I [heart] the heat gun

 Merciful Jesus the heat gun portion of our show is over, at least for the time being. It has taken me this long to hack all the paint from the bulwark and the moulding below that, and then I had to take off the brass rail strakes (how I did not break them is a miracle) and whack off all that crud underneath (and did you notice how cavalierly and with what panache I am now slinging about the nautical terminology? Who knew I would ever get to use the phrase “rail strake” in a sentence?).  Anyway, Paul brought over the detail sander and I must say it is a dandy thing, and so much easier to sand now that 90% of the paint is off.  I can tell that the lower rub rail was varnished, and if I am feeling frisky I will try to get all the paint off that and see if it can be re-varnished. Paul just looks at me with one eye shut and a snide grin when I say these things. 

I'm trying to scrape off to about 5" below the last rub rail just to have a space to work in on the black 

(and soon to be red) part. It was coming off so easy here I just went down one whole plank.

But Maynard Bray says in “Painting and Varnishing” (which Don sent to me last week) to not let the wood sit too long before you prime and paint it, so I’m stopping here and sanding what I’ve done, then painting it before I tackle the topside.  Which I have to say is scads easier than the black stuff was.  The paint just peels right off.  Which may not be saying a good thing about the previous green paint job.  But the black part--phenomenal.

Boy, it looks like crap now but I think it will feel much better when all this is over!

Before any painting gets done, though, Paul has to come over with about 5 gallons of epoxy and a million wood plugs, since I seem to keep knocking them out of the planking.  I do hope Uncle Jack is not rolling over in his . . . mud flat, I guess, off of Ram Island.  

Paint removal as anti-depressant

Told Paul I was keeping a blog of my attempts to give Jeffie a facelift.
Bad idea.
He doesn't approve of people airing their "dirty laundry" on social media.
Not that he even has email or is on any other social media; he's just a little suspicious.
It's not like nobody knows that the boat has been out of commission for a few years and probably needs a good spiffing.
It's not like I am writing this as an advertisement for my bright-work skills. Not being very bright and all.
But I forget, sometimes, that I am a Yankee among Yankees, and circumspection is our motto.  Don't tell anyone anything if you absolutely don't have to.  Just keep your head down, do your work, enjoy the fruits of your labor, and be on your way. As in: off this mortal coil.

In a way I can see his point.  For 40 years people have worked hard to keep this boat afloat, re-fastening, painting, hauling, storing, polishing, sail making  . . .and no one's taken out full page ads trumpeting their good deeds.  They're just happy Jeff Brown is still here.

Well, so am I. But I tend to forget, from one day to the next, that there are actually portions of my day that I rather enjoy, that are comprised of amusing blunders or tiny new learning experiences or small gifts from relatives long dead and a past only dimly remembered. This boat in my yard is so. . . different . . . from anything I do these days, that if it is the thing I can write about for fun, instead of what I usually write about which is the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest, the civil unrest in Aceh province, or the far-too-minimal amount of humanitarian support given to women cocoa farmers--and if by doing these tiny diary-entry things here I can get back on the track of writing more fiction, or at least more things that matter, then maybe the miniscule bits of my day that I find enjoyable will grow to be bigger bits.
Hey, it's worth a shot.

And already, Jeff has seemed to help me.
This weekend I learned to if not master, then control the heat gun to the point where the thought of doing the same thing to the green part of the hull is not so overwhelming.  Plus, I filed the scrapers. Who's master of her domain now, who?  I also removed the brass rubrail, in several pieces, making sure I didn't bend it, by tying string from the end holes to the scupper holes so it stayed straight as I brought it up and laid it on the deck.

Should there be photos of even that here? Wouldn't that be gilding the lily?  Perhaps that's what Paul means by dirty underwear.  Jeff at his most tired and worn out.

You may be wondering where my promised "helpers" were.
Don tells me that this is the nature of helpers.  They exist in one's hopeful imagination, but seldom do they materialize when one needs them.

But getting the black paint off the  bulwarks made me a little less depressed about my eyes, one of which just had rather unsuccessful surgery so that my middle vision is now quite blurry, and I can only see reeeeely close up (to about a foot) and then from 6 feet outward.  So the "living" portion of vision now eludes me.  Cataracts: my gift from a year in Afghanistan.  It can possibly be corrected by (eek) lasik surgery (which I already had, 5 years ago) but until it heals I am in the pit of despond, only able to read tiny paperbacks . . . and peel paint off an obliging old sailboat.  Which was quite satisfying and oddly comforting.

