Dena Hankins's Blog, page 17

Pointing the boat

To have a destination on a sailing adventure is to not actually understand what it means to live underway.

I think maybe Chuck Berry understood.

I don’t mean to say that having a place you’d like to be isn’t a nice thing to think about.

It’s always nice to have goals.

But once you get underway, you sail the boat!

I (James) have been focused on my new writings, the boat and the Hunter-Gatherer aspects of our aquatic lives and haven’t really been very attuned to the fact that our sailing experiences have been slim this summer because of…

Life’s non-aquatic aspects mostly.

Dena works quite a few miles inland so the fact that we haven’t been doing a lot of sailing this summer has been weighing heavy on her as of late.

But when you’re shipshape and kitty safe…

All you have to do is haul the main, tie the dink to the mooring, toss off the lines and you’re underway!

And let me tell you, we were completely underway. Just like we were crossing an ocean.

Pointing the boat on a broad reach as far down east as that light south-east breeze would take us we made for Manchester By the Sea to survey a southern approach. Why, the fuck, not.

The sailing was perfection there and back. Our speed never rose above our classic daily average of 4.2 knots giving us the thrill we needed to prove, once again, that we are underway. No matter how long we need to stay in any particular geographical area we will always be underway. We tacked at Green Bouy 11 just south-west of Great Misery Island and took the freshening breeze all the way back to Salem with nary a powerboat wake to piss us off.

Another sea story of a no-hyjinx sailing day is worth telling, for sure. If for no other reason than to just be able to relax and enjoy the perfection of it all. That in itself is a rare enough pleasure and worth reflecting upon but the fact that we just pointed our home, S/V S.N. Cetacea, to a place we’d never been before and the Earth’s forces took us there and back safe and full of love and wonder for our natural world made yesterday’s wanderings another truly incredible adventure.

“…with no particular place to go!”(*)

*C. Berry

The summer prodj

I was so jealous of Dena last fall in Boston.

While I was rediscovering how truly shitty the marina industry can be Dena was kill’n-it on the new color scheme.

Well, my turn!

I wanted to continue alternating the the colors all the way up the trunkhouse so the next obvious line was the teak detail strip following the line along the top of the house.

Like all the other teak on the boat it was subjected to chemical abrasives for many years before we adopted her so it was pretty fucked up and far gone.

Better epoxy that shit.

I put two coats of G-Flex all the way around between shitty weather days and wake heavy weekends then wet sanded with 80 grit.

…then I primed,

…and cleaned,

…sanded,

…and cleaned,

…painted,

…and cleaned,

And ultimately got a pretty good coat on there.

The weather really has been a total drag for most of this spring and summer so I’ve got a dynamic that I’ve been working with. It’s a little frustrating because I’m not able to see the kinds of changes I want, as quickly as I’d like. At this point it’s definitely not what I’d call perfect. I have some touch-up work to do and of course some more clean-up, but hey, at least I’m doing the only work I consider worth doing and best of all…

I’m totally not jealous!

 

The Hat Trick

…Is a sportzing term described by the googs as “the achievement of a generally positive feat three times in one game.” for some reason it’s most popular with hockey-sportzers.

But I do love the Cricket-sportzer version, get a load of this mouthful of stupidity, “…the taking of three wickets by the same bowler with successive balls.” AYFKM?! “Successive BALL’S?!”

Anyway,

My version of a summer-power-boater hat trick would be four perfectly aligned storms, one on each of the Summer-Days-Of-Doom…

Memorial Day…

…first day of summer and we get cold gales all frik’n day

Father’s Day…

…dads got their asses handed to ’em all day long!

4th of July…

Sweaters and Turtlenecks, best 4th Evah!

…and Labor Day.

One more to go for that perfect summer hat trick. I’m crossing my fingers.

…I kind of miss it.

So we’re still “living in” Salem, Mass, on the boat, on a mooring and there’s more faded blue hair here every day than I ever saw at the Surrealist Magic Theatre on any given Tuesday at the Weathered Wall (Seattle cir1993).

You really had to be there.

