The First Sail

The day for the first sail arrived. Fog had been threatening, but the sun was shining bright when Brittany gave a speech and splashed some white wine over Eurydice's bow. A few minutes later we  launched her and struggled to rig her afloat for the first time. I was hesitant to raise both sails in the little space, lest we be blown into the docks and other boats, so we sailed out the harbour under jib alone. It was slow going - but we were sailing.

Eurydice ready to launch.

            We ran with the wind until we cleared the last channel-marker and turned on a starboard tack, heading up the bay toward a popular beach. After about a mile it was time to tack, but I found she wasn’t making enough speed to bring her head around. After a couple failed attempts, we turned the other way and gybed instead.

            Comfortable with the jib, I decided to raise the mainsail – easier said than done, with a fair breeze and no way to keep our bow into the wind. After much flapping, a lot of cursing, and being blown about a mile to leeward, the mainsail was raised and we were making much better progress.

Sun and sails.

            We tacked back into the wind, back toward the beach, with me explaining the ropes to Brittany as we progressed. She didn’t much care for heeling, but she picked up the theory very quickly and kept a constant eye on the jib.

            Some problems were apparent by this point. Under any speed, the rudder sprung up so that only its last quarter was in the water. This led to a scene where I, leaning over the stern, pliars in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, tightened the rudder bolt while I steered with my leg. After that is ceased to give problems, but I know it’ll come up again.

            Another issue was the radbud scuppers, with their one-way ping-pong ball valves; they didn’t work at all. The ping-pong balls merely bubbled around while water poured in through the scupper holes. This taught us to sit forward, but I don’t like the idea that moving to the stern will sink my boat.

            We tacked up until we were almost to the beach and had just rounded a small rocky island when Brittany said it was time for her to get back. This was the best part of the day – being so far to windward from the harbour, I pointed her bow back toward the entrance and let out sail with the wind coming over our port quarter. Eurydice positively flew along, heeling over so that we were both leaning out with our feet under the toe-strap to keep her even, and making a lovely wake.

            We rounded the breakwater and tacked back up the harbour, feeling ourselves near experts at the maneuver now (compared to our earlier, clumsy attempts), but two things of interest happened on what should have been the last tack to approach the boat ramp. The first was that my tiller extension, which I’d constructed quickly out of soft wood, snapped off at the universal joint. The second was that Brittany misunderstood my instructions and uncleated the centerboard early, and it promptly lifted. I didn’t realize this at first, but what had previously been forward movement changed suddenly to a confusing, sideways slip. There was no better way to illustrate the centreboard’s function than to try sailing close-hauled without it.

            A few tacks later with the centerboard down and we were back at the boat ramp, where we went through the minutia of de-rigging the little boat and loading her back onto the trailer.

Secure on the trailer.

            I learned a lot during those few hours, and most of them reinforced that I need more and more practice on the water. I’m heading to sea for work for the next two weeks, however, so it’ll be early July before I can sail again.

            The little boat has come a long way.

Tiddly Bits

With all the major parts taken care of, all that was left was the tiddly bits. Inventorying this would be a pain in the ass and a bore to read, but in the spirit of completeness I’m going to go through the basics.

            Despite what I said in my last post, it turned out to be a little more than “a few minutes drilling and riveting.” Since it was raining (again) on the first day of my week off, I did what I could inside by turning to the rudder. I secured a cam-cleat to the tiller to catch the line that pulls the rudder up, and then I drilled a hole in the rudder cheeks and passed a bolt through that to prevent the rudder from moving too far forward. I relied on the friction of the rudder against the cheeks, and a good tight rudder bolt, to hold the blade down.

            With some sunshine, I turned to fitting the rest of the hardware to the boat. I spent a while measuring the size of every bolt and screw I thought I’d need, and then a much longer time at the hardware store sorting through drawers of stainless nuts, bolts and washers to find everything I needed. These in hand, I returned to Eurydice with a vengeance.

            The stern pintel and gudgeon went on first, followed by the bung hole and radbud scuppers. These latter have a ping-pong ball inside them which theoretically floats-up to block any water from entering the boat. I put all of this on with copious amounts of marine silicone sealant.

The gudgeon, pintel and radbud scuppers in place.

            I’d been at a bit of a loss for what to do with the jib sheets, as they should each properly have their own fairlead and cleat. I only had one cleat, so in the interest of sailing solo I rigged them up so they each ran through their own fairlead, respectively, but instead of a cleat for each sheet, I put one in the middle of the boat. Why have two cleats if I only use one jib sheet at a time?

