Every Tuesday evening at the Dolphin Club we give the pulling boats some care – repairing, sanding, varnishing, rebuilding. After we work three hours or so, we all eat together in the boat house at long tables.
A big crowd tonight, but not because it's Fat Tuesday and one of the members has made jambalaya. Big doings in the shop. Word has gone out that the Club's boatwright, Jon Belinski, is installing five new ribs in one of the older pulling boats. This is a rare demonstration of antique skills and methods, requiring teamwork, timing, speed and finesse. It's more than woodworking.
The ribs begin as tough locust staves. To bend this adamant wood into the fair curve of a rib, it must be cut to its cross-section and steamed in a long, closed, hissing iron pipe for half an hour. The locust ribs emerge at 200°F+ as limp as noodles. Limp for only moments. We will pluck ribs out one at a time with thick gloves and push them into the boat's inner shape, working feverishly before the inner heat dissipates and the locust stubbornness revives.
Contemporary sport boats are, in the old Massachusetts boatyard phrase, "built by the mile and cut off to suit." They're mass produced. You won't see ribs being steamed unless you haunt a cranky New England shipwright's shop peopled with wood-heads devoted to traditional (read "lavishly expensive") wooden boats built more carefully than a Hermann Miller coffee table.
We walk through the steps we will take in dumb-show first, noting where our feet will go, what will be in the way, who must step back, who must come forward. Everyone must work fast and in close concert, because the locust will be flexible from the steam box for less than a minute.
We take special care of these exquisite craft but they endure. Some are older than any of the people who work on them. And because why, mate? Because these 'ere boats is clinker-built, as light as eggshells but tough as pigs' noses. They are San Francisco variations on the Whitehall model. This means that they are rowing boats with a distinct and delicately cupped shaped, a "wineglass" transom (aft end), and that 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 constructed of thin, overlapping planks of a light, flexible wood (in this case, white cedar) "clenched" to thin ribs with copper rivets. This fastening mode is a very old usage that binds more tightly than nails and more securely than screws. Indeed, nails and screws wouldn't have much to "grab" because the stock is so thin. The soft-as-cheese cedar is milled thin, not much thicker than 1/4" and about three inches wide. The ribs are only 5/8" wide and about 1/2" thick. While they're still whippy and hot, we will drill through and secure a rib, the lower part of an overlapping cedar strake (one of the curving horizontal planks) and the upper part of the next strake.
Now. A rib is whisked out of the steam pipe, slammed into the boat, bent against the soft interior curve of the strakes and forced under some of the boat's inner structure. Held hard, holes are immediately drilled, time management and tool quickness.
As soon as the holes are made a copper riveting nail is tapped 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; it's like a chisel with a flat, blunt end drilled with a hole for the nail to occuply, so that whacking the burr down onto the nail forces the rib and strakes together. When the riveting tool is taken away, the nail is 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 with a small ball-peen hammer. This is the hammer with one flat head and one round head, made specifically for work like this – shaping the "mushroom" with the round head is called "peening". The copper is so malleable that it mushrooms over the burr and each stroke of the shaping ball-peen tightens the assembly.
It seems like intolerably fussy and unnecessary complication but it's the only thing that will bind these whisper-thin planks and light ribs into a remarkably rigid, nearly monocoque hull. It's historic, it's ancient methodology, very cool to watch and do.
Jay and I work as a team. Half the time I'm above the boat, tapping the rivets home, shaping the mushroomed-over heads in the soft copper. Half the time I'm under the boat, lying on the shop floor, holding the heavy bucking iron against the nail head. The shaping is a more focused task, it requires more care, but holding the bucking iron is heavier work.
There are compensations for that heavy work. Lying beneath the boat's lyric curves I see each strake describing a separate curved plane with a strake-thickness separating it from the next plane – graceful 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 smell bitter and damp. The drilled cedar smells like incense. The tapping and the calling between three or four sets of partners – two sets riveting, two sets placing new ribs – has a 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?
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself needs more physical work and more contact with working people. The abstract life of a writer and illustrator can be barren, like a room decorated with B&W print-outs of reports. A room and a life need color and a bit of mayhem.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
THE VOICE OF THE TURTLE CAN BE VERY LOUD
Dean Torges sent me an e-mail that I skimmed too quickly. He was telling me about salvaging a boat trailer and designing a new chicken house around it. [See Dean's wonderful blog at http://www.bowyersedge.com/]
This is nice enough, I suppose. But I somehow read that he was making a wonderful chicken house out of a houseboat, one of those fiberglass monstrosities 12' X 24' with a flying bridge, upper deck, and sliding glass doors to the spacious, dumb cabins.
Whatinhell got into my head? Where did the houseboat come from? It seemed like such a logical idea at the time, a pre-built structure to be pillaged, pierced and repurposed. I figured his high-voltage ingenuity dictated clever ways of dragging it about, perhaps just skidding its hull through the wet grass (it worked for the Stonehenge builders). I saw him saber-sawing through the bulkheads in fantastic high-rise patterns to make nesting boxes. I envisioned a chicken yacht.
This is a little like my deafness: I hear far more interesting things than people actually say. They're talking about "Ford mini-vans" and I'm hearing "Nordic blini fans." Anyone who knows me recognizes that it doesn't take much to set me off on a stirring fantasy of turbines from Denmark or Norway hurling potato and applesauce blini into vast solar-powered ovens by the hundredweight. Then I'm curtly corrected, brought back to pedestrian reality, "We said VANS, and where did you get this 'blini' notion?" I'm always disappointed. I'll think about those mighty pancake mills for days. I'll be almost able to smell the richness of the blini and hear the chunka-chunka-wheet sound of wholesome food a-making. Rats.
I'm sure the chicken trailer is nice and all. I'm sorry to have expected so much more. Wow. That would have been sweet, though.
This quickness to leap at folly has something to do with spring, no doubt.
I love my naps. But this was the first day I could comfortably open the window by my bed and sleep transported by warm breeze curling fragrant around me. The earth opened its heart and the leaves released volatiles of newness, buds and tender leaves. I slept like a four-year-old, and when my timer went off, telling me to get up and do some paying work, I told it to bugger off.
Spring has also subverted my attention in an old, familiar way. I was examining the March/April issue of WoodenBoat, in which I have an article and illustrations. I had a bit of a gloat about the illustrations and leafed through the balance of the magazine happily. Then I left it open beside my computer at the "classified" pages. Oh, dread temptation, oh, encouragement to covetousness.
The little B&W pictures of the boats seize me, tug me into their worlds helpless, and I am sighing over a Herreshoff H-55 Marco Polo Schooner – perhaps the only ugly boat L. Francis Herreshoff ever designed but, glorioski, what a performer and what a liveaboard! Slim and long, with three masts and three marconi sails, a jib, and provisions for staysails in the tradewinds. 6000 mile diesel range, capable of 14 knots with a modest quartering breeze, a blue-water cruiser. Be still my heart.