But this place, Salem, this place is fucking cheesy, seriously witchy-cheesy, I mean capes and home-made brooms kind of cheesy, commodifide-religious-murder kind of cheesy. Really fucking cheesy!

But it wasn’t just a little while ago.

It was awesome just a couple of months ago when I was riding my bike in the aforementioned town all by myself right down the middle of the road, in the middle of the day doing 30kph with just a couple of masked Blue-Hairs-with capes scattered here and there for esthetics.

Well, those days are gone my friends. Now there’s 1000’s of them, and they, those cheesy blue-tinted morbid little freaks with bad fashion sense, are all  driving their fucking cars in my town, parking and opening their fucking car doors…On…ME! Every motherfucking day!

There was a time when you could go into a liquor store and they would demand you put a mask on.

And I thought that was funny.

There was this incredible time, last year, when we could sail into a town like Salem Massachusetts, get a 3 lb lobster with all the trimmings and have the whole god-damn restaurant staff genuinely thrilled to see us.

There was this wonderful moment not long ago when I thought Hollywood would die the quick death it deserves.

Nah, not anymore.

Yeah, yeah, I’m happy for you if your businesses are back to thriving or at the very least on the up-swing but…

I miss people waving from across the street to perfect strangers, like us, just to let us know that we’re all okay.

I miss the quiet.

There used to be a time when we could anchor in a perfect little cove and not hear or feel a jetliner landing or taking off.

…not hear or feel the thrumming of a bridge in the middle of the night.

…or a helicopter hovering over a car wreck.

…or a bullet bike out running a cop at 2am.

Yeah, I kind of miss the pandemic.

Loosening Ties

Colloquial sayings stick around because they strike a chord, but the best of them work in multiple situations with multiple meanings. “Don’t shit where you eat” is a saying that’s been on my mind lately.

The 5.5 miles I ride in the morning wake me and get me warmed up for my shipping and receiving job. It’s a lot of big stuff. Crates and skids and 70 pound boxes, LTL truck shipments, and not a boat part among them. I resent paying full price for marine hardware, but it is freeing to tie my bank balance and my life’s most irritating site of coercion to something I don’t love the way I love sailing and living aboard this floating home.

So when I think about not shitting where I eat, I’m not focusing on the traditional “don’t sleep with coworkers” version or any of the other similar interpretations. I’m thinking about making a job of a joy and how absolutely wrong that can go.

James and I have been linking more and more closely with the maritime world since that first time James ran a boat club for the City of Oakland parks department. I got hired at West Marine a couple years after that and then James came aboard at the same store (Honolulu, HI). We’ve both done boat clubs and marine hardware stores and marinas and boat yards on and off since then, and this winter was the last straw.

The stress of living where James worked spiraled out of control over the course of a couple weeks. We left Boston Harbor for Salem Harbor on a cold grey day with a storm looming. Beluga Greyfinger completed his first boat ride moments before the snow buried the fragile cracked ice riming the waters of Pickering Wharf.

I applied for jobs. And rather than thinking in terms of which discounts or perqs we needed, I thought that it was time to do something…anything…other than prop up the broken marina industry or bolster the fucked-up mindset that buying shit is a fundamental part of sailing.

It was only a few weeks into the temp job that I realized I’d found something easy-breezy, something without the heaviness and stakes of running a marina I’m also living at. The flow meters I ship are used in industries I am grateful to and in industries I abhor, but I never have to package my real, vibrant, urgent and frightening and glorious life for sale along with the slip or electronics package.

My 5.5 mile bike ride back to the marina clears my head and helps me reset my give-a-shit meter. Even while telling James the story of my day, the weight and importance of the whole thing recedes behind the molten sunset, the mercurial water, and the loves of my life.

Sprung ’21

The entire year before we sailed away from the west coast of the U.S. in 2006 was spent on the three essentials of sailing beyond the curvature of the Earth. The perfect balance of Mind, Body and Boat.

You absolutely have to get your head in the right place to sail off into the sunset, or rather, you have to lose your mind before you can let go of the addictive chains of society and just sail away.

I’m not saying you have to be insane but conversely I’m not saying you gotta be sane either.

But what you absolutely have to have is a healthy body and a ship shape boat.

