Bad sailing year, 2004
2004 was a disaster. Nothing bad happened to the boat, and nothing bad happened to us, really, but time to sail was in very short supply. We only got out three or four times, plus a few visits to pump out the rainwater and replace the battery with a new gel cell. That was it. We got out early in the spring a time or two, and once in the late summer. We sailed a few hours and docked so easily and with so little fuss that there was nothing to tell on ourselves about, even if I exaggerated a lot. It was fun for us at the time but not much fun to write about. The biggest adventure was the time we went to sail and discovered a wasp nest the size of a softball in there. We lost that day just cleaning them out. Rats.
We became local political activists against our will. A railroad is setting about trashing our neighborhood to up their annual profits some fraction of a percent, and had the diabolical foresight to purchase the necessary federal laws in advance. This left us with no recourse but to raise a stink about it. Everybody running the country; county, state and federal got lots of letters from our neighborhood; most of them answered us, too. Unfortunately, it’s out of everybody’s hands; somebody else is in charge of that, sorry. The Railroad is a sovereign entity and the might and power of the entire United States is powerless to resist. They could bulldoze and pave over the white house lawn and nobody could stop them. We got to speak to our congressperson, nice guy but he doesn’t seem to be responsible for this mess, either. Dick Cheney didn’t answer our email, we didn’t bother to notify W.
So, we didn’t get to sail much at all this year because we wasted months fighting the good fight for truth, justice, and mother pie. But, we did manage to luck out just a little in real life: I got a nice, new, totally trashed out old sailboat hull in my driveway that nobody else wanted. It’s one of those heavy old fiberglass hulls that were made in the sixties and will last forever. No hull number, no brand name, no nothing.
It was the same old twin keeled boat we saw pulled up on the shore (mud) when we moved to our present marina. We lost track of where it was when our brother-in-law called up his cousin's husband who hauled it away. Three years later we discovered that a childhood friend of Rhonda’s happened to be that same cousin and, it was like a miracle, her husband still had that old boat. (Yes, our little county is a real life comic soap opera.) The cousin-in-law realized in the two years after hauling it to his farm that he didn’t have time for it after all. He had only saved it from becoming landfill, but not by much. There had to be a hundred gallons of rain water inside. The gangway hatch is completely missing. It was perfect for the handful of bugs raising their families inside. A few (hundred) dollars and several gallons of gas later I had it bailed out, on a trailer, and blocking my driveway.
It took a long time to get it cleaned out enough to just work in. Somebody had been trying to insulate the V berth and did a real good job on the starboard side; the rest of the foam was floating all over inside the boat. The cushions were all ruined. There were little doors and their frames lying about; probably once closing off either the V berth or the tiny head on the port side. No toilet, I was vaguely relieved to discover, and there was one anchor with a thoroughly rusted chain. A lot of soaked sandpaper, motor oil in a plastic bottle barely holding itself together, the mushy remains of a flair, a rusted out fire extinguisher, a zillion bits and pieces of metal, wire, tubing, plastic, and unnamable whatever. There was an oyster shell. I pulled out five trash bags of stuff; four of them were real trash and the other I’m not sure of. The last soggy load came out in a bucket. The next big items to tackle in the interior are a rusted motor, a banged up fuel tank, wiring, plumbing, and grunge.
While working at my most excellent job, while performing the various pleasant and necessary chores of daily life, while engaged in energetic and harmonious public service on our noble community project to save our neighborhood, I daydream about finally cleaning out the last of that grunge.
Once I had enough more or less clean space to sit inside the boat and look around, I could see that this was truly a purebred project boat, no two ways about it, probably built in somebody’s garage. Guys like me, only handier and hardier, had been tinkering with this thing for decades. I was truly and duly humbled.
It is supposed to be a ’63 Midget. It looks British, folks say, but no manufacturer will claim it. It is 23 feet long, 7 foot abeam, a skeg for the propeller shaft and to help support the rudder. The rudder is broken off and I will have to replace it somehow. There is a mast, masthead type, lots of little blocks up there, but no boom. The original transom was an overhanging one but an addition was stuck on, probably for more buoyancy in the rear, giving it a reverse transom. There is a bulkhead rather than a compression post to support the mast, but the doorway in the bulkhead is in the middle with a steel arch overhead against the deck. Fancy! The front hatch is round, and I haven’t got it opened yet because I need to either take the mast off the boat or I need to stand it upright. The red and green running lights are on the sides of the cabin rather than on the bow, out of the way when I put an anchor on the bow and probably safer and easier to repair.
The inboard gas motor is rusted solid and will have to come out, I am thinking of putting in a 9-hp diesel. We could wind up with a versatile little cruiser if it sails well. It looks like the twin keels will give me a draft of just over 2 feet. They are 5 to 6 feet long and extend from the hull 14 to 18 inches, nearly twice the lateral resistance area as Whisper. They’re flat on the bottom and the boat will balance on them out of the water. I suspect I will probably get pretty passable sailing performance with them. Aside from all the other potential plusses and minuses, they will certainly give me more choices among places to sail, anchor, dock and repair. It should track a lot better than the other boat, which is fine for long trips, but maybe turn a little sluggishly. I will have to get it in sailing order to see what I really have before deciding on a suitable final state of restoration to aim for.
I need to get the trailer repaired and redesigned to fit the boat better, and I need access to the hull to clean and repair it. The keels are resting on two by sixes that I jury rigged to sit on the trailer’s crossbars and axle and give it a good footing. The flat bunks the trailer came with, apparently for some kind of motor boat, were just a little too close together and the keels were wedged in kind of tight. It took a long time to get the bolts free, and the nephew finally got the last ones off. He works for hamburgers; I should give him a raise. What I need now is to lift the boat off of the trailer and onto blocks. My best and brightest idea involves pretty much simply blocking up the rear and lifting the front of the boat on the middle of a 12 foot beam so that I can haul the trailer out from under the whole thing. I wish I could think of something that sounds less crazy.
It will be nice to get out and sail Whisper this spring, politics or not, we will!
Ships Log
