Protecting the Investment

Save the forests and your sanity. Buy an all plastic boat.

While he walked among us, Phil Hartman gave to the world what it so sorely needs: the medicinal gift of laughter. Of his countless contributions, I’ll miss him most for what I consider his greatest role, that of the Anal Retentive Chef.

I’m not sure how many times Phil reprised this particular character who, driven by an all-consuming fetish for cleanliness, could never quite get to the point where anything edible was actually plated in his studio kitchen. You could have eaten off any of its surfaces, if only a scrap of food had been spared his OCD-driven sensibilities. The ingredients for each recipe ultimately got packed off double-hermetically sealed to the garbage, while the butcher block remained pristine.

Somehow Phil’s tortured culinary lessons remind me of the prescribed way to go about the varnishing of one’s boat. Admittedly, a boat bedecked with properly maintained brightwork is a sight to behold, and I’ll hazard a further assertion. The best way to behold such a vision is from the helm of your own all-plastic tub.

Last year about this time I finished putting the sixth coat of varnish (I was told I quit too soon) on virtually every last bit of exterior teak on my own infernal floating contraption. Mine happens to be a Morgan 34, built by Charlie Morgan in 1970. I hear Charlie is still thriving in his eighties. If I ever discover his whereabouts, he most likely emceeing some floating invasion somewhere south of my home port, I’ll wring his neck.

I’m no nautical engineer, but I’m thinking Charlie must have had an overstaffed and under-challenged carpentry crew there in St. Petersburg in the early seventies. Those guys, who I bet couldn’t swim to save themselves (you try, with less than a full compliment of fingers), wanted to show Charlie what could be done with a little imagination and a generous stand of well-seasoned timber.

Every sailboat owner knows of the countless attachment points there are on a sailboat, for all the things you can imagine attaching to what would otherwise be an uncluttered deck. I can only imagine that after Charlie finished penciling in a functional boat at the drawing board, his lumberjacks all gathered round him and crowed, “Hey Charlie, how about we set all your attachment points off with some really fine looking teak? We can mount stuff on wood, change some things from metal to wood, maybe throw in a few wood accents that have no purpose whatsoever, just for the fun of it. Then we call it a yacht, and you can jack up the price!”

That is what I bet happened. Charlie said. “Here’s the blueprint, boys. Now you go and lay on some nice grainy accents, the kind that give suburban couch captains the drools.”

I’ve got teak toe rail, teak coamings, a teak cockpit sole, and teak mounting platforms for all points of air ingress and egress. There are teak pads where the boarding ladder is mounted, and its rungs are teaked. Turning sheaves, and a mast-mounted winch sit on thrones of teak. The handrails are all teak, as are the top surfaces of the companionway sliding hatch and stern lazarette, the last two items striped like the side panels of station wagons from a bygone era. They’re the cat’s meow, Daddy-oh.

It looks like somebody poured Elmer's glue over our deck and placed it downwind of a wood chipper. Yet somewhere underneath all this lumber is a plain old fiberglass boat. I have, then, the worst of both worlds: all the work, with none of the respect.

A couple years ago, in a fit of depravity, I replaced our miniscule cockpit table with a Rube Goldbergian teak contraption, something that was also available in a pricier polyethylene model. I chose to save myself a few bucks, in order that I might lose my mind.

It is impossible to swallow the proper procedure for maintaining brightwork with a straight face. You just have to laugh at the directions offered by the boat gurus. After consulting them, I stared giddily at the task ahead of me. Laughing aside, there is no shame in a good cry once in a while.

If you own a boat like mine, you will need to rent a pick-up truck to haul everything required for a proper varnish job. It will consume enough masking tape to circle the globe thrice, and enough sandpaper to denude your favorite beach. Toss in brushes, varnish, thinners, strippers, bleach to attack mold, tac rags (I’m kidding. You’ll use the stack of ratty t-shirts your wife has been pleading with you to ditch), knee pads if you’re smart, ladders, power sanders, sunscreen (you will bake yourself for days), dust masks, and I forget what else. Which is okay, because you will too.