Then Paul came back to say that maybe a little social media wasn't so bad after all, and bummer about the eye, and then Steve said I could keep the heat gun for a week, and then I figured out a way to trick my reading glasses into letting me see . . . so the new moon, which had me in its grip, loosened by the end of the weekend. Plus Jennifer and I went out in kayaks yesterday to say goodbye to the seals on Cormorant Reef, who should be heading north in a week or two--there were about a dozen of them playing peekaboo with us for about an hour. Such cuties.

So between the boat and the water, living here did not completely suck this week.

little puppy head to the bottom right (Lord's Point/Stonington in background)

they were all on the rocks when we got here

"Progress, not perfection"

Steve came over the day before yesterday, and boy was I glad to see him.  His Cape Dory sailboat  Raven is down the street on a mooring in West Cove.  He lives near where I used to, and I know him from another life, long ago.  He doesn’t get down here much because of his finish carpentry business and his Christmas tree farm.  He didn’t come much at all last year, but as far as Raven goes, that’s okay because all he has to do is look at that boat, or anything for that matter, and all of a sudden it’s perfect.  He is one of those people who if they weren’t so nice and sweet and friendly, you would loathe with an unspeakable envy.  He is fabulous at everything he does.  That’s how I met him—he decided to try bicycle riding 25 years ago.  In two weeks he was better than even the racers in our group.  He decides that sailing might be fun.  Five minutes and he’s cruising alone to the Caribbean in a perfectly refurbished yacht.  During this visit he told me he’d gone to the Grand Canyon and paddled 240 miles of the Colorado river in 16 days.  Of course he did!  

There are so few people in this life whose successes and brilliance I can truly enjoy without reservation or secret jealousy.  He is one of them.  Oh, I’ve adored him for ages.  But he is also fairly perceptive, and back in those cycling days it was a wise man who steered clear of me.  I was not known for my . . . let us just say . . . stability in the relationship department.

But Steve heard about Jeff Brown and wanted to come see it, and I was half-dreading the inevitable visit because there is this part of me that is still so angry and dismayed that there are these simple things about how to fix boats that I do not know, and they do, and they are probably right, and so I will look and feel like an idjit when strangers (practically) come over and say, “Well, of course you’ve tried fastening the whoozie to the stringers bracing the whatchamacallit, because you can’t remove paint without somethingorothering to the cotton batting . . .” and I will blurt out “Bite me” and remain none the wiser.

But no . . .there he was grinning like a maniac on my porch, happy as always about whatever he was doing that day, which was gathering a thousand pine cones from the Noank Shipyard’s trees to make wreaths in November.  Plus he was going to do a little work on Raven.  He had brought all these very cool tools.  He adored Jeff Brown, was just fascinated by it, and then suggested, ever so gently, that really a boat like this deserves, well, perfection. 

I told him I did not think that was what the current overseers had in mind.  But I somehow forgot this about Steve—nothing in this world deserves to be done half-assed, especially something old and pretty and made of wood. So we got onto the deck and he brought out the Milwaukee heat gun—a magnificent contraption that, in his hands, practically chased the paint off the deck and made my preliminary sanding job look like crap.  “You’ll still have all those craters, even if you feather it, but if you take the paint off, then you can sand it and with a good coat of primer you won’t need to paint it every year; it will be great.”  He discussed scraper types, how to hold it, and told me to file the sander if it got dull.  With all those new scarper-filing skills I developed at some point.)

Then, like a crack dealer, he showed me the detail sander—a snazzy, zillion-dollar model called Fein, which he said was “worth every penny” and which I doubt either Paul or Bruce owns, but we zipped around fittings and dug into corners and I thought, oh my Christ I will be here forever now.

Bless Steve’s heart, he left me the heat gun but had to take the sander (good-bye, little marvel!), wished me luck, and poof! he was gone.

So yesterday I had a go at the heat gun.

Funny thing, it is not as easy as it looks. In fact, it is an art. But when I slowed down and worked with the grain, it got a little easier (although I thought the boat would self-immolate at any second).

I then decided to abandon the deck and just concentrate on the black bulwark (scupper area) and the black rail below that. (oh, and Steve also suggested we remove the brass rubrail to get at the wood underneath.  The boys will love that.)

It took me about an hour to do about a third of one side.

I hope the heat gun and my arm hold out!