            A camcleat near the center bracket holds the centerboard down quite nicely, and I put eight small bolts through the transom to connect it to the deck at that point. The last tiddly bit was bolting a stainless loop to the transom above the plug, as an attachment point for the toe-strap, which I also bolted to the thwart.

            The last and best part was the arrival of Gabrielle, who came with her paint brushes and shared a beer while she painted the Eurydice’s name across each bow, leading with an ancient Greek “E” and finishing with her own cursive. Where would any of us be without friends? Thank you, Gabrielle.

Gabrielle painting Eurydice's name.

            It was a strange thing to say she was “finished,” so instead I decided to say she’s “ready for her first sail.” A boat, according to Bertrand Moitessier, is never finished.

             

The Rigging

With the horizontal parts as painted and finished as I was willing to let them get in anno domini 2019, I turned my attention to the up-and-down pieces which cause the lateral bits to move. Many years ago a very dear friend had been kind enough to take my old standing rigging to the Binnacle, in Halifax, and have some new stainless shrouds rove. Every time since then that I’d thought of those coiled wires I’d been filled with a feeling of dread, lest they not be long enough – or worse, too long.

            My fears were allayed when I manhandled the mast into its newly-fitted step and strung the shrouds through their newly-laid bushings and into the refitted chainplates. They were exactly the correct length, at least without spreaders, but those mysterious pieces of hardware will constitute a future chapter all on their own. For the time being, the shrouds made me happy.

            The forestay wouldn’t reach the bow plate without more convincing than I could give it with my bare hand on the wire, but a shackle and some elbow grease talked it into a connection. I’d elected not to replace the forestay when I had the shrouds fabricated because the jib stay takes the majority of the strain once the halliard is tensioned, so now I’m left to cope with the original forestay and all its adorable eccentricities, like the weird kink in the middle that takes up so much slack.

The forestay looks deceptively perfect in this photo.

            Unlike running rigging of old, where all the lines ran up-and-down on blocks, this modern aluminum mast has its main and jib halliard running through the mast’s interior. The main halliard leads from a little pulley at the very tip-top of the mast down through the hollow insides and out a little hole near the bottom. The jib halliard is similar, except that it exits the mast part-way up. While I’m sure this is fine operationally, it’s a real pain in the ass to feed 25 feet of ¼ line down a hollow tube. I’m going to skip how I did this, because the explanation would take over a thousand words, many of them four-lettered, and require a schematic for the reader to truly appreciate. If you want to enjoy a similar experience you’ll need a pint of Malibu rum, a telescopic fly rod, about a thousand blackflies, blazing sun and five times your own length in aluminum piping to shake vigorously for at six minute intervals.

            In the end, though, it was up. I used the main halliard as a topping-lift for the boom, which I wanted in place so I could attach all the mainsheet rigging. I was happy with the result, and the next day I snuck out between rain showers to hoist the jib and mainsail for the very first time.

Finally carrying sail. 

            It was a beautiful sight to behold.

            I also realized that I’d have to improvise some sort of mechanical advantage for the mainsail’s outhaul, since the alternative is brute force and making a series of hitches at the end of the boom. I have spare blocks and cam-cleats, so that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes drilling and riveting.

The Cockpit

The cockpit was an absolute mess, and in a way it still is. Whereas the deck was more or less a straight-forward job of patching and painting a relatively even surface, the cockpit has had so many repairs and sloppy paint jobs that the bilge has the aspect of a lunar surface. I’d sanded as much of the drips and runs as I could without becoming obsessive, and thought I’d gotten most of the paint chips too. How wrong I was.

            I started by bailing, as it had managed to collect the rainwater of several downpours, and I had to remove a lot of water before it was light enough to lift the bow up and wedge another tire under it so the remaining water could run to the stern and drain through the open bung-hole. All of this water was filthy with the debris I’d created sanding.

            Next came buckets of water to rinse out the remaining debris, followed by a thorough mopping-down with warm water, soap and bleach, and then even more rinsing. At this point I left it to dry in the sun, and came back later to begin the painting. I’d bought another can of Interlux, this one flat white, from the Yacht Shop on Joseph Howe in Halifax, and it took about one third of a can to paint the whole interior.

            I started in what would normally be the fo’c’sle, but I have no clue what to call it on a 15 foot boat. I could barely reach the whole way forward, and my back bumping against the stryofoam float caused a rain of foam bits and hidden filth to litter the little forward deck I was trying to paint. I swept it out before every stroke of the roller, but debris got caught in the paint.