And here is a 27' gaff yawl, a Tern adapted from my favorite vessel, the Rozinante, another L. Francis Herreshoff design but this was perhaps his masterpiece of grace and cunning and sleekness. The Tern was retro-designed and built by my friend Nat Benjamin in Vineyard Haven. Only 27' but achingly beautiful, like a young Katherine Hepburn in a French-cut tank suit.
There's a 20' pilot-house motor launch on page 132, built for the owners of the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, to survey the waterfront activity in 1929. Rebuilt, restored, the winner of many gold-plater shows, as jaunty as she is salty.
Yes, and a piss-elegant 28' sharpie, an Egret, modeled after a British gunkholing camp-cruising design of the 1890's, rigged as a cat-ketch with a big damn centerboard and a shallow-water balanced rudder to steer without cares into the thin, thin waters where other sailors would be forced to wade.
Here is Cyclone, a rare 36' Van Dam Limousine. She's a varnished wonder with a howling inboard motor under exquisite alternating light-and-dark planked deck plates, a bow like a switchblade and a tucked-in, tumble-home flat stern that should always have a flag fluttering on a turned cedar standard. Her sisters were designed in the 1920's to take swells and dudes . . . well, wherever wet they wanted to go, probably with a professional boatman in a discreetly bullion-free pilot's cap.
And, stone the crows, this 46' flat-top, plumb-bowed Elco laid down in 1929, twelve years before Elco started churning out the most stirring boats ever employed in the service of our country, the immortal Elco PT boats. But this flat-top is a gent's yacht with a big damn saloon, teak decks . . .
There, you see my difficulty. Spring churns up the lees of things. I hear not only the voice of the turtle but the lap of little waves against the dock, and I smell copper bottom paint and fresh-sanded cedar. Oh, I will not leave this world with any grace at all. I love it all so much.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is much less sane than he assumes. That he can dress himself and wave bye-bye is not enough to qualify him as a solid citizen. He views the surrounding world through a coruscating scrim of mental fireworks that seem to spring spontaneously from his uncivilized brain. It is difficult for a pragmatic soul like me to countenance such license but we've been together for so long that I have come to admire his skill at decorating a dull landscape with fantastic projections. One hopes he doesn't need reality as much as the rest of us and, of course, he has me to fend it off.
This is nice enough, I suppose. But I somehow read that he was making a wonderful chicken house out of a houseboat, one of those fiberglass monstrosities 12' X 24' with a flying bridge, upper deck, and sliding glass doors to the spacious, dumb cabins.
Whatinhell got into my head? Where did the houseboat come from? It seemed like such a logical idea at the time, a pre-built structure to be pillaged, pierced and repurposed. I figured his high-voltage ingenuity dictated clever ways of dragging it about, perhaps just skidding its hull through the wet grass (it worked for the Stonehenge builders). I saw him saber-sawing through the bulkheads in fantastic high-rise patterns to make nesting boxes. I envisioned a chicken yacht.
This is a little like my deafness: I hear far more interesting things than people actually say. They're talking about "Ford mini-vans" and I'm hearing "Nordic blini fans." Anyone who knows me recognizes that it doesn't take much to set me off on a stirring fantasy of turbines from Denmark or Norway hurling potato and applesauce blini into vast solar-powered ovens by the hundredweight. Then I'm curtly corrected, brought back to pedestrian reality, "We said VANS, and where did you get this 'blini' notion?" I'm always disappointed. I'll think about those mighty pancake mills for days. I'll be almost able to smell the richness of the blini and hear the chunka-chunka-wheet sound of wholesome food a-making. Rats.
I'm sure the chicken trailer is nice and all. I'm sorry to have expected so much more. Wow. That would have been sweet, though.
This quickness to leap at folly has something to do with spring, no doubt.
I love my naps. But this was the first day I could comfortably open the window by my bed and sleep transported by warm breeze curling fragrant around me. The earth opened its heart and the leaves released volatiles of newness, buds and tender leaves. I slept like a four-year-old, and when my timer went off, telling me to get up and do some paying work, I told it to bugger off.
Spring has also subverted my attention in an old, familiar way. I was examining the March/April issue of WoodenBoat, in which I have an article and illustrations. I had a bit of a gloat about the illustrations and leafed through the balance of the magazine happily. Then I left it open beside my computer at the "classified" pages. Oh, dread temptation, oh, encouragement to covetousness.
The little B&W pictures of the boats seize me, tug me into their worlds helpless, and I am sighing over a Herreshoff H-55 Marco Polo Schooner – perhaps the only ugly boat L. Francis Herreshoff ever designed but, glorioski, what a performer and what a liveaboard! Slim and long, with three masts and three marconi sails, a jib, and provisions for staysails in the tradewinds. 6000 mile diesel range, capable of 14 knots with a modest quartering breeze, a blue-water cruiser. Be still my heart.
And here is a 27' gaff yawl, a Tern adapted from my favorite vessel, the Rozinante, another L. Francis Herreshoff design but this was perhaps his masterpiece of grace and cunning and sleekness. The Tern was retro-designed and built by my friend Nat Benjamin in Vineyard Haven. Only 27' but achingly beautiful, like a young Katherine Hepburn in a French-cut tank suit.
There's a 20' pilot-house motor launch on page 132, built for the owners of the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, to survey the waterfront activity in 1929. Rebuilt, restored, the winner of many gold-plater shows, as jaunty as she is salty.
Yes, and a piss-elegant 28' sharpie, an Egret, modeled after a British gunkholing camp-cruising design of the 1890's, rigged as a cat-ketch with a big damn centerboard and a shallow-water balanced rudder to steer without cares into the thin, thin waters where other sailors would be forced to wade.
Here is Cyclone, a rare 36' Van Dam Limousine. She's a varnished wonder with a howling inboard motor under exquisite alternating light-and-dark planked deck plates, a bow like a switchblade and a tucked-in, tumble-home flat stern that should always have a flag fluttering on a turned cedar standard. Her sisters were designed in the 1920's to take swells and dudes . . . well, wherever wet they wanted to go, probably with a professional boatman in a discreetly bullion-free pilot's cap.
And, stone the crows, this 46' flat-top, plumb-bowed Elco laid down in 1929, twelve years before Elco started churning out the most stirring boats ever employed in the service of our country, the immortal Elco PT boats. But this flat-top is a gent's yacht with a big damn saloon, teak decks . . .
There, you see my difficulty. Spring churns up the lees of things. I hear not only the voice of the turtle but the lap of little waves against the dock, and I smell copper bottom paint and fresh-sanded cedar. Oh, I will not leave this world with any grace at all. I love it all so much.
