A sewing sailor needs her own pair of pliers
Issue 87 : Nov/Dec 2012
Here’s a little-known fact: any sailor who sews should have a pair of pliers in his or her sail-repair kit. Pliers are just the thing for pulling (and sometimes pushing) a needle through eight or more layers of sailcloth when sewing the batten pockets closed for the season. They’re the only solution when a needle is stuck in several layers of Sunbrella. And they’re perfect for pulling what’s left of a broken pin out of thick fabric. Without a pair of pliers, this operation can be a nasty business.
We have pliers on the boat. I know exactly where they are. I realize it’s redundant (when on board) to have my personal pair in our sail-repair bag since nothing is more than 30 feet away at any time. But, since I sometimes take the sewing project some distance away from the boat to the clubhouse, only to discover that I forgot the blankety-blank things, a pair of pliers is an essential part of the onboard sewing kit. The same goes for the pliers at home. We have a drawer-full of them in Jerry’s basement workshop and a second drawer-full in the garage. Just the same, I want my own set of pliers in our sewing kit at home. You can’t have too many tools, can you?
I’m learning to weave by attending classes at a weavers’ guild, not too far away in Minneapolis. There I learned that delicate little sewing machines have walking feet. Who knew? We bought our Sailrite machine for its ability to sew through anything and for that glorious walking foot. Turns out you need a walking-foot sewing machine when hemming the ends of little projects that come off the loom. When I told the weavers in my class that I have a walking foot on my huge heavy-duty sail-making machine, they looked at me blankly. It is a hunk of a machine, I must admit. It takes two of us to carry it up the stairs. No prissy little sewing machine for me!
But the rest of the world’s citizens really don’t understand the life of the sailor, do they? It’s not that we carry on secret lives somewhere in the underground. Nothing like that. It’s just that our interest in extreme sewing machines and our need for pliers in our sewing kits is totally foreign to them. The differences between Mars and Venus have been overdone lately. Perhaps Mercury and Saturn, then?
All this occurred to me while I was sewing our latest project from hell. I was thinking of it as Jerry’s Folly.
The well-dressed cooler
Since we’re primarily wilderness cruisers, we don’t sail with a cooler full of ice. And since our good old boat is just that, we don’t have a built-in refrigerator or freezer either. She didn’t come with one in 1976 and the skipper, a refrigeration engineer in his other life, didn’t choose to go there on Mystic. We got along very well without ice or refrigeration for nearly 20 years.
Recently, though, a diabetic’s diet has left Jerry with fewer culinary choices. He needs meat and vegetables, and must forego the pasta and rice with which I added interest to the meats and soups we canned in the winter for summer dinners aboard. Two years ago, we bought a little plug-in freezer/refrigerator about large enough to hold a gallon-sized jug of milk. We can choose how cold we want this thing: hard as a rock, somewhere around frozen but not quite rock-solid, or refrigerator temperature. Managing much more than several days’ worth of meat and occasional leftovers is out of the question. What’s worse, it’s a real energy hog, particularly when it’s in its rock-hard mode, so the skipper requested a little tea-cozy-type arrangement for the cooler.
In his concept, the cozy would have 2-inch insulation between two layers of Sunbrella. But since 2-inch foam is difficult to bend around corners, we bought 1-inch foam. I started by making a fairly tight-fitting inner layer in Sunbrella. Then Jerry kludged together two layers of 1-inch foam. My final assignment was to come up with an outer layer that would somehow hold the whole thing together. It wasn’t easy. This project took much longer than we imagined and was a much larger hassle than either had hoped, but we both managed our parts. It’s truly a cooler cover (with an attitude) cum tea cozy. But it works.
I mentioned I’m becoming a weaver these days. Jerry’s next request for me is to weave a privacy curtain for the head compartment in the Mega. But nothing’s square inside a boat, and this curtain must somehow align with the curve of the headliner. I imagine that, when his concept for this project has been fully developed, it is certain to be a privacy curtain with an attitude.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
