Caveat Emptor

Please mind your extremities

On our “to do” list had been the bullet point Shovel Off Boat. It'd been a particularly wintery winter here on Long Island, and while our Laura Lynn can handle the load (wet-stored, she was resting on her lines despite a foot of snow on deck), we'd wanted to make sure everything below was hunky dory, and to clear the dock and lines for the eventuality of real trouble. Plus, it seemed something akin to spousal abuse to let her wallow so ignominiously. For all I know, leaving a layer of insulation on her might have had a protective effect against the ravages of UV.

While we shoveled we noticed Matt, a local institution, tending to one of his own fleet, the cute-as-a-button water taxi that doubles as a tour boat during the fun season. He was moving ice out from around her on a lazy Saturday. When you’re in the water biz the work never ends. Having said that, I’ll wager there is nobody on the Eastern Seaboard more up to the rigors of the job than Matt.

Let me say this about the man. If one day he decides to hang up his foulies for good, our town might as well fill in the bay and start building condos. It truly frightens me to consider our harbor without his presence. He annually tends to a swarm of moorings belonging to the municipalities, yacht clubs and individuals of several harbors off the Sound.

I rent one of those moorings, and last summer Deb and I chose to hunker down aboard our boat as a vicious squall we’d tracked on radar tore through the harbor. While we huddled underneath our thrumming dodger I watched as scores of boats got knocked on their beam ends, our dinghy swamped and our oars took flight for the near coast. When it was over I remember marveling to Deb, “Matt’s moorings all held. He saved all our hides.”

Matt also oversees our bay’s water taxi service, much of the maintenance and seasonal care of docks, floats, gangplanks and whatever other nautical paraphernalia crowds the shoreline, and offers harbor tours to the less fortunate on the aforementioned scenic vessel. Beside all his other responsibilities he must deal with the likes of us, the hordes of boat owners who care only for our own personal pleasure.

One can imagine how hard it might be to book some face time with the guy. But here he was, coming over to say hi as we tended to our singular task. It was a rare pleasure to share in his seemingly limitless joy of being on the water.

Matt just seems made for this environment. He works like a dog (a Chesapeake Bay retriever comes to mind), one that wouldn’t have it any other way. The thing is, ways change. It’s been going on in this country for some time now, and some of it just plain turns my stomach.

When we asked how things had been going his countenance clouded over, something I doubt an act of nature could wring from him. No, this was man-made, and he proceeded to unload a weighty cargo involving an incident involving one of the town’s moorings. It had occurred a couple years back, but like some bad ideas it had festered inside another man’s poisoned mind. The details had pulled Matt away from the work he loved, immersed him in a foreign world, and the experience was keeping him awake at night.

I will now state for the record that anything I print from here on in is my own interpretation of events. Why? Because it involves boaters and lawyers. You don’t believe me? Take a gander at the water from any safe distance next spring. If there is a boat there, there is likely trouble in the offing. And as I love to observe, if I have not shed blood today, I surely have not spent time on a boat.

And lawyers? The term “lawyer” requires no explanation. It is as self-descriptive as the term “diarrhea”. What kind of diarrhea? Do you need to see a list? I don’t think so.

I’ll stick to what I do know. We boaters are a sad lot. Little is officially required of us in terms of experience and know-how, and what policing does exist is marginal. It often appears that the only thing one must have in order to be referred to as “Captain” is the key to the engine and a cooler of brewskies.

We captains are jumpy, too. The second a warmish day surfaces in March we expect the bay to be ready for our orgiastic spring emergence. Maintenance be damned; first one in the pool wins.  

So I’m seeing this guy in my mind’s eye. He’s itching to get his tub floating again, and his mooring ball is out there, having been placed by an experienced crew that has swapped it in for the winter stick that ID’s the strategically positioned and inspected ground tackle, one which serves as the template for Chapman’s Guide To Boating. He’s got this powerful hankering in his loins, but there’s no pennant so he figures he’ll rig something himself. How hard could it be? He tells Matt, and Matt being the kind of guy he is says the pennant won’t be in for a week, but feel free to give it a go, Cap. Just exercise due caution.

So our MacGyver proceeds to mangle a finger in an attempt to pass a line though a mooring shackle. Tricky business, threading a rope through a loop. It’s only done maybe tens of thousands of times a day by boaters who have an iota of common sense. So you know what’s up next, right? Time to call in the legal team. That’s where a real boater shows his metal.