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
Himself is much less sane than he assumes. That he can dress himself and wave bye-bye is not enough to qualify him as a solid citizen. He views the surrounding world through a coruscating scrim of mental fireworks that seem to spring spontaneously from his uncivilized brain. It is difficult for a pragmatic soul like me to countenance such license but we've been together for so long that I have come to admire his skill at decorating a dull landscape with fantastic projections. One hopes he doesn't need reality as much as the rest of us and, of course, he has me to fend it off.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
VALENTINE'S DAY
Today is Valentine’s Day.
I prefer the pre-adolescent view of this odd glitch in the year’s topography: those little candy hearts with “I love you” and “be my own” imprinted on them (I don’t know how they did that, by the way). I remember sending valentines to everyone in class, and to getting everyone’s valentines. We didn’t know what we were faking. We thought it was something teen-agers and adults did, fell in love, sighed and sang, danced to sad music, wrote strange letters full of poetry. We were too young for the concept of “bittersweet,” and took our milk chocolate straight and creamy.
Later, when we thought we knew love, we were even less informed. We hadn’t learned about the “terrible otherness of people” and about the inevitable, groaning, tectonic shifts of spirit under the lace-rimmed valentine hearts. We didn’t know how dangerous passion could be because passion was our daily bread. We were passionate about Elvis and Bardot, Corvettes and dragsters, the Team and the flag. We didn’t know there were passions so different from pop-wonder.
As a boy I’d seen a hundred copperheads, walking in the woods and along streams. Oh, another copperhead. Then one day I saw a real copperhead, glorious in color and mesmerizing in pattern, beautiful and ugly, fat, flat-bottomed with wicked walls of perfectly elastic muscle mounting to a clean ridge of spine, with a nasty, squirmy rat tail ungraceful and incongruous at the end away from that broad, merciless, uncaring, cold-blooded strike-head. I stared. The copperhead, storing sun heat aboard a flat rock in a small stream, sensed me, its busy and intelligent tongue flailing the air in tiny strokes. Naturally, I ran. I didn’t run: I fled, a rout, a headlong retreat from reality. But even as I levitated up a near-sheer bank (already a hundred yards from the careless monster) the hundreds of copperheads I had casually witnessed fell in a broken-ice, shattered image to become . . . water snakes.
So when I discerned that love was different, dangerous, toxically powerful, uncompromising of plans or friends or intent, it was too late. The passion was much too powerful for my frail balsa wings and I crashed disastrously. It was not a mighty crash because my soul was not very large. It was mostly a folding up of paper-thin illusions, a crackling more than a crash. But I’d met passion, so all the flirtations and romantic notions dropped in the same broken-ice shattering to become . . . sweet little valentine hearts, “I love you,” “Be my own.” Available in bulk or in cellophane bags.
And later, more times than I’m comfortable specifying, I ignored the reality of love, insisted on the Disney version, crashed, burned, crumpled, destroyed many good components in a careless life. Because I was careless about the best things in my life, cavalier, as if they would always come, replacing themselves with even better wonders. My God, it’s taken me so damn long to see anything about this business of living. I lost, more than once and more than twice, the most precious things I’ve ever held, and it is a conscious, weight-lifting effort to forgive myself for my lack of respect.
So today is Valentine’s Day. And when I recognized the day in the morning an old song blew through my head like a draft:
I'm through with love
I'll never fall again.
Said adieu to love
Don't ever call again.
For I must have you or no one
And so I'm through with love.
I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there.
I have stocked my heart
with icy, Frigidaire.
And I mean to care for no one
Because I'm through with love
But even if I don’t know life better than a passing nod, I know myself. I know I’ll be looking for that strange sickness the rest of my life. Knowing how dangerous, poisonous, corrosive, ungovernable and unforgiving it is, I’ll walk right up to it and smile like a yokel, hoping to be loved by Love.
There’s a cruel old joke about a miner heading for the saloon. His partner says, “Are you gonna sit down at that poker game again?” A shrug, a nod. “Hell, don’t you know that game is rigged?”
“Yah. I know. But it’s the only game in town.”
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
For a supposedly bright man, Himself has a weak spirit and a haphazard tendency to delusions. In many ways he shouldn't be allowed out on his own.
I prefer the pre-adolescent view of this odd glitch in the year’s topography: those little candy hearts with “I love you” and “be my own” imprinted on them (I don’t know how they did that, by the way). I remember sending valentines to everyone in class, and to getting everyone’s valentines. We didn’t know what we were faking. We thought it was something teen-agers and adults did, fell in love, sighed and sang, danced to sad music, wrote strange letters full of poetry. We were too young for the concept of “bittersweet,” and took our milk chocolate straight and creamy.
Later, when we thought we knew love, we were even less informed. We hadn’t learned about the “terrible otherness of people” and about the inevitable, groaning, tectonic shifts of spirit under the lace-rimmed valentine hearts. We didn’t know how dangerous passion could be because passion was our daily bread. We were passionate about Elvis and Bardot, Corvettes and dragsters, the Team and the flag. We didn’t know there were passions so different from pop-wonder.
As a boy I’d seen a hundred copperheads, walking in the woods and along streams. Oh, another copperhead. Then one day I saw a real copperhead, glorious in color and mesmerizing in pattern, beautiful and ugly, fat, flat-bottomed with wicked walls of perfectly elastic muscle mounting to a clean ridge of spine, with a nasty, squirmy rat tail ungraceful and incongruous at the end away from that broad, merciless, uncaring, cold-blooded strike-head. I stared. The copperhead, storing sun heat aboard a flat rock in a small stream, sensed me, its busy and intelligent tongue flailing the air in tiny strokes. Naturally, I ran. I didn’t run: I fled, a rout, a headlong retreat from reality. But even as I levitated up a near-sheer bank (already a hundred yards from the careless monster) the hundreds of copperheads I had casually witnessed fell in a broken-ice, shattered image to become . . . water snakes.
So when I discerned that love was different, dangerous, toxically powerful, uncompromising of plans or friends or intent, it was too late. The passion was much too powerful for my frail balsa wings and I crashed disastrously. It was not a mighty crash because my soul was not very large. It was mostly a folding up of paper-thin illusions, a crackling more than a crash. But I’d met passion, so all the flirtations and romantic notions dropped in the same broken-ice shattering to become . . . sweet little valentine hearts, “I love you,” “Be my own.” Available in bulk or in cellophane bags.
And later, more times than I’m comfortable specifying, I ignored the reality of love, insisted on the Disney version, crashed, burned, crumpled, destroyed many good components in a careless life. Because I was careless about the best things in my life, cavalier, as if they would always come, replacing themselves with even better wonders. My God, it’s taken me so damn long to see anything about this business of living. I lost, more than once and more than twice, the most precious things I’ve ever held, and it is a conscious, weight-lifting effort to forgive myself for my lack of respect.
So today is Valentine’s Day. And when I recognized the day in the morning an old song blew through my head like a draft:
I'm through with love
I'll never fall again.