Finally, we got a weekend that was calm enough (in the morning at least) to allow us to go aloft in the mooring field. Between the powerful springtime winds and the near constant work boat traffic we’ve been a bit put off. We needed to deal with some “roller fouling” issues and bend the headsails to the foils before we could do any sailing! The staysail went up so fast and the new furling line and fair-leads made the staysail rig glide into place. But the yankee headsail would pose some issues.

Just the fact that Dena’s been riding in excess of 60 miles a week and works at moving thousands of pounds a day and I’ve been on a rigid workout routine for months now made it so much easier for us to muscle each other up the mast. We’re both feeling very strong and healthy now-a-days which is good for hoisting human bodies.

The whole reason I brought up the Hawaii trip above was to talk about the roller furling system aboard S/V S.N. Sapien. That was the boat we sailed to Hawaii from San Fransisco.

One of the (manymanymany) reasons we bought S/V S.N. Cetacea as quick as we did was the fact that she had twin Furlex 200s roller furling systems on the bow. It was the exact same system S/V S.N. Sapien had for her single 130% Genoa roller-reefing headsail.

…a system we never had any issues with.

The only problem with this ‘new’ twin Furlex system is the fact that it’s almost exactly the same vintage as the one we had on S/V S.N. Sapien…new cir. 2002, which makes these very intricate pieces of machinery very old in roller furling years.

Which is close to the cat-year equivalent when you add in the ineptitude of most previous owners of sailing vessels.

That’s a twenty year old cat with dickheads for feeders!

Anyway… The extrusion system that holds the sail on the Furlex is a series of locked together aluminum rods that connect via a push-in clip above and below each rod. No one clip supports the entire rig but dog help you if a clip breaks out aloft. Well, that’s exactly what happened and dog did not help, neither did cat.

The top most extrusion piece de-clipped because of a pig-tail cable attachment that was shabbily installed at the head of the yankee headsail before we bought the boat. We removed the pigtail when we first encountered the issue last summer but it didn’t fix the gap in the extrusion. We tried to go aloft on three separate occasions to bring the clip back in place but could never quite get the rig to actually clip together. Which, by the way, is incredibly frustrating 40 feet off the deck in a harness with a bag of tools on your hip. Regardless of the issues, Dena got the track lined up, we hoisted the sail. The upper rig got stuck at the gap, then I went aloft and guided the sail rig the rest of the way aloft. Annoying as fuck but ultimately effective.

Now it works perfectly and looks totally awesome with our newly rebuilt and recovered yankee and saysails aloft. But, let me tell you, we’re not going to trust it to do a long offshore passage that’s for sure.

The way it sits now it could work for years without a single issue as long as we do our regular PM’s routines but that’s the kind of tech that is almost guaranteed to explode in your hands a thousand miles offshore. Exactly the kind of thing you don’t need on your lost and wandering mind while crossing an ocean.

I’m not necessarily saying we’re going to replace the Fulex’s. I like ’em, they work really well especially when shortening sail in a blow but it might be time for a full-scale overhaul when we pull and rebuild the mast in the fall.

Until then we’ll put this system through its paces to find the flaws so we won’t have to stress our (not quite sane) minds when we sail away again.

…soon, very soon!

The Descension of Events

We’re back on a hook, not THE Hook, mind you, but a hook. A hook I might add, I do not trust.

I didn’t build this mushroom anchoring system and I haven’t seen it so all I can do is hope that this (unseen) rig holding us to the bottom of Salem Harbor is somehow capable of keeping our 5,670 kg boat and her crew of three from drifting out to sea.

To be honest with you, I have some trust issues here.

I mean, it only takes one weak link in all the links of a chain to turn my deepest concerns into a harsh reality. I’ve seen how moorings are built and maintained professionally and it sucks, let’s just hope this one isn’t like all the rest.

When Dena scored the gig making grownup money after I got fired from my grownup gig a couple of months ago we decided to avoid the local… er, Officials-of-Concern (OoC) by just paying the fucking money for a seasonal mooring. This way we placate the OoC, have bike parking, a shower and a place to put our dinghy every day. Cool, right?

