That mast never looked so good

This past week brought a raft (get it?  A little nautical humor there) of activity both above and below the waterline. My part was rather icky and black-lung-inducing, since I was sanding and scraping the bottom (and topsides). The topsides are so much easier this year! Took Jeffie’s name off with the heat gun; now I have to order more letters.   

 

The bottom, however, is a nightmare.  I did not give it the attention it deserved last year.  So I am trying to be kind to it now. 

Got what’s called “hammered gold” paint for the wooden rub rail, which might be better than the horrid gold leaf that oxidized in 24 hours.  Hopefully this one (thank you, Rustoleum) will do better.

But above the deck we had the bleaching of the spars this weekend.  Break out the oxalic acid!  Unfortunately there are still some black spots, and the two-part bleach (or at least one that works) is nowhere to be found.  Hopefully the spots won’t be noticed much.

 

Here’s what Mr. “C. Ross” says about oxalic acid in the WoodenBoat forum in 2010:

“Oxalic acid's only function is to break down iron tannate - it does not take natural color out of wood cells, it does not break down cellular structure of wood, it does not remove pigments or stains. Two-part bleaches do, well, two things. Part one breaks open wood cells and part two destroys the coloration in the cell. They damage the cells as paladin says, but I'm not sure they go any deeper than a couple of layers of cells.”

Paul hates to have his photo taken.  But I wanted to catch him and Dane in the act, so there he is. Yes, the mast has a bit of a kink to it.  You would too, if you were that old.

He’s still quite prickly about this blog.  Airing dirty laundry and all.  He suggested, a bit snarkily, “Why don’t you write in your blog and see if anyone has any suggestions on where we can get two-part bleach?”

So all of you two (or possibly three) readers out there, let me know the right type of 2-part bleach that gets out the black stains, and do it by next week before Dane starts varnishing. Pleeeeeze!

Speaking of dirty laundry . . . a method that is being used to see if we can salvage the rotten part on the keel is supposed to be a secret, for some reason. It involves a bunch of holes being drilled, some tiny bronze brazing rods stuffed in the holes, and a lot of epoxy.  But I guess I should say no more! If it works, I’d pronounce it a genius idea.

Bad weather is not our friend

It's been 2 weeks with nothing that could be done to JB . . . except Dane has been busy in the shop, like I said, sanding down the mast.


That's it, hanging from Paul's ceiling

 Pretty, huh?  Imagine it all varnished--no more blotches--it'll be great!!!

Next up: Mr Bowsprit:

 

It was really windy today but I started sanding the topsides.  Paul says that it takes 3 years from taking a boat down to wood, for the paint to get to a point where the hull looks nice and smooth.  So this is year 2 and already I can tell the difference--this is so much easier than last year!

Mystic wooden boat show, here we come!  That is, if we get some decent weather and I can take the other half of the tarp off.

Reefing the garboard seam, or, "rank amateurs with sharp objects"

So Paul brought back all the old friends—the 3 sanders, the sandpaper, the scrapers . . . and two new visitors, called reefing irons.  Now you may think, friends, that I would instinctively know what to do with these things, but I assure you I did not. 

 




Here are my three new buddies. As you can see, it’s nothing but the most modern of equipment for me! On the left is my grandfather’s scraper, then what I call “the hoof pick," then what’s cleverly called the “reef hook.”  It has many interesting edges, and darned if all of them don't have a purpose—and I used ‘em all.

This is Jeff’s keel . . . looking okay from far away, but up close was another story.

At the end of the day, however, I had progressed from novice to acolyte, if only by virtue of being able to do the limbo under the axles of the trailer to twist my body into the right angle to whack the iron with the hammer and push the rubber caulk out of the seam.

Tapping away was rather satisfying, only Paul has implied that I have to get a flashlight and look to see if any more caulk is left there.  Then you have to scrape some more, which I did with what I began calling “the hoof pick,” because I cannot find what this particular one is called.   

 

And the internet is no help—do you know there is not one video about reefing?  Noooooo, only filling the nice, perfect seams with nice, perfect caulk.

I have no idea if I did this right.  I will have to wait for Inspection.

