The View from the Helm

DIGGING OUT 80-YEAR OLD FASTENINGS

I’ve enjoyed my retirement, really I have. Sure I miss the process, the challenges, my genius employees and the beautiful yachts we created, but I love the small boats most of all, the ones that attracted me  to a life of sailing. So when I phoned my brother from the midst of a winter holiday in New Zealand and he hit me with, “we’ve got this Herreshoff 12 ½ up at the boatyard and we can’t find ANYONE with your skills to restore it”, well…

The boatyard is on Cranberry Island, reachable only by a small wooden boat from Mount Desert Island, and this is the middle of winter. The commute itself is, can be, downright dangerous in an easterly wind. We leave at 6:00 in the morning and when we get to the island climb into a rusty old truck, an “island truck” that deteriorated beyond any hope of passing inspection twenty years ago, and spew a plume of blue oil-smoke another mile to the yard. This is a “real Maine” boatyard that forgot to leave the 19th century. There is no bathroom- all of the employees are male and find a spot out in back of one of the sheds for this necessity. But if you can find them beneath a century’s worth of too-good-to-discard chunks of hardwood, shelves of every color paint ever chosen by boatowners long departed, and modern batts of fiberglass cloth and epoxy resins– the bins full of ancient tools left behind by craftsmen sadly no longer available at any price in our benighted land are balm to a restless artisan like me who appreciates the  heft in his hand of a tool that was not made in China to look good in a blister-pack.

Next week I will be in Rome studying Carravagios and Da Vincis. What a life!

PORT and STARBOARD

So you thought all I could paint was boats, huh? Thanks to the encouragement of my mentor Ron Frontin, I’m stretching my metaphorical legs into all sorts of new subject matter. If you think it’s easy to catch the way a silver bowl, devoid of its own color, reflects everything around it, think again.

mY nESTER WITH THE MAST IN THE WRONG PLACE

Many of you will have seen in my book, photos of my Nester dinghy sailing.  I enjoyed her, but she  had two flaws- she twisted quite a lot, and she sailed with lee helm.  My own fault, of course- for convenience I put the mast too far forward. I built the forward side-to-side member at sheer height so as to have enough “engagement” of the bottom of the mast (about 11 inches)  to eliminate any stays. How could I have failed to see a better solution- one with the mast in the right place?

So I’m ripping that member out, removing the rowing thwart aft of it, and making a new rowing thwart, enough higher in the boat to result in exactly the same height of engagement, yet not too high, I hope, to still be able to row from that position. I’ll keep you abreast of progress in this blog.

 IF YOUR YACHT CLUB IS INTERESTED IN HEARING CHUCK SPEAK AND GIVE HIS BEAUTIFUL SLIDE SHOW, PLEASE EMAIL HIM AT paineyot@aol.com

The Morris 42 SHEARWATER has just won her class in the 2010 Bermuda Race.  Congratulations, Conrad Hall and Crew!

I finally got to sail the Dave Gerr designed Nester dinghy that I converted from a pure rowboat over last winter. She sails fine, albeit with a bit of lee helm. And she twists bigtime as you can see, though not enough to actually let the ocean come in.