Said adieu to love
Don't ever call again.
For I must have you or no one
And so I'm through with love.
I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there.
I have stocked my heart
with icy, Frigidaire.
And I mean to care for no one
Because I'm through with love
But even if I don’t know life better than a passing nod, I know myself. I know I’ll be looking for that strange sickness the rest of my life. Knowing how dangerous, poisonous, corrosive, ungovernable and unforgiving it is, I’ll walk right up to it and smile like a yokel, hoping to be loved by Love.
There’s a cruel old joke about a miner heading for the saloon. His partner says, “Are you gonna sit down at that poker game again?” A shrug, a nod. “Hell, don’t you know that game is rigged?”
“Yah. I know. But it’s the only game in town.”
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
For a supposedly bright man, Himself has a weak spirit and a haphazard tendency to delusions. In many ways he shouldn't be allowed out on his own.
Friday, February 12, 2010
MINE CANARIES
CREATIVE PEOPLE have always lived in the thin ends of the bell curve, out on the fringe, scuttling about and picking at the table scraps of big money. The exhibits I've had a hand in designing, the books I've created, the articles I've written, the films with which I've worked – they've all been secondary fruits of "loose money" freed up for social projects by embarrassingly large profits. When profits dip, artists are the mine canaries of capital flow: we fall dead off our perches before the big guys can feel the pinch. Looking around me I see a lot of empty perches. And there's a bit of a rasp in my throat, as well.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
What follows is part of a reply to the director of the Bay Area Discovery Museum, a lovely place for little guys. I proposed we collaborate on some exhibits and he, graciously and reluctantly, confessed that the BADM didn't have the funding to pursue anything new in this crunch. I replied:
Yes, the economy is harsh, but I can’t imagine any other result from our global adventuring. As Shackleton said, “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” We don’t seem to manufacture anything in the hardware store, now. Many of our best young men and women are scattered across the world fighting and dying for folks who don’t want us there. We’re fouling our nest but can’t seem to stop. The rolling juggernaut of corporate America more or less ignores all our objections and cries. Yet we DO live in a favored land, and our culture IS strong, has a work ethic, and has good roots. The problem could be that our leaders don’t demand much of us, or much more than merely spending. The children you and I try to encourage will reap the whirlwind, and that right soon.
My current book project is Black Bonfire, about the end of cheap oil. It’s inevitable, calamitous, and much, much closer than I imagined when I began the book. The book is directed at young adults, giving them an overview of energy as they enter adulthood, as they become citizens. When you want to do an exhibit on just how deeply oil has become the warp and woof of life, give a shout. If you’re sitting inside, everything you see – from wood paneling to steel shelves to plastic pens – is or was put together by oil. Oil that we won’t have.
So how do we, as creative workers, survive the present economy? Dunno. We’ve always been on the fringe, depending on an upstream flow from the largesse of wealthy patrons, not too far removed from Cosimo de Medici. I suppose we can hope that the wealthy will always be wealthy. I’m not sure that will be borne out in the cultural upheaval. I don’t want to sound apocalyptic but major institutions will change. The hoary dictum, “What good for USSteel is good for the country” isn’t quite so true.
Perhaps we’ll survive like that marvelous soul William Kamkwamba, who built a windmill in his yard from junk and electrified his African village. What do we need with the Incredible Hulk and Batman when we have Kamkwamba? Perhaps we’ll build our exhibits out of local junk, building from the midden pile of Marin society. Our work could come to resemble the ancient trade of the storytellers who traveled from village to village, sitting under trees and eaves to spin out tales that amazed and informed.
[Jon Steward interviews Kamkwamba at http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-october-7-2009/william-kamkwamba]
Artists. We're all canaries trying to survive this oppressive atmosphere, clinging to our wobbly little perches with our feeble claws, and still singing brightly. How many friends do you have who are paralyzed by dread and frustration? On the other side, how many artists do you know who are doing jes' fine? If it weren't for Zoloft, we'd have a mass suicide of artists (something like M. Night Shyamalian's The Happening) and the balance of the population would say, "Whatinhell have they got to complain about? All they do is sing and swing."
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
What Himself neglects to acknowledge is that living on the fringes is a choice, not a profession. I could be demonizing the victim by bracing him thusly, but living on the fringes is inherently dangerous and unstable. The deep, strong current is where the action is, not the back eddies in the reeds. It's artistic hubris to assume the world will pull you triumphant from the edges and proclaim you its darling. Himself has a task: get into the mainstream or perish. This is harsh advice but so is the economy.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
MORE SMALL BOAT TALK
I REMEMBER a daysail with the Traditional Small Craft Association up in the Sacramento Delta. I had an idyllic morning and afternoon aboard a Redwing 18, a home-built plywood skiff with a big cockpit and a cuddy. WoodenBoat sells the plans for about $100, and I'm wondering how many Redwings there are, carrying couples and families over small waters.
I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.
The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.
An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.
I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.
I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.
Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"
I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.
Adkins
I'm accustomed to big, powerful sloops and ketches in the 36' to 65' range – OPB's, other people's boats – but that odd little outboard in the complex little sloughs of the Delta offered a scaled-down, wholly delightful adventure.
The four-stroke, ten horsepower engine was quiet at the pokey rate of travel the slough mandated, perhaps 5.5 knots. Conversation was easy, the banks were lovely and the birds were plentiful and varied – egrets, green herons, great blue herons, redwing blackbirds, crows (my favorites), wrens, robins, mockingbirds . . . Some spoke of seeing otters in less-traveled sloughs. The cooler with sodas and lunch was in the shade of the cuddy cabin. The day was fine though I could see that a canvas Bimini cockpit cover would be a blessing in the depth of summer.
An oddly pleasing part of the voyage was the wheel, itself. It was a small galvanized workboat wheel, with its six teak hand-spokes extending the cast galvanized spokes, mounted on the starboard face of the coach house. The little engine swung to it, and the engine controls were mounted to the right of the wheel. Perhaps the comfortingly elderly wheel made it feel more like a sea boat. We're all suggestible, subject to delusions, me more than most. I remember it as one of my favorite little passages.
I love big boats, long may they wave, but I'm speculating that the marine industry must expand the base of small boaters. Small experiences may lead to big-boat purchases in time. Even an 18-footer consumes an appreciable amount of marine equipment, year by year.
I could be way wrong about this. If I were a businessperson I wouldn't be a writer. For boatbuilders already set up to produce grand vessels the only course is to winkle out high-ticket owners from the Fortune 500. One thinks of steep oil price increases, however, and wonders what big breweries were thinking just before Prohibition. Some actually went into the root beer business.
Welcoming a wider public to life on the water is good sense and good seed. By and by most dinghy sailors want a bigger boat for longer voyages, and for learning new things. Young people who play on the water with their families are more likely to invest in a big boat when they have families of their own. Should boatbuilders and chandleries be thinking about what Stewart Brand calls "the Long Now?"
