Can you call it sailing when you’re not leaving the dock and the work list?
Issue 129: Nov/Dec 2019
Seaview, Washington. For about half the year, half the time it’s raining and blowing, the other half it’s about to rain. North Jetty Pub. Order food outside from a truck, eat it inside. The beer selection, some of which is brewed behind a glass wall near where we sit, is listed on a chalkboard.
Robert, my Portland friend who owns a powerboat, talks about a trip he made recently and the prop he screwed into a Columbia River sandbar nobody knew existed. He doesn’t seem distraught, doesn’t offer many details. He says he enjoyed getting out.
The beer comes. I like high-hopped brew. I report on the progress of my solar panel project. I’d given months to thinking about where to put it. I finally hung it off the transom on a bracket made of .080 stainless tubing and channel, and gorgeous, sturdy, varnished hardwood (batu) cut to follow the curve of the transom railing.
Robert says he wants to meet my woodworker friend, Amos; he’d done fine work refurbishing the hatch cover over the forward berth.
I describe the nice results of another project: adding a portlight, one I designed and had cast in bronze because I couldn’t find a used one in good enough shape. I’d made sure they used good, thick glass. I also threw out the horrid Porta Potti-type toilet, retrieved the Wilcox Crittenden manual model that shipped with the boat in 1975, restored it, reinstalled it, and gave it an automatic feature by creating a tee at the clean-out port and running that to a macerator and holding tank. Now I have a head that is automatic with a manual back-up.
Our hamburgers arrive.
I tell Robert about the nifty new little tray that Amos made me for galley utensils; it fits exactly in a space over the ice locker. Robert doesn’t understand why I’d made it both a paint and a varnish project. The sides were 3⁄8-inch birch ply, so I had to paint them. But the bottom was luan, and what a shame not to varnish such beautiful veneer.
“Have you been out lately?” he asks.
“Well, of course, you know I’m trying to get these upgrades done before the good weather comes.”
Robert knows the weather. He stares at me, deadpan. The tray was a worthy and beautiful idea. The varnish-plus-paint aspect was probably elaborate, I admit. “But it’s a gorgeous detail for the galley,” I say.
Almost under his breath: “Is your hamburger well done enough for you?” He knows I never get my hamburgers done well enough.
Then there’s a long, dead moment between us. I get the message loud and clear.
I have overstayed my welcome with a friend, talking about boat projects as conversation. His response is a larger question: Is the limited Pacific Northwest sailing season an excuse, the truth being that I simply enjoy the boat as a project laboratory?
Perhaps. It seems like lately the focus has been on upgrades, repairs, restorations, rearrangements, and beautifications. Sailing the boat a little to fix it a lot.
We finish our food. Head out into the rain.
John Arrufat, from Portland, Oregon, began writing and sailing in San Pedro, California, in the early 1980s. He’s prepping himself and his Ted Brewer Cape Carib Ketch 33 in Astoria, Oregon.
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