Right now the wind has been howling through the rig like a mourning mother for almost 72 hours and the chop has been pounding through the nights like a recalcitrant tween on Ritalin …and that’s not easy to say dog-damnit.

Anyway…

The Descension of Events: what is that? I think the first time I heard that phrase I was on a fishing trip with my father off Padre Island, Texas, a million years ago. It was a rented power boat so of course everything that could go wrong went very wrong and it happened in a very logical, although chaotic, way. Not unlike a ballet dancer leaping off stage into a mop bucket and falling down a flight of stairs. It happens because it must.

I won’t bore you with the details of a drunken fishing trip gone wrong. I’ll just say: for example…

So there we were having coffee in the cockpit compliments of Lee Goldenhour and his glorious sunrise.

Afterwords I took Dena ashore in the dink to do her work thing while I went back to the boat to do the daily domestic detail…galley, cat box, cabin sole, ect.

After that I jumped in the dink and headed to shore for a supply/hardware store run.

I knew the wind was supposed to pipe up fresh by the afternoon but, by the time I’d shown up back at the dinghy launch, the entire harbor had a white-cap dressing and the wind was blowing at least 18 knots, steady.

That’s kind of the definition of a small craft advisory and our dink is the very definition of a small craft.

The exit to the marina pinches together with two docks having the same effect as an exit bar with two jetties. It creates a vertical chop during tidal changes, in other words it really sucks twice a day. And it was particularly sucking as I passed through it that day.

Once I got out into the harbor proper the chop was mean but manageable as long as I could deal with getting wet, and I could, so I took the waves as they came. There were a few that were genuinely scary and particularly wet but I didn’t push it and took the waves at an angle so I made a good steady pace all the way back to Cetacea.

I made fast portside aft, hauled my backpack aboard and all was well in the universe.

The little boat was totally full of seawater so I took to bailing. I got about a third of the water out out of the boat when the engine cover got caught in the wind and took off.

Now, I don’t mean the expensive and essential factory, hard plastic, cover. I mean this weird little white soft plastic cover we picked up for ten bucks at the Wickford Marine Exchange a couple years ago. It was a total piece of shit that made the motor look like a little Star Wars Storm Trooper. Yes, it protected the engine and it made us laugh but the only thing I was thinking when the fucking thing took off was: That plastic piece of shit shouldn’t be pollution yet. So I went after it.

The wind had only increased and the chop worsened so by the time I got the little boat started and untied the cover had traveled at least 20 yards on the surface of the water and was picking up speed.

As soon as I got the engine in gear I sat on the bench seat in the middle of the boat and it slipped out of its straps and right out from under me. I was sucked into waist deep ice water almost instantly. I gasped but I had my eyes on my escaped Storm-Trooper helmet and there was nothing gonna stop me from saving it from becoming premature litter, obviously the most important thing in the world, right?!

I got right up next to it and almost fell out of the boat trying to grab it as it sunk when the boat went broadsides to the waves. I got knocked back against the opposite side of the dink and thus began my Descension of Events.

First I tried to roll over to recover, then I kicked the motor sideways with my foot and the throttle went full. The boat took off in a circle and took a huge wave directly on the motor, killing it with a pathetic gurgle.

I instantly became painfully aware of the cold howling wind blowing me out to sea.

I took out one of the paddles (a big deal actually) and started paddling, not rowing mind you, paddling. Without the seat in place, the boat was impossible to row traditionally. So I paddled.

I paddled for about 20 (motherfucking) minutes and got absolutely nowhere.

The boat was at least 50 yards away from me by that point and no matter how hard I paddled I couldn’t get any closer to it.

I could feel myself starting to hyperventilate so I decided to focus on getting the engine running before the wind got any stronger.

The boat was still full of cold water and everything was being tossed around inside it like a sharp toxic soup grinding together to get out.

I pulled myself to my knees and slid to the back of the boat to inspected the motor and actuated all of the valves then went through the starting sequence.

The engine started in one pull. Remember, it was at full throttle when it died and still in gear so the bow of the boat shot in the air and all the water came aft.

Okay, in that instant I came so close to flipping over the transom and watching the little boat drive away from me as I floundered fully clothed I actually lost track of why it didn’t happen.