In this, the most litigious culture in the history of Planet Earth, no folly shall go undenied. No culpability shall go undeflected. No lapse in judgment shall forego the attempt to reap monetary reward. We are a nation of dufus/whiners who feel no shame in the blaming of someone else for our own failings. Having stumbled on the sidewalk while gawking at the Wonderbra billboard, it is now time to take on the municipality, the concrete company, and the dentist who failed to match the color of the chipped tooth.

Matt Meyran once nearly died in a hospital after a routine operation went awry. When I asked if he’d sued for bazillions, he just went, “They were just doing their job. Sometimes things happen.” Yes they do, Matt. And now there’s a numb-nut out there trying to make a killing off his own stupidity, with a money-grubbing legal team looking for a cut of the action.

You’re out there somewhere, Captain Douchebag. Next time you decide to try to bust a move from the bow of your SS Guppy, do us all a favor and drown. And take the family shyster with you. 

Entropy

Odds are we could beat this guy in a match race

It’s a brisk Sunday afternoon, the approach of autumn hard on the wind. I’m comfortable in my living room alternating between a laptop and an old trumpet I’ve received as a gift from the estate of a deceased cousin.

I'm thinking this could add a new dimension to my sunset salutes, my having been limited in the past to the single note of the Bahamian conch horn manufactured during our 2005-2006 seabattical. How hard could it be to squawk out a rendition of Taps? I’ll check on YouTube. The answer to everything is on YouTube.

And what must Deb be thinking while listening to my first strangled notes? That her husband could definitely use yet another musical instrument he cannot play? What Deb says is, “I’m thinking I might like to go for a sail.”

 This girl is no sissy-pants

Yeah, but it’s kind of windy, and chilly too. I can see the tree limbs out the window, my attuned senses clocking the gusts in the mid twenties at the very least. I check UConn’s nautical buoy at Execution Rocks for corroboration. Frigging close enough. Let the frost-biters have their sick fun. I return to the laptop and google the proper technique for maintaining a brass instrument. I’m talking about the trumpet again.

 What was my excuse the last time Deb suggested we get out on the water and put to good use our marine investment? I believe it was a little too hot out, and there wasn’t enough wind.

What’s wrong with this picture? Beyond the fact that I’m a lazy-ass bastard and that sailing involves work, there is an ulterior motive for my avoidance. Entropy depresses me.

To go sailing I must collect the oars in the garage, and the garage door opener has been acting up. It’s definitely not the battery in the remote. I think the remote is just about shot. I checked the cost of a new remote online. Ridiculous. I’ll just keep squeezing the old one from positions picked up while watching Cirque du Soleil promos.

The oars also need a varnish job before they start to delaminate. Amazing how much two sticks of wood cost at West Marine. The oarlock sockets on our dink need work too. Stress cracks are forming on the gunnels at both fittings. Truth is, the whole dink is falling apart, and my previous attempts at fiberglass repair are a civic disgrace. I tell myself the look adds a level of theft protection. I hear voices anyway, and I trust they’re mine.

As we row away from the dinghy dock I’ll take a look at the gangplank I maintain myself because the guys who are supposed to don’t. The gangplank tires I installed need air before they flatten out or they will self-destruct, and then the rims will chew away at the plastic floating dock like the old ones did. The dock is a puzzle-lock affair made out of interlocking floating cubes, and when one of them has been punctured, a sinkhole forms around it. From whence follows death and destruction.

 Let's be clear, Vinny is not the problem 

with the gangplank

Our approach to the Laura Lynn reveals that the work put into making the hull sparkle has worn out its welcome. Pausing at the stern boarding ladder I can just see (the water is foul with algal growth. More on that later…) the rudder sprouting foliage, which means the prop will be even worse, which is bad for engine efficiency. Barnacles will choke off power and cause overheating (I forgot to mention the sea strainer), and the scraping off of the barnacles, which secrete a natural form of crazy glue in order to anchor exoskeletons composed of scalpel blade shards to things you own, will require a ritual swim involving bloodletting and the caking of every orifice I possess with dispossessed crustaceans.

Hoisting myself aboard, I am reminded by the twinge in my left shoulder that it will one day more than likely require surgery. But the shoulder is the least of my bodily concerns. Let’s not even go there. Let us rather consider the imminent destruction of our planet, shall we? Unless you’re one of those hapless Teabaggers? Because right now my bay looks like a couple of cargo ships dumped their entire Lipton stash overboard.