            Debris also got caught in the paint along the bilge, and some managed to sneak out from a hidden place under the gunnels. It too got into the paint. Well-stuck paint that I’d feathered out after removing the peeling bits betrayed me by flaking off chips into the newly-laid paint. I picked-out what I could and the rest got rolled in. Most of it blended quite nicely, and I took some solace on reflecting that the dirt and chips could not twice fall from its hidden perches, so the second coat must necessarily go on better.

            Even with the imperfections, I have to say the over-all effect has brought her one step closer to looking like a new boat, at least from a distance.

Shiny when wet.

The Deck II

After my experience with the primer, I decided to take the Interlux Interdeck to a hardware store for them to mix professionally – ie, put it in a machine and shake the absolute bejesus out of it. The clerk was good enough to do this free of charge, and even opened the can afterward to make sure there were no clumps left. It worked.

            I sanded down the bumps left by the primer on Eurydice’s deck and gave the whole thing a light once-over to rough it up a bit, then brushed away the dust and wiped the whole thing down with acetone.

            Between the high wind and the clouds gathering overhead, I hesitated to paint. The weather hadn’t called for rain, but everything told me it was coming. I could feel the atmosphere growing denser, so I held off, had a tea on the veranda, and waited. After about half an hour the dark clouds began to lighten, and I could see some clear sky in the east, where the wind and weather was coming from. I decided to risk it and lay the paint. I later found out that it had rained only 10 kilometres away.

            The paint went on thicker than the primer, and it took nearly half a can for the first coat. I’d hoped to have enough Intedeck for two coats and part of the interior, but the first coat lead me to believe that I’d only have enough for the deck itself.

First coat of paint, tape still in place.

            The next morning was windy again, and I found several blackflies had managed to secure themselves to the deck by landing in yesterday’s drying paint. I picked out what I could and painted over the rest. It was a relief to be taping off the deck for the final time, and I was happily surprised to find that there was still a quarter can of Interdeck left over when I was done painting – at the very least, this will be enough to paint the seat tanks and centerboard well inside the cockpit, and I think that I still have enough blue topside paint do to the rest of the interior.

            Unfortunately, I’m going to need a bit of that blue paint to fix a couple of spots on the exterior of the hull. I slipped twice while sanding the bit of deck above the transom, and the masking tape pulled off a small chip near the same spot. At least it’s all roughly in the same place. If there’s a next time, I’ll tape it off even for the sanding.

            Eurydice is getting a lot closer to the water. Two more days of painting, and I can start putting her hardware back in place. Those two days will have to be next weekend.

The finished deck.

           

The Deck

Work has kept me busy lately, but fair weather and time ashore have given me enough time to return to Eurydice. I’ve thought about her a lot during the lapse, but I haven’t been idle. I honed old skills and learned new ones during an intense six-day Fast Rescue Craft training course, and I’ve been read a number of sea books which I’ll address in a future post.

            Eurydice’s deck is far less problematic than her hull was. For the most part it’s even intact, except for a small portion on the port side where she seems to have suffered some trauma that also affected her hull above the waterline. Whereas her hull was patched, however, her gunnel was left broken and bruised. Uncovering these blemishes is part of a larger progress of seeing her history revealed through wounds, patches, paint-jobs and neglect. As far as I can tell, she was mended several times in her original form, had one major rushed overhaul, and was generally patched poorly after that.

I know she was used as a training boat for Sea Cadets before my friend acquired her at auction, and I’m guessing it was then the rushed overhaul was made. All Sea Cadet Albacores in her family were painted sky blue from stem to stern, and that colour that shows up between the initial patches and the latter, shoddy ones. It’s like the layer of burned earth indicative of destruction that archaeologists discover when unearthing an ancient city and use to mark the phases of its life. Eurydice has her own Troy I and II, and Troy III is currently under construction.

Yesterday I spent much of my afternoon removing hardware and sanding. It was incredible to see the difference worked by years of salt water exposure on ferrous metals – whereas the stainless bolts were basically spotless and came apart without complaint, all of the straight steel ones had rusted solid and needed to be broken and then pounded-out with a nail-set and a hammer. One piece of hardware fixed with a stainless bolt on one side and a non-stainless on the other. The stainless looked new, whereas the other had devolved into a rusty clump.

