Reassurance springs from long hands-on experience
Issue 55 : Jul/Aug 2007
After working on our cruiser-in-progress for two months shy of six years, I’m just about done. I don’t think I’m boasting my way to a jinx when I say that I know every inch of her now. During post-workday, cocktail-hour relaxing, one of the first talking points my wife and I come to in the list of benefits accruing to those who, like me, drip our own sweat, blood, unrealized income, and hours off life’s clock onto the decks of our own boats is that when we get out to St. Somewhere, we’ve got The Right Stuff when it comes to fixing something that isn’t going nearly as smoothly as the evening’s drinking.
To me, though, standing way on the other side of Omygod Day (March the something, 2000), the primary advantage to having crawled my way, cursing and grunting, of course, into all the impossibly dark non-corners and recesses of my vessel is psychological. And the most important part of my boat for me to learn intimately was her bottom. Why? Sometimes my imagination is not my friend. The scariest thing that can happen to a boat is to sink, and the way most boats sink is from leaking. Potentially catastrophic leaks come in from the water the boat’s sailing in and work their way from the floorboards up the graduated terror scale ’til they get to the mark that says, “You must be this tall to ride.”
The first few times we took Miss Bohicket out for a taut-gut, tight-lipped, out-and-back sail, she was a great big old mystery containing some vague number of potential ingress points, through which water could, unseen, fill up some other vague number of unknown nether regions, until the bilge boards were awash and whatever general buzz we had at being underway would flip in a flash to general panic at soon being underwater.
Familiar territory
While doing this-and-that over the next six years of bullet-list upgrades and re-do’s, though, what was under those bilge boards turned into familiar territory — grungy gray-painted space by grime-speckled water hose, each annoying little fiberglass cut accompanied by an annoying little muscle crick. In the process I learned her bottom. I learned what was attached to what, and where, and how sturdily. I scrubbed away decades of grime and slime to reveal the thick, green, solid roving-and-resin that separated my dry bunk cushions and box of cereal from fathoms of cold, salty, dark ocean. I hewed out old gate valves and put in textbook-endorsed seacocks and backing pads so that every place where we voluntarily let sea water in was a place for which I was solely responsible (and for which my herniated disk had gotten just a little bit worse).
I put a laughably enormous socket wrench (normally used for tightening floating piers) on the keel bolts to test their tenacity. I dug out waterlogged and muddy gobs of foam from bilge floors and packed in epoxy and shredded fiberglass. I’ve crammed parts of my 6-foot, 200-pound self into places that haven’t seen sunlight since long-haired Pearson factory clock-punchers dropped liner into hull the same year “Margaritaville” went to number one. (I was 9 — Elvis died that year.)
And then of course we hauled her out — twice — and I ran my eyes and hands over the outside of her bottom too, concentrating again on potential ingress points. When I saw or touched anything that gave me pause, I loaded a tube of 3M 5200 or mixed up a tub of epoxy. I gripped and shook the rudder and prop shaft. Once satisfied that what I saw on the jack stands was going to do just fine at keeping the water on the outside from getting to the inside, I could relax a little, walk around slowly, and muse on the shapes of her bottom.
Unfinished surfaces
The inside of her bottom is like backstage . . . all function: plumbing, wires, unfinished surfaces, and scummy bilge water. But the outside of her bottom is where she’s most a boat . . . where she touches the water she’s designed to move on and through. All is rounded, streamlined, uninterrupted flow. Hull shape, keel shape, skeg, and rudder reach a meeting point of strength and speed that gives me confidence she can handle the wrestle-dance of push and pull, thrust and friction, of a keelboat moving through big water.
When we sail her now, I don’t think of her as all that big, and I certainly don’t think of her as mysterious. Perhaps what’s most important is that I don’t think of her as some held-together contraption at the mercy of rolling tons of Atlantic and whistling winds. I know for a fact she’s a tight unified structure built the way a boat needs to be built; she may have been put together from parts, but finally she is one thing. And if that bilge alarm ever does start screeching and those floorboards ever do start floating up off their appointed places, my racing brain will know exactly what my wide eyes will be looking at while my desperate hands grip that flashlight. I’ll have the picture I need already in my brain to guide my path to salvation, even if it is the middle of the night and the ocean is in motion. And that makes every daysail that much easier to enjoy . . . that and the contemplation of heading out into the big blue.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