Sailing is not the green endeavor one might wish it to be unless you’re the Pardys, and they crap in a bucket. Deb and I employ an eighties-era engine in our boat, and diesel is now going for about six dollars a gallon on the water. I think we’re running low, but we don’t have a fuel gauge. We have to dip a notched stick into the tank to find out. To do that we have to assemble our cockpit table which covers the fuel deck fill when folded shut. Nothing we do on this simple vessel is simple.

Which reminds me: I think we have to pump out the head soon. Landlubbers do not appreciate the miracle of modern plumbing nearly enough. You tap the handle and get pissed if it sticks. Where does it all go? As if you even care. We boaters must carry our sloshing effluent around with us until we run out of space, and we don’t use a dipstick for that measurement.

Above deck, the weathering of all the brightwork is demoralizing. Brightwork, for the uninformed, is a euphemism for rotting wood caked in flaking varnish. It was just two years ago that I stripped every board foot of lumber for the second time, and applied too few layers of varnish once again. The elements have returned to mock my work in short order.

 As I've stated in the past: a total waste of time

The mainsail cover is ragged, as is the jib’s UV cover. Deb made great efforts to repair the dodger, which is old enough for about every seam to have been dissolved by the sun. All the canvas should arguably be replaced, but that argument will fall on cheap ears. I’ll just stare at the threadbare material instead of the scenery, and blame our boat’s mediocre performance on blown-out sails. I’ve heard that’s a more than reasonable excuse.

Below decks I follow a regimen that reminds me at every turn how old our boat is. I open the main hatch, which now leaks. The Lexan is cracked, but it has been cracked for as long as we’ve had the boat, so the leak is a surprise. There are other leaks as well, as evidenced by a check of the bilge. I have no idea where they originate, since water collects even when it hasn’t rained. I keep a hydrometer from an old aquarium (never ever own an aquarium) to tell if it’s fresh or saltwater, but it doesn't seem to be working. It thinks every fluid poured into it has infinite density. Deb just takes a lick. Seriously, she is nuts.

Readying the engine gives me the most angst. I’ve never stopped the slow leak in the secondary fuel filter, which should be changed. I neglected to change the oil last season also, thinking we were going to sail through the winter. Deb did, anyway. I knew better.

I always hope the engine will fire up the first time I push the starter button. More often we get a series of clicks. Having run all the prescribed tests, I suspect there is more than one cause to the problem. I hate when that happens, and it happens a lot. I’ve decided that part of the solution, battery replacement, is overdue. We have three batteries, and they are very heavy. Replacement is a simple process requiring little more than lots of money and a series of lacerations from hoisting dense blocks of applied chemistry into painfully tight compartments.

When the engine does fire, it announces its return with a cloud of dark smoke, a perfectly healthy response for a diesel engine. Screw the environment.

I recently discovered rotting of the cored deck at the hawsehole. I know! What the hell is a hawsehole, and how did I discover it? It turns out a hawsehole is a thing that needs maintenance. I discovered this from having stubbed my toe on it.

My neighbor, an avid sailor who loves trouble, tells me I don’t even want to know what’s involved in dealing with a spongy deck. I already do know, and he’s right, I don’t want to. Searching the sky for succor, I notice the worn halyards leading to ancient winches, and spreaders in need of inspection. I am told the wooden spreaders of the Morgan 34 are particularly suspect, subject to rot and ultimately rig failure. We will have our rig removed this winter for inspection, another added expense.

The obvious issues instill in me a darker thought. There are things I cannot see in the nether regions of the boat that could cause worse problems than poor sailing performance. I suspect the secluded stuffing box, embedded chainplates, buried wiring…

One of the common characteristics I find among sailors like my neighbor is a seeming pleasure at the discovery of problems, which they then get to tackle with perverse abandon. I do not share this trait. My common response to the discovery of common boat problems is pathetic and unprintable.

And so the prospect of a pleasant day on the water is inevitably accompanied by the even more compelling concern as to what I’ll discover that will most probably cost me money and aggravation. Last time it was a jammed mainsail car (we should never have bothered raising the main) that will need some sort of attention, I guess.

On the bright side, the boating season will soon come to an end and we’ll have our vessel stored on land, where she belongs.

Day is done