I went to work on her deck with two electric sanders, removing the dings, blending where the paint had chipped, and giving the whole thing a roughing-up to prepare it for paint. As usual, my own previous mistakes were my worst obstacle. As stated in an earlier post, I had connected her deck back to her hull with pop-rivets and fiberglass. With the hull upside down, I’d been unable to appreciate what a sloppy job I was doing on the underside, and now I was faced with lumps of fiberglass covering the broad heads of the pop-rivets. I feathered this mess into the deck, but I left the rivets in place.

Next I filled the holes left by all the removed hardware, choosing only a few to leave open where I knew I’d be returning something to its original home. I also discovered plenty of other holes where bits of tackle had been removed in years prior and the holes left gaping. These, too, got the Bondo treatment. I was forced to sand out a chunk of the port bow a couple inches long that had a deep fissure, and this I made a tape mold around and filled with the short-stand filler. I don’t think it’ll be visible at all when I’m done.

Sanding the cockpit was the stuff of nightmares – uneven, covered with paint and fiberglass runs, and paint flaking-off everywhere. At a certain point I had to remind myself that Eurydice isn’t entering a beauty pageant, and that if I wanted the cockpit to look like new I may as well commit myself to a week of work. She’s already a beauty to me, and I’ve got to balance the finishing work against getting her in the water and sailing. The point here is to sail, not paint. Even still, I re-enforced the scupper-catch with fiberglass and sanded it smooth, and intend to do the same with the mast-step.

The ugly break in Euyydice’s port gunnel patched more easily than I expected. Am I getting better at fiberglassing? It was significant enough to have warranted previous attention.

First, I cut out the damaged area and sanded the edges smooth to receive the fiberglass. This removed the rotten section that had succumbed to repeated soakings.

Next I filled, sanded, and repeated.

Because the break extended vertically, I used the same technique I had used before to replace a whole missing piece on her starboard side; a mold of tape to create a reservoir for the filler, and sanding flush with the gunnel afterward.

            With all the fill-work sanded pretty, it was time for the paint. The Interlux Interdeck paint I intend to use for the deck and cockpit requires a primer where it will cover existing paintwork, and it just so happened that I had enough Petit primer left over from the hull to cover the deck, but just barely. The paint had separated entirely during its long wait, and I stirred for twenty minutes to bring the two parts back into harmony – alas, it was not stirring enough, and the first few strokes I rolled on showed clots that refused to undo themselves. These I will have to sand-out before the Interdeck goes on.

            The result of priming was that Eurydice now looks strikingly handsome, and very close to how she’ll appear when everything is said and done. I frequently have to remind myself that while the paint serves a practical purpose, it is essentially a cosmetic feature, that the real work on the hull was the strengthening and binding provided by the fiberglass. In any case, the last few days have been beautiful and sunny, and the singing of Spring birds has spurred me on to get the old Albacore into the water as quickly as possible, all delays made for good seamanship excepted.

                

Catalan Castaway Review

When my friend Kyle and I began talking about the idea of sailing from Gibraltar to Istanbul in a sailing dinghy, one of my first impulses was to find others who had already done it. It was during that search I encountered Ben Crawshaw, an ex-patriate Brit living in Catalonia who built a plywood skiff to sail and row around the western Mediterranean. I first encountered his six-part mini YouTube documentary covering his trip to the Balearic Islands and back, and this led me to his blog, which ended suddenly and without explanation four years ago. And then, googling his name to find out what the hell happened to him, I found out he’d published a book, Catalan Castaway.

            I was surprised when the book arrived. It was smaller than I’d anticipated, and the long horizontal layout seemed strange for a narrative documenting building and sailing a small boat. The rationale for this was apparent upon reading Ben’s Forward – this book is his blog in print, complete with photographs. He’d been approached by Lodestar Books, which speaks a little to Ben’s one-time presence on the net within the small-boat community.

            I admit I was initially disappointed with this blog-cum-book. I’d been expecting a narrative, not an epistolary account, and I felt a bit as though I’d been tricked. The bad impression didn't last long.

            Catalan Castaway opens with an introduction / disclaimer by the boat’s designer, Gavin Atkin, who lauds Ben as a person (this is pretty common from everyone who knows Ben, actually) and warns the reader against following his example. Atkin notes that his design was “being tested in a way [he] hadn’t anticipated and couldn’t approve of” and is surprised that “somehow Ben has survived his adventures” despite sailing in a “small, narrow flat-bottomed boat that isn’t designed for rough weather and strong winds.” Although Atkin hasn’t yet built his design, he assures readers that when he does, he will “sail it cautiously on the kinds of sheltered waters for which it was intended.” Despite so many repeated warnings within the body of a very short forward, there’s also a definite sense that Atkin not only likes Ben immensely, but has also enjoyed living vicariously through him in his adventures.