The reason it didn’t happen: the seat had gotten wedged under my foot and held me in place so I couldn’t fall out. That fucking seat that started the whole chain of events in the first place saved my life!

I situated myself midships in the dink and was back at S/V S.N. Cetacea within fifteen minutes.

The one smart thing I did before I went on my failed Storm Trooper helmet hunting expedition that nearly killed me was leave my backpack with my phone and a nice dry towel in it back at Cetacea.

For almost an hour after I dried myself off I sat in the cockpit of Cetacea replaying the Descension of Events, one by one, in my head.

Of course I never should have gone after that stupid fucking cover! But there’s a greater lesson here, right?!

Life is delicate and forever in the balance. It takes multiple levels of consideration to survive any day on a boat but life on the water demands awareness that leaves very little room for mistakes and it really is a matter of life or death. My (or Dena’s) life or death and every once in a while we get a humbling little reminder of just how delicate that balancing act of ours really is.

My craft, my trade, a story…

I started shooting pictures at my sisters first wedding in 1978, I was 14 years old.

She and her slightly shocked soon to be husband “hired” me to take pictures using any kind of camera I could find as long as it didn’t cost more than $20 bucks.

Don’t laugh! None of us knew the slightest thing about photography or even knew where to get any reliable information so, I was a minor and I was in Texas so of course I went to a pawn shop for advise.

A1 Pawn was less than a mile from my home and I’d been buying drums and other musical equipment from them for a while at that point so I went to them for a good old fashioned data-mining field trip cap-in-hand.

They told me all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t possibly remember or even comprehend at the time but when I asked them what was the best budget camera for shooting a wedding they pointed me to a Canon AE1 Combo-Kit they had right there in their lighted case. It was a standard kit with the camera body, a 50mm lens along with a 70-200mm zoom, a hot-foot-flash, a bag and a bunch of filters. As the cherubs chorus faded into the reverberated ether I could see my future illuminated right there in that glass case, just out of my reach!

That fucking thing was $300 (1978!) bucks and I was 14, there was no way I was going to convince any one in my reality to buy that thing for me and I definitely didn’t have the resources to buy it on my own.

So I went to the local Safeway and bought 4 disposable Kodak cameras and a nice photo book with a wedding theme that wasn’t too cheesy.

I shot the wedding sent the cameras away and in two weeks I put together my sisters, first ever, wedding album.

They loved it! “Hey Mikey!”

She showed it to every body, it was a hit. But there was still no way anybody that knew me was going to give me $300 for anything much less a very expensive, very breakable set of optical equipment. No fucking way.

The years went by (two to be exact), the husband went buh-bye and the new boyfriend proposed to sister and sure enough they bought me that AE1 Combo-Kit and asked me to shoot their wedding.

Gulp!

I didn’t even know how to put film in that camera and YouTube was still about 30 years out so my prospects for actually pulling it off like I did the last one were slim-to-none, and Slim: he was leaving town.

Before I went back to Safeway for the disposables I thought I’d hit up A1 again for advice on how to load it, how to put a battery in it, how to use the flash and what settings I could use to just “get away with it”.

Of course they didn’t know shit but they lied well enough to convince me that I should just play around with it before the wedding to get some chops. Holy-Crap, that shit’s expensive! With four rolls of different kinds of film I discovered that the flash totally sucked, Black and White was actually pretty cool, long exposures were bad for people and good for colors and sunset was the only way to go.

So after about 40 years of photography those four lessons I taught myself with those first four rolls of film are still my go-to’s for a good set up.

I will never, with some never on top, shoot another wedding. Nothing brings out the worst in people like the American wedding ritual and I won’t have any more to do with it. It definitely wasn’t my sister’s wedding that did it, it was the 15 or 16 after that that ultimately convinced me to gouge out my eyes with ground-down forks before shooting another mother fucking wedding.

Along the way I learned that the Earth was the most beautiful thing in the world and the only things worth taking pictures of are the things that make me happy. Dena, the Earth, the water, my boat, the cat: things that make me happy.

My sister and that husband are still together and still happy I convinced them to wait until just before sunset to say their vows, they still show people that ancient photo album I made them and they still brag about how much it didn’t cost them.