 “Don’t touch the cotton or the oakum,” Paul warned.  Two problems.  First, what the $#@! is oakum? It sounds like a nice warm breakfast beverage but it is not, oh no, it is in this case a mass of wet, stringy greenish-brown goo resembling what’s in the bottom of a hash pipe—not that I would know.

Second, the oakum at times was so close to the surface that chipping out the caulk means yanking out the oakum.  What to do?  Stuff it back in the hole? I know that cotton (which was also up there in spades) needs to be rolled, and then twisted just so, and pushed up with a talent reserved for only the virtuosos of the maritime repair world. But I confess, I just stuffed it back up there. However, I still don’t know how we are going to caulk this seam if oakum is level with the wood.  There’s just so much stuffing of that crap you can do after 50 years.

Did you know that a lot of prison labor in Victorian times included the making of oakum, or the separating of the strands of rope to create it?  Doesn’t seem so bad of a job—beats working on a chain gang—but I guess it was pretty nasty. Contemporary oakum is made from hemp or jute and usually has some type of tar on it.  But if my oakum had tar on it at one point, it has long since abandoned ship.

Anyway, this is what it looked like coming out of the seam of Jeff Brown.

 

What not to do: oakum wants to escape, but you must not let it.

Here’s a bit of what the crevices look like, post-reef.

I admit I did not do the greatest of jobs on the bottom last year—it really needs a good scraping. Well, cadal, cadal as they say in Kosovo (a land not known for boating); little by little.

Just found a YouTube video of what may lie in store for me, and I think I will take to my bed with the vapors:

Commodores Boats caulking garboard seam with hawsing iron and beetle

Shipwrights Terry & Dwight working on the classic tug "Viking King" owned by Harken Towing. Location "Shelter Island Marina" in Richmond BC Canada.

Just kill me now.

 

Jeff is in the house!

 Well, look who is back in my driveway.  Bruce trailered it over about five days ago, in the rain—and Bruce never works in the rain so I know he loves me (hey, it’s a stretch, but it could happen) and pronounced Jeff “better than last year,” which for him is high praise.  “Let’s work on keeping it from sinking this year” were his parting words. 

 

And in fact, non-sinking is our main concern this year—apart from re-sanding, painting the whole thing again, hoping rot didn’t set in somewhere new, and finding a nice gold paint that doesn’t oxidize the minute I put it on the rub rail.

There are several new challenges this year.  First of all, it is the Emma C. Berry’s 150^th birthday on June 5^th—Emma is the last smack sloop (fishing boat with a wet well) in existence, and Mystic Seaport is making a very big deal out of her birthday—as well they should. But Jeff Brown is also a smack sloop, along with Winsome, which was built a little after Jeff Brown—1970-ish.  And both Jeff and Winsome have been invited to float beside Emma at the Seaport during the Wooden Boat Show, which is one of the biggest deals for wooden boat lovers in the country.  

 

Here’s Winsome, in a 2006 photo by "Wildjack." You can see it has more cockpit space and a cabin--it actually is very cozy and has a head, and a bunk area.  And I got a lesson from Paul last year on what the bowsprits are called and let’s just say they are different. Winsome points down and Jeff Brown points slightly up.  You can guess where the naming headed . . . but who's cuter, really, huh, who?

But it is the last weekend in June, which means that we have to shake a tailfeather and get Jeff all un-sinkable and gorgeous by the end of June so that he is ready for his close-up as thousands stroll by the dock, or “smack alley” as we are calling it.

So apart from the sanding and re-painting, which will not be that bad this year, there is much to be done “below the waterline.”  Paul mentions epoxy in hushed tones and I suspect that gallons of it will be needed to be poured into holes in some dark reaches of the bilge (which is being kept covered to stay dry until that’s done) but as of now, that is above my pay grade.

I have been assigned to “reef out the garboard plank,” which is as you may imagine the first time I have ever typed that in a sentence.  We’ll see how that actually goes in practice tomorrow.

This year we have a new volunteer—Dane, who is great.  I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.  Actually, Dane is the master of masts, and is taking Jeff’s mast, boom, etc. down to bare wood so it can be completely re-varnished and doesn’t look like a pinto pony this year. He’s already sanded the mast and it is gorgeous. I have to take a photo of it—it’s in Paul’s barn.