            The blog dressed in book’s clothing opens with Ben launching his boat, the Onawind Blue, through the surf of the beach in front of his house in Catalonia. The difficulties of launching through this surf are a returning theme in this book. Over the next chapters Ben goes through a series of trials and sail configurations as he learns what works best for Onawind Blue and fights with his budget to outfit her. It doesn’t take him long before he starts properly cruising, sailing along the coast and camping ashore in the sand, and later with an improvised tent over his dinghy. There’s enough food and wine to make the reader hungry and a little jealous, but also enough hangovers to make the reader glad it’s Ben and not them.

            Pages of rudder adjustments and broken tholepins culminate in Ben’s big trip to the Balearic Islands, where he gets to put some of his sailing and all of his rowing skills to the test as he’s repeatedly becalmed for hours. The main theme of this part of the book, and one that he deals with more specifically in his six-part YouTube videos, is fear. “Fear is a Giant Octopus,” Ben writes, and describes his pre-trip jitters:

Physically I was fine. Long hours of rowing, running, swimming and weightlifting with my local rowing team had left me in better shape than ever. I knew I had the stamina and the physical reserves and that I could handle the lack of sleep. But what was unsettling was my high state of nervousness. Though my stomach felt hollow it was full of dread.

I was struck by the overwhelming fear expressed in Ben’s videos, and also with his honesty and openness about it. In the philosophy of courage, there’s a repeated mantra that bravery isn’t a lack of fear, but rather the will to overcome it. From this perspective, courage cannot exist without fear, and a person without fear is only reckless, not brave. To be afraid of something worth acting upon and be defeated by fear is actual cowardice.

            By this estimation, I would esteem Ben Crawshaw as a brave individual, and his fear may only be a sense of timidity inspired by a lack of faith in something – maybe himself at the time of his crossing. I can’t say a lack of self-confidence, because Ben also appears to be an incredibly confident, affable and open person. Atkin describes Ben as “not just a great sailor, adventurer and writer,” but also “charming an interesting” who “has the great gift of being sociable.” Ben’s own thoughts on the subject are interesting, but go largely without resolution, except that by committing to sail he overcomes the fear that holds him back.

            As it turns out, facing his fear of disappearing at sea on his solitary trip was a dry run for what comes next: Ben gets cancer. There’s not much in the book after this, but I’m going to spoil the end and say that Ben defeats his second Giant Octopus too.

            The book / blog is well-written and the colourful Catalan coastline make for terrific photos. Ben is a reader, and it shows-through in his writing. He mentions Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin series, the Donald Crowhurst tragedy, and other books and authors that are well-known to thallassophiles everywhere. There’s enough nautical terminology here to properly illustrate the narrative, but I don’t think a land-lubber reader would get lost or feel the writing is polluted with jargon. While most of the writing is designed to recount specific events and speculate on possible future endeavours, there are also the occasional truly beautiful prose passage that speaks something of the artist in Ben.

            Where the book may suffer is its format. There are virtues to the blog presentation; the future is unknown chapter to chapter, leaving the narrator as un-omniscient as the reader; because of this, each chapter appears honest and unadjusted for how things actually turned out; the reader may have more of a vicarious experience and feel closer to the writer because of this. On the other hand, speculation about things that never happen begins to feel wearing, and small problems that are important to each chapter eventually become boring. It didn’t take me long before I expected there to be a problem beaching the Onawind Blue through the surf, or for a tholepin to break every trip. I was intrigued by the archaic tholepins before I read Catalan Castaway – there was a set hanging on the wall inside the barn when I was growing up, and my father explained them to me- but I can now say with certainty that I’ll never, ever use them.

             I learned a lot from Ben’s adventures with Onawind Blue that I’ll apply to Eurydice and hopefully eventually transfer to the Mediterranean trip. Most of all, I was inspired by Ben’s willingness to experiment with his boat. He tried different sail plans, rudders, rigging, and a variety of woods for his tholepins. He was constantly trimming, so to speak, until he reached a fine point of sailing.

            And by the way – Ben appears to be doing fine, despite dropping off the face of the earth. By the end of his blog he seems to become a commercial fisherman, and he's penning lyrics these days for his partner Monica’s band. I can only hope that someday Ben's blog The Invisible Workshop flashes back to life with new updates. I enjoyed reading both it and the book version - which is admittedly not quite the same thing - immensely.