I Believe…

I have come to believe the marina industry is a blight on our planet. Another perfect example of run-a-muck capitalism driven by the falsehood of ownership.

These so called, Marina “owners”, world wide, believe that because they played the game of political-permit-payola they have the right to limit public access to our community waterways.

I don’t believe in that myth.

It’s the same falsehood that inspires some to actually believe they can own ideas or concepts, or beauty or color.

Shit, even the view of a sunrise can be perceived as purchased simply by the ritual of the virtual exchange of monetary credit through a bank. Then of course a well built gate and a  lightly educated and overly armed local police force kind of seal the deal.

They (insert corporate fictional name here) may be able to keep you away from the coast today but in reality we as beings on this planet are stewards of our waterways and we as a species should drive off these carpet-bagging Neo-monopolists before they devour every last inch of our common coastline and then turn around charge us for it.

I know of no one who hasn’t lost a place they loved to a modern industrialist’s vision of progress.

The marina industry being only the final destination on that ultimate trail of destruction only because, in most cases, it’s quite literally the end of the road. There isn’t a city waterfront on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. that hasn’t undergone that old coastal urban stereotypical trajectory of…

You know the ‘ol 5 point plan’?

…War, Industrial collapse, Degradation, Gentrification and ultimately capital-revitalization and police militarization.

This familiar spiral inevitably ends with local communities being abusively relocated with those same working people paying a premium to regain access to their own lost coastline.

And yet new marina facilities are still considered “Coastal Improvements” by the ignorant local city management who more often than not are just desperate to fill their Covid-depleted or, (add calamity here) city coffers by any-means-necessary.

And make no mistake about it, these so called, “Coastal Improvements”, more often than not, are lipstick on a pig at the very best.

I believe it’s time we started measuring value by intelligent means rather than any-means-necessary.

And what is value anyway?

I believe that the delicate line between the water and the land is absolutely invaluable! It’s the meeting place of the Earth’s three great atmospheres, the land, the sea, and the air for fuck’s sake! It is the very place where we as a species can begin to understand how delicately balanced and, indeed precious, all things are in the overall bio-connection of our world…a finite, isolated and closed bio-connection by the way.

But even if you don’t believe in any of that meta-value stuff at the very least I’d think everyone could appreciate an uncluttered sunset or a perfect reflection of an autumn treeline on a glass becalmed lake.

I believe the only things of value in our lives are the moments we remember until the very end.

  I believe saving our coastlines from rabid capitalism is an imperative and a shared responsibility.

I also believe it might be too late.

Realizing Color

James’s artistry has taught me (Dena, of course) so much about apprehending the beauty around me. He shows me the world through his photos, which also trains my eye to linger on line and shadow, contrast and texture.

He’s also one hell of a color schemer, and our very own S/V S.N. Cetacea needed a color reboot.

We did the green and beige thing on Nomad, plus this hull just begs for something more…intense.

In addition, the wood on the toerail and under the green strip had thirty-six years of weathering and rough cleaning. It didn’t just need spiffing up; it had to be repaired.

If you look at the top right of the picture above, you’ll see that there are fastener heads poking up above the level of the wood. Those began life snuggled under bungs. They haven’t worked their way up. The wood has been worn down by at least…oh…four to six millimeters? The scarf (where the two pieces of wood are mated together with a jagged joint) was structurally unsound.

My challenge was to salvage a terribly thinned rail and stop the degradation. My desire was to make it beautiful in the end.

After I removed the bolts reinforcing the scarfs, I worked West System’s awkwardly named G/flex 650 epoxy into the holes and between the two pieces of wood. A pleasingly ample amount squeezed out when I applied the clamp. I slathered the rest of the damaged wood with more epoxy than it needed on the first round with the plan of sanding it down even.

That worked!

And then I thickened batch after batch of G/flex with colloidal silica and applied it with every tool at my disposal: mixing stick, spreader, and hands.

I used my hands because the rough cleaning I mentioned above had left a washboard of wood. Teak has beautiful grain, but the variation is due to some of the wood being softer than other parts. Chemical baths and stiff brushes dig the soft stuff out and leave the harder parts as ridges. On Cetacea, some of those were as high as three millimeters above the crevice.