I find such peace and a settling of the soul on the water. I can't imagine not getting onto the water – on a big boat, a Redwing 18, or an innertube. Water is the only magic I know. So I'm an advocate, and were I the Pied Piper the trail of my tiny-footed band would lead to the shore. I want kids to see the grace of the water, and to see the shore from the ocean perspective – both useful visions.
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
It's true that Himself is calmer and more lucid, less flighty and anxious, when he returns from a trip around the Bay. Perhaps other men center themselves in the woodshop or on their bicycles or hunting moose. Himself is a Water Healer; get him off the shore for a few hours and he's nearly tolerable. He says that the problems of the land diminish in proportion to the height of the trees as he sails away from the dock. Is it merely one form of temporary nepenthe, or is it like the old Norton Utilities program that rearranged your hard drive storage into logical, faster segments? Either way it's better than vodka.
Adkins
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
ARTICLE FROM SOUNDINGS by William Sisson
OK, I admit it. I’m a sucker for good-looking small boats. Always have been.
The latest one to catch my eye is the Whiticar 21, which is both gorgeous and one of a kind. It’s the only outboard boat ever built by Whiticar Boat Works, the noted Stuart, Fla., builder of quality cold-molded offshore sportfishermen.
This little gem was built in 1966 for T.R. Garlington of custom boatbuilder Garlington Yachts, who used to run her a mile or two out into the Gulf Stream on fair days to fish for sailfish. She was completely restored in 2009 by Paul Scopinich, who owns Scopinich Boat Works in Stuart, which is known for its quality fighting chairs and custom boats.
Scopinich bought the 21-footer about eight years ago from a local captain and stored it in a garage until last year, when business slowed and it seemed like a good time to tackle a refit.
“I pulled it out of the garage in June, and we all went at it,” Scopinich says. The cold-molded mahogany-planked hull was in surprisingly good shape. There were a few soft spots on the deck, on one of the frames and around the aluminum windshield, but otherwise the structure was sound.
Scopinich was impressed by how well the little Whiticar had weathered its 43 years. “The hull was perfect,” he says. “They go overboard when they build stuff. They don’t forget the epoxy.”
The only structural changes Scopinich had to make during the restoration were replacing a few planks and frames. In breathing new life into the Whiticar, he and his team completely rewired the boat, put a teak deck over the original cold-molded plywood one, added a teak helm pod and two new helm chairs, and rechromed all the original hardware.
He replaced the aluminum windshield with a lovely wooden one that Whiticar founder Curt Whiticar sketched for him on the back of a nautical chart. “Curt, who is 94, is the one who built that boat,” says Scopinich, who enjoyed consulting with the spry nonagenarian during the restoration of the former Ju Ann.
At one time, the boat was powered by a Mercury Black Max outboard. Scopinich hung a new 90-hp Suzuki 4-stroke on the transom and replaced the Suzuki stickers with new specially made Mercury ones from the Black Max period. Nice touch. He painted the hull “fighting lady yellow,” with a “snow white” deck.
In all, he figures he has about 850 hours into the project, which wrapped up in November. Scopinich has put a price tag north of $80,000 on her, although he says he may wind up using the boat himself. For photos or to contact Scopinich, go to www.scopinich.com, (772) 288-3111.
She is a lovely little dayboat with a strong pedigree. Makes you wish boats like this were the rule in our world today, rather than such an exception.
ADKINS COMMENTS to the Marine Industry Forum
What a sweetheart of a boat, and what a reassuring story about trustworthy construction, respect for the vintage form, and the care that our older boats deserve. The icing on the cake was the collusion of her original, 90+ builder.
I'm wondering if we in the marine sector are reading our compass correctly. A lot of us are surely following the rest of American business by scrapping over the disposable income of the very wealthy. That's the common wisdom. Granted, she was rebuilt as a gold-plater with a gold pricetag, and one hopes the builder is rewarded with a good price. But when I see a sweet little boat like this I wonder if we shouldn't be selling the water-life to a more modest demographic of families and young people. Perhaps boating can once again be an ideal of egalitarian sport. It wasn't so long ago that New England yacht clubs were places you could meet folks with very different net worths – a senator, a young middle-class family, or a retired bass-fishing guide. Perhaps we're seeing an era of small boat exploration again.
WoodenBoat is running a series on "Getting Started In Boats" (I've written two of them, but they're all quite good). Young men and women are making impressive kayak trips, camp-cruising along the coast and even out into the big sounds, very like the dreamy, iconic voyages of the Rob Roy in 1866, or some of the pre-1900 voyages down the coast in decked canoes and kayaks.
The only thing we know about oil is that it will become more and more expensive. If the house of Saud falls, which seems more probable than possible, the price of oil will spike immediately. Folks who now motor out of San Francisco Bay for good fishing around the Farallones simply won't be traveling that far, if at all (80 gallons @ $4/gal for a day of fishing?). A contemporary problem is abandoned vessels, often sound and well-fitted, abandoned by owners who simply can't afford the continuing costs of fuel, insurance, slips and maintenance. Perhaps some of the gracious, big twin-screw behemoths will survive but the bottom will drop out of marina service and marine sales. Unless we cultivate a new market in family boating aboard small, home-maintainable vessels, kit-boats, small adventurers.
My meetings with the Traditional Small Craft Association show a lively interest in both old forms and in small adventures on a budget. Are we doing enough to encourage a new market? Are we emulating that sterling character, that admirable waterman found in all Coast Pilots, the Prudent Mariner? Who's watching the compass?
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
IT'S ABOUT TIME himself paid attention to his blog. He's been reliably informed that the only way to raise his creative profile is to put himself out into the current, to float his work in the channel. Direct selling does creatives very little good. Most of his "big mailings" have netted nothing, nada, goose egg, while his major commissions seem to drop out of nowhere. Nothing drops from nowhere. He's needed a bit of prodding but Adkins is at last beginning to use his blabby facility and send it out again. "Watch this space," as they say. He needs a crotchety dwarf like me to nudge him into action.
Braxinoso
OK, I admit it. I’m a sucker for good-looking small boats. Always have been.
The latest one to catch my eye is the Whiticar 21, which is both gorgeous and one of a kind. It’s the only outboard boat ever built by Whiticar Boat Works, the noted Stuart, Fla., builder of quality cold-molded offshore sportfishermen.
This little gem was built in 1966 for T.R. Garlington of custom boatbuilder Garlington Yachts, who used to run her a mile or two out into the Gulf Stream on fair days to fish for sailfish. She was completely restored in 2009 by Paul Scopinich, who owns Scopinich Boat Works in Stuart, which is known for its quality fighting chairs and custom boats.