 

Before (left) and after--it's worth it but man, my progress is turtle-like

 

 This is as far as I got yesterday.  I think when it's sanded (and of course all the cracks are filled) it will be swell.

But oh my god what am I going to do about the deck?  That will be frigging hours of work!  But it looks so much better than just being sanded.

[I will confess I went online to see how much electricity a heat gun uses.  Surprisingly, not much; about 18 cents an hour, or $27 a month for 5 hours a day every day.  Which I will not be doing!  Hey, I had to look.  I am nothing if not frugal.] 

The green part has too much paint to take off that way.

Paul is not answering my cries for help.

He is letting me stew in Steve’s taunt of perfection.  I really should adhere to the old 12-step slogan: progress, not perfection.

I knew there was a lesson in here somewhere!

Background

I used to think for many years that the reason my father didn’t teach me enough about how to operate his charter boat, how to run it, how to repair it, how  to set up the lines and where to fish and how to make the passes or how to spot the birds working on the horizon—was that I was a girl.

But when I was 21 and my stepmother Joan had died and he gave up chartering, he asked me out of the blue one day, “Pen, do you want the boat?”  That ugly 28-foot piece of crap that I had no idea how to run or maintain or stock with the right type of bait, tackle or rods, and he’s asking me if I want to continue the charter business?  Had he been living some sort of parallel life while I was growing up, in which he imagined he taught me everything I needed to know, and nurtured my love of the water and my fascination with that life?  So I said “Uh . . . no thanks” and went to graduate school instead, and seethed, and continued seething until the Jeff Brown appeared in my yard and Paul in his kindness said, “Here.  Here’s a project.  Get it ready,” and I started wondering why I knew nothing, really, about boats, or the water, or this area, or my family.

This isn’t the story of my father.  I don’t think.  It’s the story of my incompetence, and my continuous desire to be more than adequate at something, especially something that is an art on both sides of my family.  My mother Alma was Jack’s sister.  She died when I was 5 months old.  My father and Jack were great pals.  There was a great ripping in my father’s soul when she died.  I cannot explain it.  I never fully understood it.  But from that moment, he spent his life waiting to die.  I’m getting ahead of myself.  That stuff can come later.  But what I’ve realized in the few days since Jeff Brown arrived and I have faced my incompetence head on is that I didn’ t learn about boats and the water like other kids here not because I was a girl but because my father just could not push aside that curtain of despair long enough to do anything with a child that was remotely life-affirming for the child. He could sometimes make himself comfortable-that’s how he put it—on the water, and so we went on endless, and I mean endless, fishing trips.  I do not know how to repair or drive a boat but I know how to fish.  He was not a good teacher.  We learned through a frantic desire to make him less angry.

My stepmother Joan always wanted a sailboat.  My father hated them. They got in the way of fishing.  Which was strange, since his best friend, his brother in law Uncle Jack, built them—sloops and schooners and catboats—but Jeff Brown was built after Alma died and so to my knowledge my father and Jack never went sailing together—they preferred to commune on the Star, a 40-foot dragger Jack built—my father’d been a lobsterman before he bought the charter boat.  His first boat, the Dutchy was a beautiful little dragger. 

 Here's the Dutchy , c. 1962 or so, with Pop posing

He re-named it Yankee Girl II—a name I was never fond of, and then sold it and bought the piece of crap called Yankee Girl III. Which I guess now could be considered a “classic.”  The sight of it in vintage ads still gives me the creeps.

 

Feh.

 

We didn’t visit Uncle Jack or his family often.  My stepmother would occasionally take us to see them, or other cousins—she was friendly and outgoing and not a fan of 24/7 isolation.  But to my father, everyone was crazy, or had done him wrong, or not worth talking to.  What I know now is that everything hurt.  Seeing Jack hurt.  Living in the same town hurt.  It was a bottomless well, his despair, and we were down there with him, only we didn’t know why and he did, but he really wasn’t thinking about us.  It wasn’t selfishness really. . .  maybe it was.  It was the inability to care about anything that wasn’t part of the past.

So I learned nothing about boats not because I was a girl but because it would have been impossible for him to teach me.  That’s why when he asked me “Do you want the boat?” he really meant it, as though life had gone by with him showing me how to have a future and me learning it. And none of that had happened at all.