This is the kind of job that spawns preemptive jobs. You’ll realize that to do the job efficiently, you’ll want to remove a lot of hardware. In the process, you’ll destroy some of it and have to order more. Stripped bolts of non-standard sizes will be special-ordered. Some parts, perfectly fine where they’d been petrifying until you wrenched them from their perches, having been specially designed by Noah himself for an ancient arc, will no longer be obtainable. You will then strike up conversations with fabricators. Fabricators are guys who don’t own their own boats just yet, but they’re working on it with your help. The more items you dissect and destroy, the further away you will be from ever laying a loaded brush to wood.

As I worked on my own boat, I heard others doing likewise. There were the sounds of miscellaneous struggle, the sanding of wood mixed with a chorus of cussing produced by the grating of knuckles, barking of shins, and general thwacking of extremities.

We were all busy with these awful jobs for one reason. Our boats were not in the water, where we could have been having fun on them. Had the boatyards done what we’d wanted them to do, which is predict a half year in advance when nice weather would arrive, and put our boats in the water a day ahead of that date so we could have some fun, our boats would all be in the water in an admittedly sad state of disrepair, and fun to be on.

This ritual has been replayed every year since the invention of the boat. So, if you’re thinking of buying a boat, get used to the fact that one of the main joys of boat ownership is that of the protractedly delayed pleasure. In that respect it’s a lot like sex, but with higher overhead and less time at the helm.

When it came time to prep the wood, I found that my palm sander was too bulky to get to all the nooks and crannies wood could be found. So I bought a little detail sander, one with a prosthetic protuberance that digs into tight places. It has a Velcro nose for which I must cut lots of bits of special sandpaper, if I choose not to special-order those items and pay shipping-and-handling fees four times the value of the product, which is made of sand and wood pulp. In my next career, I wish to be a shipper/handler. Look out, Bill Gates.

What I really needed was to borrow that sonic thing my dentist uses on plaque around my gum line, to destroy flaking varnish around the bases of cleats and whatnot. No way was I removing through-bolted hardware. I was not going to be one of those guys who did it right, so I could write an inspirational article about my fulfilling, decade-long refit.

Still, it had to be right enough, because I was really doing this for my wife. Women, I believe, would be happy as clams on a boat that leaked like a sieve, as long as it was looking good while heading for the bottom. In any event, Deb does not get excited about upgrades to diesel engines, so I was going to have to show her a fancy finish where it counts: the ego.

When I started sanding down to raw wood, I found that previous owners had tried all sorts of ways of avoiding serious work. Coats of varnish had been slopped on and casually laid over untreated areas. “Wood tone” paint had been tried on occasion. It’s a whispered fact that paint will better protect your wood than varnish, or any other material you might use, but then people wouldn’t gawk at your hubris on display as your vessels crossed paths, so what would be the point?

I sanded for days on my two bit knees, sometimes by hand with bitty strips of sandpaper, sometimes wearing a mask, and sometimes not, when the combination of my own stifling backflow of breath and the fogging of my corrective lenses threatened my sanity. At times I preferred the hacking and wheezing the work inflicted on my unprotected lungs. This is not a rational project, I guarantee you.

When I finally got down to bare wood, the boat looked kind of nice, like a newborn baby full of the promise of tomorrow. It is said that teak is perfectly happy to live this way, and will age to a very functional gray over time. Gray? Oh, I don’t think so.

I taped off the wood. This took the lion’s share of a day. You might be tempted to forgo this step when outfitting the new infant’s room, thinking you’ll just be real careful with the brush. This is always a huge mistake. Bite the bullet. Use the blue stuff. It makes your accomplishment stand out like a sore thumb.