Scopinich bought the 21-footer about eight years ago from a local captain and stored it in a garage until last year, when business slowed and it seemed like a good time to tackle a refit.
“I pulled it out of the garage in June, and we all went at it,” Scopinich says. The cold-molded mahogany-planked hull was in surprisingly good shape. There were a few soft spots on the deck, on one of the frames and around the aluminum windshield, but otherwise the structure was sound.
Scopinich was impressed by how well the little Whiticar had weathered its 43 years. “The hull was perfect,” he says. “They go overboard when they build stuff. They don’t forget the epoxy.”
The only structural changes Scopinich had to make during the restoration were replacing a few planks and frames. In breathing new life into the Whiticar, he and his team completely rewired the boat, put a teak deck over the original cold-molded plywood one, added a teak helm pod and two new helm chairs, and rechromed all the original hardware.
He replaced the aluminum windshield with a lovely wooden one that Whiticar founder Curt Whiticar sketched for him on the back of a nautical chart. “Curt, who is 94, is the one who built that boat,” says Scopinich, who enjoyed consulting with the spry nonagenarian during the restoration of the former Ju Ann.
At one time, the boat was powered by a Mercury Black Max outboard. Scopinich hung a new 90-hp Suzuki 4-stroke on the transom and replaced the Suzuki stickers with new specially made Mercury ones from the Black Max period. Nice touch. He painted the hull “fighting lady yellow,” with a “snow white” deck.
In all, he figures he has about 850 hours into the project, which wrapped up in November. Scopinich has put a price tag north of $80,000 on her, although he says he may wind up using the boat himself. For photos or to contact Scopinich, go to www.scopinich.com, (772) 288-3111.
She is a lovely little dayboat with a strong pedigree. Makes you wish boats like this were the rule in our world today, rather than such an exception.
ADKINS COMMENTS to the Marine Industry Forum
What a sweetheart of a boat, and what a reassuring story about trustworthy construction, respect for the vintage form, and the care that our older boats deserve. The icing on the cake was the collusion of her original, 90+ builder.
I'm wondering if we in the marine sector are reading our compass correctly. A lot of us are surely following the rest of American business by scrapping over the disposable income of the very wealthy. That's the common wisdom. Granted, she was rebuilt as a gold-plater with a gold pricetag, and one hopes the builder is rewarded with a good price. But when I see a sweet little boat like this I wonder if we shouldn't be selling the water-life to a more modest demographic of families and young people. Perhaps boating can once again be an ideal of egalitarian sport. It wasn't so long ago that New England yacht clubs were places you could meet folks with very different net worths – a senator, a young middle-class family, or a retired bass-fishing guide. Perhaps we're seeing an era of small boat exploration again.
WoodenBoat is running a series on "Getting Started In Boats" (I've written two of them, but they're all quite good). Young men and women are making impressive kayak trips, camp-cruising along the coast and even out into the big sounds, very like the dreamy, iconic voyages of the Rob Roy in 1866, or some of the pre-1900 voyages down the coast in decked canoes and kayaks.
The only thing we know about oil is that it will become more and more expensive. If the house of Saud falls, which seems more probable than possible, the price of oil will spike immediately. Folks who now motor out of San Francisco Bay for good fishing around the Farallones simply won't be traveling that far, if at all (80 gallons @ $4/gal for a day of fishing?). A contemporary problem is abandoned vessels, often sound and well-fitted, abandoned by owners who simply can't afford the continuing costs of fuel, insurance, slips and maintenance. Perhaps some of the gracious, big twin-screw behemoths will survive but the bottom will drop out of marina service and marine sales. Unless we cultivate a new market in family boating aboard small, home-maintainable vessels, kit-boats, small adventurers.
My meetings with the Traditional Small Craft Association show a lively interest in both old forms and in small adventures on a budget. Are we doing enough to encourage a new market? Are we emulating that sterling character, that admirable waterman found in all Coast Pilots, the Prudent Mariner? Who's watching the compass?
Adkins
BRAXINOSO SPEAKS
IT'S ABOUT TIME himself paid attention to his blog. He's been reliably informed that the only way to raise his creative profile is to put himself out into the current, to float his work in the channel. Direct selling does creatives very little good. Most of his "big mailings" have netted nothing, nada, goose egg, while his major commissions seem to drop out of nowhere. Nothing drops from nowhere. He's needed a bit of prodding but Adkins is at last beginning to use his blabby facility and send it out again. "Watch this space," as they say. He needs a crotchety dwarf like me to nudge him into action.
Braxinoso
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Inland Passage
Skipper Chris Northcutt and I took a wonderful journey last weekend.
A boat is a departure machine; it takes you generally where you point it, imperfectly, but it perfectly brings you to fresh perception. Probably because it forces you to cut back on world-clutter in favor of prudent navigation and survival (not sinking), and because it takes you off the highway, onto the theoretically geometric plane (locally perturbed) of the wide water, out where the perspective exceeds a few car-lengths, out beyond human scale. On the fretting surface, perpetually finding its energy equilibrium, you're involved in a time-lens through which you can often see familiar topography and territory as you might have seen it two hundred years ago. Though you can notice the minute twinkle and flow of humdrum traffic on Route 101, six miles away, you can also see the tailing scars up by the peak of Mt. Burdell, evidence of a mine worked by pick and shovel and headlamp. You can prudently steer clear of the Vallejo ferry's route – a high-tech catamaran of 130 feet carrying two hundred passengers at 20 knots but leaving a wake less troubled than a Boston Whaler's passing – but the ferry obliges you to sense the hydrography that shapes its course, the same hydrography that shaped the passage of deep draught passenger vessels carrying prospective gold miners up the Sacramento River to the American River digs, the hydrography closely played across the "flats" of the upper Bay when they were navigated by flat-bottomed, practical, cranky scow sloops carrying twenty-foot loads of hay (the captain stood on a ladder and shouted steering directions to the helmsman below him) or roped in cows, sheep, oxen, mules, or bins of produce, or ziggurats of chicken crates. You see the past, if not in color and movement, then in consequence, distant perturbation, like the wake of the ferry as it reaches you, the passing of another voyage rocking your boat.
Weather outside the Gate was daunting: 20k to 40k winds, 11 foot seas every 9 seconds, brutal weather for a small boat. So we nosed past the perpetually swung-open railroad bridge at its mouth to trend up the Petaluma River. The cruising guide mentions that it was once the third busiest waterway in California, after the Sacramento and the American we suppose. We discovered evidence of former and continuing commerce.
This was an easy interior voyage. We were on a comfy Beneteau 36 that draws six feet. This is deep in relation to most of the sport vessels that use the Petaluma so we steered by depth sounder, watching the digital numbers as closely as the course, swinging wide on the outside curves where the river cuts a deeper channel, trending toward the middle in straights, nodding back and forth when the channel wanders and the numbers decrease, throttling back when they approach 5 feet (below the keel) to cast back and forth like a hound, sniffing out the deep numbers again. Concentration and exploration, tight work. But the setting was broad and fragrant. It was like sailing (without sails up; we motored) through bright, flat countryside! Sweet and peaceful.