When my stepmother Joan died I was 21 and my father moved away, to be taken care of by a new wife who had known him since before Alma.  I decided to get to know Alma the only way I could, and I started visiting Uncle Jack.  I think he got it. He took me sailing a lot, and out on the Star with his old water rat geezer buddies.  He spoke of Alma as much as he could.  I remember him being glad to see me every time I visited. I tested his serenity many times, trying to get him into arguments about politics, or his life choices, which I didn’t understand.  When we were out sailing he’d tell me of his other boats.  When I knew him he had the Sea Mew which was a wonderful little catboat-ish thing with a gaff rig,  He also had built a little spritsail boat that you could sail, row or put a motor on.  He let me sail that but told me it gave him a heart attack to watch me.  I knew nothing.  But I had no fear.  I thought I could learn it from osmosis. I figured it was in my blood.  There was so much time to make up.  I could not learn it from osmosis.  There was only the time I had left.

First Inspection

This is what we are aiming for.  Jeffie in 2001. I believe that's cousin John at the tiller.

Paul came over today with facemasks and words of encouragement.  We looked at all the little cracks and he said they could get filled with epoxy resin, that he will thin so it is almost like water, then it slinks into the cracks and fills up.  There are some spots where there is a LOT of epoxy; Paul looked a little sheepish and said that the rail needed to be completely replaced.  I think it is the rail.  The place where the scuppers are.  If I am going to work on this boat I should probably learn what things are called.

Bulwarks!  That’s what they are.  First the gunwale, or the rail cap, which is now white but had been varnished, then below that are the 4” high bulwarks where the scuppers are, which are black on the outside and white on the inside/deck side, then the brass rub rail on the outside, then another 4” trim board that sits below the decking, then another rub rail which used to be varnished but is now black like the bulwarks and the trim, and then the green part, technically known as the hull or topside, which confuses me mightily since shouldn’t the topside be on top?  But no, friends, that is the deck.  Which got scraped today.  Not much time since I do have a job.  

 Here's the front

 Here's the back

The hole got bigger--I do wonderful work, don't I?

Also, Paul said I could scrape and sand the snot out of it, and scrape up loose caulk and epoxy, but if I hit cotton I should stop.  I know that putting the cotton in is an art, and I am no artist.

 

 Bit of a problem on the deck . . .  

 

Paul also said there are “helpers” who want to help sand, so I told him that would be fine as long as I could tell them when to come. It’s an enormous job, especially for someone who does not know what she is doing and hates power tools (the noise, you know) but it means I will have to crawl out of my hermit shell and be friendly, and admit that this is a group project.  Which it has been for many years.  Everyone loves this boat. People with far more talent than I have kept it afloat all this time.  I have to learn to be happy to just be a part of some things.  It’s funny, but the things I tend to latch onto and not want to share are the things that have never been mine in the first place.

I believe tomorrow Paul will come with a detail sander and because it is so tiny and delicate I will ease into the power tool portion of our show in  that way.  It looks like Paul is amenable to painting the black trim red, which is was awhile ago when a guy on Fisher’s Island had it and did the thing with the varnished gunwale and rub rail.  Paul said it looked “like a million bucks.”  I think it will look like a gothic Christmas tree. 

"Don't go looking for trouble."

Two days of scraping and the paint is just flaking off like mad.   

After he dropped the boat off, Bruce told me, as his only instructions, “Don’t go looking for trouble.” But trouble found me.  I have pink electrician’s tape and started marking all the places where there was rot, then I stopped because I was using too much tape. 

 The mother of all rot.  This  hole actually got bigger when Paul told me to remove all of it.  Yikes!   

I took the hatch covers off to let the inside dry out but then Paul came by when I wasn’t here and filled the bilge with water.  He said he was washing it out and when it dries he’ll vacuum it and put all the ballast (big lead pigs I think, or maybe really uniform-looking rocks) back in the bilge.  He is unsure if we will get to painting the cabin (such as it is) this year.  

 I have found that scraping the deck is very relaxing—in the evening sun I can sit on the deck and take note of every plank.   I know that many have been replaced since 1966, and in 1990 Andy, Jack’s “protégé,” refitted the hull—whatever that means—I think it means that the hull is tighter now, and it actually looks better than the rails and the deck-- but it’s still Jack’s boat and that feels nice. I used to “help” him when he built boats—in the boat shop right behind where I live now, in the house his father, my grandfather Moses built—but my assistance involved maybe holding planks for him while he nailed them in, or doing something to steady a piece of wood when it was going in the steam box—nothing really amazing or technical.  But I remember being there, and in a way, it was like watching history happening.

