a photo every six-seconds.

The cliche of a ship’s captain being the last to step off the slanted, sinking deck into the lifeboats; the person who “goes down with the ship.”  The stand-tall, imperious embodiment of leadership personified. Remember Captain Sullenberger walking the flooded aisle of his Airbus as it sank gently into the January Hudson? Checking twice for straggler passengers?

Now in the Gulf of Aden we have Massachusetts Maritime Academy graduate, Captain Richard Phillips of Underhill, Vermont selflessly offering himself to a band of Somali pirates so the crew of the Maersk Alabama could go free.

A family member told the Cape Cod Times:

“”What I understand is that he offered himself as the hostage,” she said. “That is what he would do. It’s just who he is and his response as a captain.”

Imagine the scene as the desperate pirates sit in a lifeboat, out of gas, floating listlessly in water and this arrives, the U.S.S. Bainbridge?

Break out the Depends.

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 1/8^th 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
• Tying the Turk’s Head: where I try to reproduce the art of rope jewelry but fail.

   

Next I’ll take a look at my ditty bag – a knot-tyer’s “toolbox”

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:

1. The gang drinks beer and tells stories in between boats.
2. Tools from my ditty bag are borrowed and dropped in the water
3. The trailer tire goes flat and a can of a Flat-Fix gunk needs to be located
4. The stem on the trailer tire rips off and the flat fixer is coated with white Flat-Fix gunk
5. Another trailer is found
6. More beer is drunk
7. People who don’t know how to back up a trailer are allowed to back up the trailer
8. 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.

So ends a summer Saturday.

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.

 

 

The Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation

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 in Bristol, 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.

(photos by the late Leonard R. Greene)

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).

The yacht club pulled its dock and racing buoys out of the water on Labor Day weekend, but a good fleet of skiffs remains in the cove, ready to sail if the urge hits on an Indian Summer day. We raced Saturday and Sunday morning( and will try to do it again next weekend) very informal affairs with my son running the motorboat, Chris Jackson whistling the starting times, and  moorings and channel cans standing in as turning marks.

Saturday was very windy, so we reefed — or shortened sail — and I had my step-sister from Beijing crewing for me. We finished in the middle of the ten boat fleet in the first race, and came in fat last in the second race because she urged me too close to the line and so I was over early and fouled another boat in the process, forcing me to perform the dreaded 720 maneuver (two consecutive circles) which is very, very hard and dangerous on a windy day.

Photo by Charles Lowell
Afterwards we met for chowder and beer on the bluff with agreement to return again on Sunday for another two races.

Once again Fisher was the race committee, but the wind was much lighter and everyone sailed without crew, expanding the fleet to 13 boats which was just enough to make it competitive and interesting.

In the first race I nailed the start and sailed to the left of the course, catching a very nice breeze, enough to round the first windward mark in first place, and again around the second reaching mark a comfortable six boat lengths ahead of the fleet. Alas, fat man and light wind conspired to throw the anchor over the stern and I finished that race in the middle of the fleet in sixth place.

The second race … let’s not go there. The abbreviation on the results sheet says it all: DFL. Dead Fat Last.

We’ll try again next weekend, and perhaps the weekend after that. Life is quiet here now, no one is around, Main Street goes minutes without a passing car, and everything from the flower gardens to the crickets seem to know fall is coming. I need to go dig up a perennial bed and level some footings for the chicken coop. Whereabouts this week:

Cotuit – 9.10

Cotuit-North Carolina – 9.11 (this is a bad day for me, for everyone for that matter, but I will try to not think about it as I fly out of Boston)
North Carolina – 9.11 to 9.14

Cotuit 9.15-16

I returned from Virginia to find a long box on the dining room table with a pair of new spruce Shaw & Tenney oars to replace the faithful, but fast fading crap basswood oars that have served me for the last six or so years.

Shaw & Tenney is an ancient company in Orono, Maine that makes very nice (and expensive) oars and paddles. I ordered my pair back in June, and finally, with summer on the wane, they arrived. After placing dead fat last in the morning skiff race, I opted out of the second punishment, came home, and sat down on the back deck with my ditty bag to get some leather onto my new blades.

Chafing is the enemy of the sailor, and a lot of seamanship is devoted to cutting down on friction. A frayed line, a chafed sail, or a worn spar can mean disaster at the wrong time and in the wrong conditions, so one does what they can to keep a boat from rubbing itself apart. Leather is a staple of any ditty bag, generally high quality tanned stuff for applying to spars where they rub against other spars. Boom crutches and gaff jaws are two places where some well applied leather will protect the brightwork (varnish), but nowhere is it more useful (and good looking) than on the looms of a nice pair of oars.

I have collars and buttons on my old oars, but I tacked the leather in place with bronze brads — a bad but quick way to get the leather on and the method preferred by my grandfather on his ash oars. Bronze looks good when it corrodes green with verdigris, but one is putting two rows of small holes into the oar which will eventually let water in and cause the oar to swell, split, and fail. So I decided to put my collars and buttons on the old school way — with needle and thread, and for an hour today put my ditty bag to good work. Paul Gartside, a boat builder in British Columbia, has excellent instructions on how to do this.
First, I took a leather collar kit and marked the leather around the shaft, centering the leather about 24 inches from the end of the grips. Shaw & Tenney recommends 20 inches, but I like to have my oar handles close together, so I move the collars out.

I marked the circumference of the oars on the rough side of the leather and cut it with a single-edged razor blade using a steel ruler as a straight edge. Then, with the ruler as a quide, I marked twenty points 3/8ths of a inch apart on each edge, and popped them through with a hammer and nail over a piece of scrap wood (an awl also works well). The holes don’t need to be particularly large, just punctures to guide the needle.

I lace with a six-foot piece of dacron sail thread thoroughly waxed with beeswax. I use two egg-eye needles — stout and blunt tipped on each end of the thread. Some experts call for shorter thread for ease of use, but I go with a long piece so I can have one continuous piece. I laced these leathers on by putting the oar across my lap, and had my sailor’s palm on my right hand to help drive the needles through. The stitch is easy — essentially the same pattern as a shoelace.

I start with a few passes on the top edge, pulling the dacron very tight to bring the two edges of the leather together. I cut the leather about 3/16ths short in the expectation that the lacing will bring it together super-tight around the loom of the oar.

I run the thread up and back, and wind up with this:

I finish it off with a Turk’s head over the button, and with some care, these oars should last at least ten years.