We started up blue heron, egret, ducks, geese, little green heron. The banks and sometimes ramshackle docks embraced a few forgotten boats being reclaimed by the water and land. More artifacts: unfinished "project" boats from the Whole Earth Catalogue hippy days – ancient wooden relics sketchily refurbished and a few ferro-cement hulls abandoned by builders who finally found a girlfriend with a house. Perched on one prominence of the west bank sat another project boat, a rust-red welded steel enigma with many rectangular windows in banks, a plumb bow over a flat bottom running back to painstakingly (and skillfully) shaped prop ducts for a twin-engined controlled-flow propulsion scheme. Curiously, it had lengths of 2" angle iron projecting horizontally about two feet from the hull around the perimeter. For what? What was the purpose of this odd craft? It reminded me of the thousands of experimental vessels that have been built for one shake-down cruise and then discarded as the valuable trial of an idea that didn't meet promise. But this experiment never reached the water. Its builder's hard on the river bank was as far as it ever voyaged. The hedgehog of its defensive angle irons gave it a pouting, shamed air.
We passed beached seine boats (roller-bowed scows that gather up herring nets), liveaboard trawlers, raffish riverfront cottages with rickety docks that looked unmistakably jolly. We passed kayakers, one industriously casting into the banks. In truth we passed lots of fishermen but the river fishers never told us what was running. They didn't seem to care and were so content that the lack of focus appeared to be salubrious.
We passed odd barge tugs, as high as their length. Their stability must depend on the mating clasp with their barge. And then we passed barges. Big barges. Because Petaluma is a working town, still, unlike the tourist-dead show-towns of Sausalito and Mill Valley. Petaluma has rich gravel pits that supply construction needs across the Bay. We passed three of them, processing and shifting gravel in overhead shuttles with a hum and a hiss. Rumor also has it that Petaluma is the egg capital of California, though we didn't see a single chicken. You'd assume that in the egg capital you'd see at least a few escaped chickens running for cover. Nope.
We went all the way to the head of navigation, to the turning basin right in the center of Petaluma. Yes, directly in the center. One block away from the live-music theater, three blocks from the cineplex, within four blocks of dozens of interesting restaurants, shops, bookstores.
We had dropped our docking lines at Pt. Richmond on Saturday at 0830h and went up-Bay on a flooding tide, arriving in the basin (about 9 miles, crowflight, above the mouth) at 1430h. Once in Petaluma we took it way easy. We napped, I walked around reconnoitering. We had a great time. At 1730h we had a sandwich at Flipper's, looking across the basin at our own boat and the ten or so big damn Carver sportfishermen and motor cruisers that were having some kind of meet, there, and then headed to the cineplex, but for our chosen movie only front row and scattered singles were available. Forget it. So we sleuthed out a bookstore, which happened to be a very fine bookstore, indeed. I found a used copy of Goodbye Mickey Mouse for Chris (he hadn't read any of Len Deighton's excellent WW II stuff) and spent a happy hour browsing, buying a few good books. Then we returned to the boat. The weather had cooled rapidly, it was a great reading and sleeping night, and we were as happy as bugs in a rug.
The trip downriver was just as pleasant, just as interesting as the upriver passage. We avoided a gargantuan barge returning for a gravel refill. We were wary of waterskiers in the broad sections. We put on sunblock, wore our sunhats, and we drank a lot of electrolyte liquid and soda. It was hot. Threading the narrow, dogleg channel from the river mouth to the slightly deeper southern reaches of San Pablo Bay against the wind was dicey under power (wind in our teeth) but uncomplicated. The water around the channel at the very head of the Bay was confused miniature chop over shallow water, less than six feet deep, gray and turbid with silt. About six nautical miles out of the Petaluma's mouth we reached deeper water and set a course for the Richmond narrows between San Pablo Bay (to the north) and San Francisco Bay to the south. Though collectively it's all called The Bay. In another six nautical miles we passed The Brothers. We swung west and avoided any involvement with a docking supertanker at the Chevron docks, and entered Brick Yard Marina around 1600h.
Putting the boat to bed was simple, except for leaving one porthole open when we sluiced down the decks, flooding the cabin somewhat. No biggie. It's a boat, for pity's sake. It expects a little water. As we carted our goods to our cars we began to hear word of folks who had spent the weekend outside the Gate. Horrible times. Scuttled boats, weeping last messages, brutal days-long pounding. Perhaps we should have felt left out of adventure but we're older sailors; we enjoy simplicity and the lack of terror, good food, a nice ramble ashore. It was a successful sailing adventure for us. We never raised jib or main during the entire trip. Did we feel apostate? Unfaithful to our principles? We did not. We were happy, feeling that slightly toasted sun and wind nip, and drove home on 101 smiling.
For a self-indulgent sybarite who loves his comforts he talks about the Good Old Days suspiciously often. He's enough of an historian to know they weren't that good, the old mores more ethically compromised than current attitudes, the quality of life smellier and more tedious than Himself could bear for a week. Getting a scow sloop to market in the City was long drudgery. Perhaps he's not longing for the old ways so much as admiring their immediate cleverness. He doesn't have any grasp of string theory or the mathematical basis of quantum theory but he understands rope and pulleys, and he likes to talk about what he understands. He persistently thinks of himself as "the feathers at the back of the arrow," giving things a spin while slowing the headlong flight a bit, keeping the arc true. So, to place it in the most charitable light, this concern with historical sidelights is his notion of balancing things.
Braxinoso
A boat is a departure machine; it takes you generally where you point it, imperfectly, but it perfectly brings you to fresh perception. Probably because it forces you to cut back on world-clutter in favor of prudent navigation and survival (not sinking), and because it takes you off the highway, onto the theoretically geometric plane (locally perturbed) of the wide water, out where the perspective exceeds a few car-lengths, out beyond human scale. On the fretting surface, perpetually finding its energy equilibrium, you're involved in a time-lens through which you can often see familiar topography and territory as you might have seen it two hundred years ago. Though you can notice the minute twinkle and flow of humdrum traffic on Route 101, six miles away, you can also see the tailing scars up by the peak of Mt. Burdell, evidence of a mine worked by pick and shovel and headlamp. You can prudently steer clear of the Vallejo ferry's route – a high-tech catamaran of 130 feet carrying two hundred passengers at 20 knots but leaving a wake less troubled than a Boston Whaler's passing – but the ferry obliges you to sense the hydrography that shapes its course, the same hydrography that shaped the passage of deep draught passenger vessels carrying prospective gold miners up the Sacramento River to the American River digs, the hydrography closely played across the "flats" of the upper Bay when they were navigated by flat-bottomed, practical, cranky scow sloops carrying twenty-foot loads of hay (the captain stood on a ladder and shouted steering directions to the helmsman below him) or roped in cows, sheep, oxen, mules, or bins of produce, or ziggurats of chicken crates. You see the past, if not in color and movement, then in consequence, distant perturbation, like the wake of the ferry as it reaches you, the passing of another voyage rocking your boat.
