It’s a springtime rite in a boatyard
Issue 102 : May/Jun 2015
It begins slowly. Just a rustling of loosened winter covers and the occasional soft thump as hatches open and close. It’s not that the boatyard was ever completely deserted during the winter (see “Boatyard Ghosts,” November 2013), but traffic starts to pick up once the snow and ice are no longer underfoot.
The trigger is traction. All through the northern states’ winter, climbing a ladder into a cockpit was an express ticket to the emergency room. You get about halfway up and the ladder’s feet skate out from under you on the ice. Better to stay home. But as soon as the ground is ice-free and ladders can hold, people show up by ones and twos to assess how well their sailing machines weathered the months of cold and darkness. You can guess at what they find just by listening to the noises they make. Then they start making other noises. Work noises.
Think of it as the start of a symphony: a tone here, a touch of percussion there, building and swelling. But the music analogy falls apart in a hurry. The fact is, a boatyard in springtime seethes with sanders, buffers, and other power tools. It sounds more like a demented bagpipe garage band. Even so, this is the happy time in boatyards.
People who have been marooned on land all winter are shedding their cocoons of gloves and bulky overcoats. They stretch out and feel sunlight warming them for the first time in months. Watch long enough and you might catch one of them spreading his arms out to greet the sun the way a cormorant dries its wings. Then, of course, he’ll fold up into himself again, with a sidelong glance for reassurance that no one was watching. Some stand on deck, nostrils raised ever so slightly to catch the smell of spring as it drifts up on the southern breeze, and they allow themselves a smile. Their long and sometimes impatient endurance of winter is ending. With a little work (or maybe a lot), all the rewards of the sailing season will be theirs. At what other time of the year can we expect our efforts to be so reliably rewarded? Who cares if heat and humidity are on the way? On a reach, you hardly feel them at all. What matter that the land is about to be overrun with mosquitoes and every other kind of noxious insect? A thousand yards out into Buzzards Bay or Lake Michigan, you won’t have to deal with them.
Oh, sure . . . there’s a good deal of muttering and grousing about how much trouble it all is. Washing. Scraping. Sanding. Buffing. It’s work. But Kenneth Grahame was on to something when he penned that famous line: “There is nothing . . . absolutely nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”
Even New Englanders, famous for their mild aversion to human interaction, are practically bubbling with the prospect of getting the Old Girl back into the water where she belongs. Ask a tight-lipped Yankee what he’s working on today and there’s a good chance the whole season’s hopes and plans will come tumbling out of him like birthday candy from a Mexican piñata. All the men and women are here because they want to be — because they like it. Most of them will even admit it.
The hard-core racers are here, wet-sanding their bottom paint to glasslike smoothness. The casual weekenders are sweeping and scrubbing. Contractors are stripping away Shrink Wrap and hauling it off to recycling stations. Purists are laying down seven coats of spar varnish on any wood exposed to sky. Engines are coughing to life. And everywhere around the yard are heard variations on the same question: “What’s your launch date?” “When are you going in?” “When do you splash?”
It’s the only question that really matters. When do we get to be sailors again? How long before we can drive a five- or eight-ton boat through head seas, using nothing but the air itself as propellant? When can we crowd the starting line, counting down the seconds for the gun? When can we carry our friends and family to distant harbors, drop the hook in a quiet cove, fire up the grill, and hoist the cocktail burgee?
The answer is what makes springtime the boatyard celebration that it is. The answer is: soon.
Robert Hlady has enjoyed a checkered career as a journalist, lawyer, and stay-at-home dad. He started out as a desert rat but became a passionate sailor later in life. A member of the Beverly Yacht Club in Marion, Massachusetts, he single-hands a 1979 O’Day sloop on Buzzards Bay, races on other people’s boats, and will do just about anything to get out on salt water — including winter maintenance projects.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