So there’s this boat in my yard . . .

 . . . and for the first time I have been asked to do something about it.  I am supposed to scrape it and sand it and paint it and get it ready to go in the water where it will live on a mooring in the Mystic River and be the envy of everyone who sees it, and that is no lie.  The envy part.

The rest is something Paul invented, because he is kind and funny and knew my father and of course knew my Uncle Jack who built it, and knows I don’t really like living here, even though I grew up down the road in Groton and have always dreamed of returning to Noank . . . it is kind of sad and true, that you can’t go home again.  I wasn’t returning home so much as trying to discover what home had been like. My father tried to keep us in the dark about the world, and life outside our house, and our relatives, especially the relatives who lived here—my mother’s family; it was all too painful for him.  But the water, Fishers Island Sound, Race Rock and Little Gull Island and those places out there, I knew them because he was always out there either with us, his family, or with his parties—I guess you call them fishing clients, I don’t know.  Maybe they still call them parties. I left the area to go to college, and didn’t come back to live until two years ago.  Knowing nothing of what I thought I should know.  It’s in my blood, right?  The fishing and the boatbuilding and all the seaweedy, scaly stuff?  And the not-knowing is a source of shame and sadness.

So the other day, down the road lumbers the big red trailer driven by Bruce who owns the boatyard, and on the trailer is the first boat my Uncle Jack ever built: Jeff Brown.

Jack always talked about the Jeff Brown.  By the time I stated spending a lot of time with him, from about 1980 to right before he died in 1992, the boat had been sold, to make way for the next ones he built in succession.  It was at Fishers Island for awhile, and then somewhere up the Connecticut River I think. But I sensed that Jeff Brown was his favorite.  He said it was the fastest.  He built it in 1966. He told stories of he and my aunt Pat and my cousin Charles out on it, just burying the competition, if there even was any.  It was named after a late 19th century smack sloop which in turn was named after a prominent Florida politician.  I hope the original Jeff Brown was a good guy.  It seems like he probably was.

There’s an article called Sailing Craft of the Florida Keys by John Viele that talks about different fishing and cargo boats of the 1800’s, and it says this about Jeff Brown:

There were two classes of Keys fishing vessels. The larger ones, used for off-shore fishing and supplying the Havana market, were called smacks and tended to follow New Englanddesigns.The61-foot, 43-ton, schooner, City of Havana built in Key West in 1877, was typical of the larger smacks. She was modeled after smack schooners built at Noank, Connecticut. The entire amidships section was occupied by a large live well to hold the catch. The well extended from the keel to the main deck and from beam to beam. Holes in the bottom of the well allowed sea water to flow in and out to keep the fish alive until sold. With a flush deck, clipper lines and a fairly deep draft, she was a fast sailer.  The smaller fishing craft, called smackees, were manned by one or two men and operated in nearby waters catching fish for the Key West market. Ranging in length from 14 to28feet, the smackees were shallow draft, sloop-rigged vessels. Smackees also had built-in live wells amidships to keep the catch alive. The Jeff Brown, a 25-foot, shoal-draft, skeg-keel sloop with a leg-of-mutton mainsail was representative of the type. Topside arrangements included a U-shaped cockpit for the helmsman, and a small cuddy cabin forward of the live well.

So Uncle Jack got the plans from the Smithsonian and build Jeff Brown, only without the wet well.  My cousin John has lots of photos of it under sail.  I do not have copies of these photos yet but I’ll get them.  After all, John lives right next door now, and he is viewing the return of Jeff Brown to what is basically his back yard (where it was built) with a mixture of amusement and nostalgia and, I think, weariness; you never can tell, when the past returns, how the visit will go.  And me-- I’m just starting out on this journey.  I don’t even know the right name for things.  Front, back, bow, stern, rot, crack, hull, terror.

I think I’m going to have to learn how to be humble—fast.  But here’s this beautiful old thing—just about as old as me, actually, finally returned home, and many people here love it, because they loved my uncle and how he built boats for practicality but beauty always won out.  So maybe I can get out of my own way long enough to help out, and learn something in the process.

I started to write this because as soon as I saw Jeff Brown in the cradle last November, and Paul asked me to paint the bottom (my  snazzy paint job is shown above; one thing I learned as a kid was how to paint boat bottoms), I thought, well, here is your chance to do some catching up.  There’s a lot about this boat I don’t know.  I’ll find it out, like you find out about any of your old relatives who come home after a long absence—just like I did.