Weather outside the Gate was daunting: 20k to 40k winds, 11 foot seas every 9 seconds, brutal weather for a small boat. So we nosed past the perpetually swung-open railroad bridge at its mouth to trend up the Petaluma River. The cruising guide mentions that it was once the third busiest waterway in California, after the Sacramento and the American we suppose. We discovered evidence of former and continuing commerce.
This was an easy interior voyage. We were on a comfy Beneteau 36 that draws six feet. This is deep in relation to most of the sport vessels that use the Petaluma so we steered by depth sounder, watching the digital numbers as closely as the course, swinging wide on the outside curves where the river cuts a deeper channel, trending toward the middle in straights, nodding back and forth when the channel wanders and the numbers decrease, throttling back when they approach 5 feet (below the keel) to cast back and forth like a hound, sniffing out the deep numbers again. Concentration and exploration, tight work. But the setting was broad and fragrant. It was like sailing (without sails up; we motored) through bright, flat countryside! Sweet and peaceful.
We started up blue heron, egret, ducks, geese, little green heron. The banks and sometimes ramshackle docks embraced a few forgotten boats being reclaimed by the water and land. More artifacts: unfinished "project" boats from the Whole Earth Catalogue hippy days – ancient wooden relics sketchily refurbished and a few ferro-cement hulls abandoned by builders who finally found a girlfriend with a house. Perched on one prominence of the west bank sat another project boat, a rust-red welded steel enigma with many rectangular windows in banks, a plumb bow over a flat bottom running back to painstakingly (and skillfully) shaped prop ducts for a twin-engined controlled-flow propulsion scheme. Curiously, it had lengths of 2" angle iron projecting horizontally about two feet from the hull around the perimeter. For what? What was the purpose of this odd craft? It reminded me of the thousands of experimental vessels that have been built for one shake-down cruise and then discarded as the valuable trial of an idea that didn't meet promise. But this experiment never reached the water. Its builder's hard on the river bank was as far as it ever voyaged. The hedgehog of its defensive angle irons gave it a pouting, shamed air.
We passed beached seine boats (roller-bowed scows that gather up herring nets), liveaboard trawlers, raffish riverfront cottages with rickety docks that looked unmistakably jolly. We passed kayakers, one industriously casting into the banks. In truth we passed lots of fishermen but the river fishers never told us what was running. They didn't seem to care and were so content that the lack of focus appeared to be salubrious.
We passed odd barge tugs, as high as their length. Their stability must depend on the mating clasp with their barge. And then we passed barges. Big barges. Because Petaluma is a working town, still, unlike the tourist-dead show-towns of Sausalito and Mill Valley. Petaluma has rich gravel pits that supply construction needs across the Bay. We passed three of them, processing and shifting gravel in overhead shuttles with a hum and a hiss. Rumor also has it that Petaluma is the egg capital of California, though we didn't see a single chicken. You'd assume that in the egg capital you'd see at least a few escaped chickens running for cover. Nope.
We went all the way to the head of navigation, to the turning basin right in the center of Petaluma. Yes, directly in the center. One block away from the live-music theater, three blocks from the cineplex, within four blocks of dozens of interesting restaurants, shops, bookstores.
We had dropped our docking lines at Pt. Richmond on Saturday at 0830h and went up-Bay on a flooding tide, arriving in the basin (about 9 miles, crowflight, above the mouth) at 1430h. Once in Petaluma we took it way easy. We napped, I walked around reconnoitering. We had a great time. At 1730h we had a sandwich at Flipper's, looking across the basin at our own boat and the ten or so big damn Carver sportfishermen and motor cruisers that were having some kind of meet, there, and then headed to the cineplex, but for our chosen movie only front row and scattered singles were available. Forget it. So we sleuthed out a bookstore, which happened to be a very fine bookstore, indeed. I found a used copy of Goodbye Mickey Mouse for Chris (he hadn't read any of Len Deighton's excellent WW II stuff) and spent a happy hour browsing, buying a few good books. Then we returned to the boat. The weather had cooled rapidly, it was a great reading and sleeping night, and we were as happy as bugs in a rug.
The trip downriver was just as pleasant, just as interesting as the upriver passage. We avoided a gargantuan barge returning for a gravel refill. We were wary of waterskiers in the broad sections. We put on sunblock, wore our sunhats, and we drank a lot of electrolyte liquid and soda. It was hot. Threading the narrow, dogleg channel from the river mouth to the slightly deeper southern reaches of San Pablo Bay against the wind was dicey under power (wind in our teeth) but uncomplicated. The water around the channel at the very head of the Bay was confused miniature chop over shallow water, less than six feet deep, gray and turbid with silt. About six nautical miles out of the Petaluma's mouth we reached deeper water and set a course for the Richmond narrows between San Pablo Bay (to the north) and San Francisco Bay to the south. Though collectively it's all called The Bay. In another six nautical miles we passed The Brothers. We swung west and avoided any involvement with a docking supertanker at the Chevron docks, and entered Brick Yard Marina around 1600h.
Putting the boat to bed was simple, except for leaving one porthole open when we sluiced down the decks, flooding the cabin somewhat. No biggie. It's a boat, for pity's sake. It expects a little water. As we carted our goods to our cars we began to hear word of folks who had spent the weekend outside the Gate. Horrible times. Scuttled boats, weeping last messages, brutal days-long pounding. Perhaps we should have felt left out of adventure but we're older sailors; we enjoy simplicity and the lack of terror, good food, a nice ramble ashore. It was a successful sailing adventure for us. We never raised jib or main during the entire trip. Did we feel apostate? Unfaithful to our principles? We did not. We were happy, feeling that slightly toasted sun and wind nip, and drove home on 101 smiling.
For a self-indulgent sybarite who loves his comforts he talks about the Good Old Days suspiciously often. He's enough of an historian to know they weren't that good, the old mores more ethically compromised than current attitudes, the quality of life smellier and more tedious than Himself could bear for a week. Getting a scow sloop to market in the City was long drudgery. Perhaps he's not longing for the old ways so much as admiring their immediate cleverness. He doesn't have any grasp of string theory or the mathematical basis of quantum theory but he understands rope and pulleys, and he likes to talk about what he understands. He persistently thinks of himself as "the feathers at the back of the arrow," giving things a spin while slowing the headlong flight a bit, keeping the arc true. So, to place it in the most charitable light, this concern with historical sidelights is his notion of balancing things.
Braxinoso
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