With my fingers, I massaged the G/flex into all of these crevices. This is more than 30′ of wood on each side of the boat for the top of the toe rail and another 30′ under the green stripe, so it took a lot of time, a lot of epoxy, and one hell of a lot of tape.

The first sanding revealed that I had a lot of work left to do.

I filled up and sanded down…filled up and sanded down…tried to make up for missing material. The lower wooden part in the picture above has a thick line of epoxy from where the wood had simply disintegrated.

Where fasteners were showing, I filled their holes with epoxy if they were low enough. If not, I ramped the epoxy up around them to smooth the bump.

I got a lot of compliments while doing this work. We were on the main walkway for the northern side of the marina and a dozen people (minimum) passed me each day. Lots of kind words, mostly from people who would never take on a project like this. She just smoothed out so nicely!

And, what was I (James) doing while this brilliance was taking place?! I was punching a clock doing another man’s work for him trying to change an industry that is trying to destroy the world one fastener at a time. Once again people, I am well within my comfort zone here!

I (Dena) worked from the dinghy on the side that wasn’t against the dock. It was less stable but also less stressful as far as making a mess.

Finally it was time to do the very last sanding before the neat coat of epoxy that would finally and completely seal the wood away from the ravages of salt and sun.

That neat coat of epoxy showed me that yes, it was time to start the real job. Painting.

Well, to be clear…priming to paint.

It was rather a shock to the system to see that wood suddenly disappear. The more work I put into it, the more beautiful it had looked overall. There was just too much damage, though, for a decent-looking varnishing. This would be better, I reminded myself sternly.

When the black went on, it was a revelation.

I truly loved it. Sleek and solid, beautiful and the farthest thing possible from mistreated.

James caught me taping for the final stage and one which made me vibrate with excitement. If painting the rail felt like a big change and black felt daring, our plan for the green stripe was nothing less than breathtaking.

In 2015, our first Downeast Maine run was highlighted by a trip to The WoodenBoat School in Brookline at the very end of the Eggamogin Reach. We put Nomad’s hook down and rowed in and, just as we were getting out of the little boat, we spied a beautiful old wooden schooner pulling up to the WoodenBoat School’s visitors dock.

It was the first time either one of us had seen the color known only as Epifanes #23. We were blown away. I (James) found it impossible to put my finger on exactly what the color, deep and almost disturbing, exactly was. I (Dena) think it evokes bodily viscera in a way that could be creepy but ends up being so richly alive.

The owner of the vessel saw us ohhing-and-ahhing over his totally nontraditional choice in color. I (James) of course had to ask him what that incredible color was actually called and he simply said Epifanes #23.

We’ve both been big fans of Epifanes marine varnish for years but, until Dena worked for Hamilton Marine Supply in Portland, we’d never actually seen a color palate of their line of marine enamels. Shit, I thought all they did was make the best varnish in the world. The black rail clearly showed us how cool their enamels and primer were to work with.

It’s funny, I didn’t even try to explain the color to anyone around the marina…mainly because #23 isn’t that expressive of a name and…well…it is still very hard to put my finger on exactly what color it is. It’s definitely not what I would call red. It’s soooo not purple and be damned if it looks like any color I’ve seen on any vessel besides that one beautiful schooner we saw five years ago.

Well, my co-worker on the docks, Owen, named it as soon as he saw what Dena had done. He called it Pinot Noir, and he nailed it.

The final result (with only one coat of each color to get us through the winter) is so beautiful that you just have to see it for yourself.

Now we have to (get to!) get rid of all the rest of the green on the boat, so I started by stripping the UV cover from the roller furling headsails.

All the sail covers will be black, as will the two hatch covers eventually. Next spring, we’ll tear off the entire cockpit cover and start a whole new system of getting just enough weather…but not too much.

And finally, finally, I (Dena) will be able to see perfectly what James could conceptualize in his head. I doubt I’ll ever have the grasp he does of color and shape, but he makes sure I have a head-turningly gorgeous boat.

Lucky me!