Boat Night

Tuesday is boat night at the Dolphin Club. The Dolphin is a large frame building rambling along the shoreline below the Ghirardelli Chocolate factory, next to the public beach and it's art deco building, across the cove from the San Francisco Maritime Museum. It's a little outpost of New England on the Bay, woody, genteely distressed and (for San Francisco) old. The first floor shelters the weight room, the kitchen, the boatshop, and a collection of pulling boats [lubber's note: rowboats]. Most are for a single oarsperson but there are longboats for two, four and more rowers. Locker rooms, showers, steam rooms and a spartan but easygoing lounge with a spectacular view occupy the upper floor.

The basic Dolphin Activity is quite mad: swimming in the Bay. There is an annual swim to Alcatraz and back. Ahem. I doubt that I will join them. But every Tuesday John Bielinski, the Dolphin's boatbuilder, organizes the 10 or 15 volunteers that show up to maintain the exquisite smaller boats. Like all wooden boats thoughtlessly dunked in water, they need obsessive attention. Add to this, they are bright-finished – varnished. This requires yearly scraping, sanding, and reapplication. The methods, approaches, brands, brushes and application of varnishes can be a religious observance for waterfolk and has created angry sects. The Dolphin is interdenominational in the canon of marine finishes, so even varnish nights are relatively peaceful.

After the volunteers work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables. Since tonight was Fat Tuesday, one of the members had made jambalaya. The kitchen was already fragrant with sausage and filé when a big crowd of about 20 assembled. Word had gone out that one of the older pulling boats needed five new ribs, an operation requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. This was not merely woodworking but time management and tool quickness. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built and as light as eggshells, but tough as a pig's nose.

The pulling boats are Whitehalls. This means that they're rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom [back end]. They're very light for their size, built in the ancient "clinker" construction. "Clinker" is an Old English cognate of "clencher," which indicates that the boat is made up of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to tough ribs with copper rivets. Rivets are very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. To fit the locust wood ribs to the inside of the boat's pronounced curves, they must be milled thin (a little thicker than 1/4" and about 5/8" wide) and softened in a steam box for about half an hour. They're taken out with heavy gloves and pressed immediately into the boat. While the ribs are still whippy and hot they're clamped into place and immediately drilled through. The drilled hole passes through a rib, the lower part of an overlapping strake [long hull plank] and the upper part of the next strake below it.

As soon as the holes are drilled a copper riveting nail is hammered through them. The "nail" is square in section to grip the wood more tightly. A round copper washer – called a "burr" – is forced over the square nail with a special riveting tool. The tool is like a chisel with a flat end and a hole for the nail, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. The nail is then snipped off just above the burr and, while one partner "bucks" (holds a heavy iron on the nailhead end to prevent it from being driven away), the other shapes the soft copper over the burr with a small ball-peen hammer (the kind with one flat head and one round head, made especially for work like this). The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms easily and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen hammer tightens the assembly.

Is this is more than you want to know? But it's historic stuff, ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.

The trick is that everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the wood stays flexible from the steam box only a few minutes. Whisked out of the pressure and heat, slammed into the boat against the inside of the strakes and under some of the longitudinal structure, immediately drilled, nails hammered home, burrs forced down against the inside of the rib, the nails cut off at just the right length above the burr, and tap, tap, tap, tap until the rivet is shaped.

Jay and I worked as a team. Half the time I was above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I was under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The peening (shaping] was a more focused task. Holding the bucking iron was heavier work. The compensation for that heavy work was lying beneath the boat's lyric curves, each strake describing a separate curved plane with a step separating it from the next plane, the graceful strake lines paralleling and harmonizing, the color of the varnished white cedar glowing golden and varying with the glare from every work light, shading from dark umber in the shadows to chrome yellow in the light. Beautiful. The locust wood ribs emerging from the steam box smelled bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smelled like incense. The tapping and the calling between three sets of partners – two sets riveting, one set placing new ribs – was a cacophony with a subtly discernible rhythm and order.

The work had a sensible urgency and a splendid, strong outcome. What do we do in our lives that gives us much of that? These boats are old fashioned, outmoded in everything but their intrinsic utility: one person using oars to skim the water quickly and with assurance. Some of the boats themselves are old, relics, cockleshells rowed by the oldest members when they were young. We make them live over and over, replacing ribs, strakes, fittings, finish. We have a stake in the heritage. Boats like this are lent to us by dead oarsmen to keep for unborn oarsmen. It's a privilege we share.

Jan Adkins

Braxinoso speaks:
My attention is usually wasted on reminding Himself of tradition and continuity. Occasionally, however, he gets the bit between his teeth and waxes eloquent about the oldness of things. He's quite right to underscore our maritime heritage, of course, but he leaves out the real reason he attends boat night: it's just fun fooling around with boats. As the rat said, there's nothing like it.
Braxinoso