The first coat of varnish is the most satisfying, because you can actually view what appears to be progress. After that you will attempt to convince yourself there is a reason you come back day after day to add an invisible layer of protection. It does seem to be getting shinier. Have you already hit this spot? It’s kind of sticky. Perhaps you should have been more regimented in your procedure. Next time go from the base of the third stanchion to the midship cleat before you shift the can. Brush only in one direction, ideally toward your most recent work, or alternatively away from it, depending on which guru you worship. This assures that you’ll take twice as long to lay down a coat. Oh, and make sure you use only the most expensive brush you can find, preferably one made from the ear tufts of virgin female Himalayan Yaks that only graze above thirteen thousand feet. Or, the cheapest foam brush made. Your call. Anything in between will ruin your finish, say the gurus.

But one must not simply dip one’s brush directly into the varnish can. Oh no, one must decant the portion one plans on applying each day, as one would do before savoring a fine wine with guests visiting from the Dordogne. If you’re a beer drinker, you’re screwed.

Unlike your bottle of Chateau La d’ Da, however, you should water down your first varnish coats in a series of spirit dilutions that I forewent, choosing to go full strength from the can from the get-go. I drink out of the bottle, too. Sometimes the gurus need to be put in their place.

To further postpone job completion, before each subsequent layer goes on, you have to sand off the previous coat. Not all of it, of course, just some, to remove all the muck and bugs that were blown onto your last coat. Because your boat now illustrates, much like a child’s science exhibit does with plastic dinosaur replicas and molasses, the machinations of the La Brea tar pits.

The other reason you sand is to improve adhesion. Scuffing up your work makes the next coat hold better. Well okay, if the gurus say so, even though the goop I inadvertently dolloped onto the deck yesterday without any prep work seems to be adhering just fine, thank you.

Next, you take a tac rag (old t-shirt, like I said) to the newly sanded surface to make it all nice and smooth. Why bother? This is, after all, a boat! We require traction. Even the seats in our cockpits are designed with a non-skid surface, presumably to keep our well-heeled backsides from sliding into the ocean while we’re on a beat. Why would I want to give all the wood a slippery feel to it?

Oh hell, I sanded between coats.

The gurus say a minimum of six coats is required for a proper job. No one hazards a guess on the upper end of the equation, which I put at somewhere around eighty. But no matter how many you decide on, here is something you should never, ever do. Never, ever agree to host any young apprentices, like say a twelve-year old niece and her friend, out attempting to stave off boredom, by letting them come aboard to help you.

Whatever layer gets applied that day will savage everything you’ve worked for. No matter how detailed your varnishing seminar, how urgent your admonitions for care and patience, after a few minutes they’ll be slathering the stuff on like maple syrup on a Sunday morning short stack. Varnish will be gushing from your scuppers, flowing over your topsides, drizzling down your coamings like snot from a sniffling toddler. Better to let them go play unsupervised with the outboard engine.

Who am I kidding? She's the best crew

a captain could ask for.

After six coats (the bare minimum, which was all I could bear) and the half day it took for me to remove all the masking tape (a scalpel, tweezers, and some Goof Off came in handy), I stood back to inspect the result, and was met with the predictable emotional response: depression. If you do the job well, all this lovely brightwork will stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the boat, every remaining aspect of which is in desperate need of restorative therapy.

But the payoff is not far off. Come boating season, out on the water, you’ll find your passengers ignoring nature’s wonders, rapt as they are at the artistry of your work. Then, at some point you’re bound to hear, “Hey, Cap! The base of your starboard spreader.”

“What? What’s the problem?”

“You missed a spot.”

I look forward to that exchange. I really do. It’ll give me a chance to finally practice a live MOB drill.

That’s if you do the job at all. See, you’re supposed to wait for the right weather window. No sun, low humidity, light to no breeze, temperature between fifty-five and seventy-five, or the gurus seem to imply that your work will turn into a pumpkin. We’re talking eight to ten contiguous days of this, in April. Where I live, that kind of weather is as likely to show up as a flock of pelicans.

If you do pull it off, take a moment to enjoy your work before you put in, because you know what’s coming next. Your mate, having lavished the requisite bit of faint praise, will now notice that the hull could use a nice wax job.

What the? More @%*$&# wood? I'll hit it next year.