Shysters of the Sea

I know some lawyers. I do. And I actually consider some of them my friends. In my defense, those litigators I’ve chosen to befriend (it is hopefully a reciprocal arrangement) are among the rarified kind, which is to say they own moral compasses.

I apologize to those acquaintances in advance then, for what I’m about to say, for I believe that in a modern society such as ours, lawyers are the cultural equivalent of hired thugs.  They simply forgo hoodies for the tailored suit, their teeth are bleached rather than gilt, their shared gang tag the ubiquitous Esq, writ in Gothic lettering wherever they lurk.

Lawyers threaten not with Berettas but with bankruptcy.  They intimidate with boilerplate. They crush the resolve of law abiders with incessant delay. And they bury their victims not with shovels in the woods but paperwork in the courts. A Glock is a water pistol compared to the lethal force of an “order to show cause.”

Why am I fuming legalese in a boating blog? Because a sailing friend of mine recently fell prey to the assaults of one such shyster, though the crime didn’t begin with the legal firm. It began with yet another scourge of the sea, the certified mechanic.

I think most of us have been victimized by the local expert whose credentials have been passed along by the un-skeptical. Somebody knows the name of the local "Yanmar guy." Or a company like Mack Boring, restricted by its distribution agreement with the aforementioned engine manufacturer, passes on the number of a business in your area since they can’t sell you parts themselves. Welcome to the jungle.

It may be that some of these referrals actually know what they’re doing. They may even be friendly dudes. Here’s the thing: I don’t care if they’ve graduated cum laude from Snap-On U. I don’t care if they sport prosthetic torque wrenches for forearms. It’s all a moot point if they don’t show up for work.

Sadly this happens too often in a small community. A couple guys monopolize a business, saying yes to every job that comes along when they know they can’t satisfy the demand. I carry in my head a list of numbers I will not call again, simply because of the likelihood that neither the call nor the message left will be answered. Entire boating seasons have been scratched while owners await a response to, “Will you please come do the work you said you’d do?” And whole businesses have floated on the deposits of those who believe that a man’s word is his bond. Fat friggin’ chance.

I know my friend, and I know he has a legitimate complaint, and he can prove it with copious documentation. In fact he proved it in our local court system. For the court’s part, it awarded him his money back. The thing is, the mechanic, utilizing his typical modus operandi, didn’t show for the proceedings. What the man who took my friend’s money did instead (after my friend’s exasperated wife turned to the Web with a negative review in the local paper that finally brought our mechanic to life), rather than attend to the work promised, or return the money advanced in good faith, or even address the complaint in his own words, instead this man went and got himself a lawyer.

I have to figure one of two things. Either this lawyer was taken in by the mechanic's song and dance, which would make him one remarkably credulous lawyer, or he determined that the mechanic was giving him a song and dance, and didn’t care. He may indeed have coached his client on the finer points of the soft shoe, so as to defeat a system put in place to protect the citizenry from cheap Vaudevillian acts.

It does however beg the question - Why would a lawyer take on the case of a man perjuring himself in small claims court for the kind of chump change high-rolling types use as straws for doing blow?

We the people submit the following as evidence: said lawyer owns a boat.

Ah! So our briny barrister now has a 24/7 mechanic in his “employ,” and honest boaters looking for any kind of engine work in our harbor will either have to take a number higher than Johnny Cochran's, or pull out the service manual and socket wrenches. 

Taking Back The Holiday

A view from the travelift

I visited my sailing blog recently because I was bored, and because visiting my blog registers a visit, an important consideration if ever I am to reach Internet critical mass. Presently I’m the only one visiting me, but sooner or later you will too because Google's algorithms, impressed by my overly frequent visits, will recommend that you give me a try.

That's why it’s important to remain relevant. So it’s with a certain skewed sense of pride that I announce we are finally back in the water just in time to have attended the 2013 edition of the fireworks display in Hempstead Harbor, one year to the day after we’d discovered we were sinking.

It was on the previous 4^th of July, with our niece and a group of her high school friends aboard, that a distressing amount of water was discovered in the bilge after we’d returned to our mooring. After pumping the water out that night, I’d checked again early the next morning to discover it had opted to return.

I’m going to skip over most of the details since they were covered in my last post (which you should also read along with all the other posts), though I'd like you to know that Emily is now graduated from high school and onto new adventures. So the lessons to be learned herein are: 1) study hard, grasshopper, and 2) if you have a boat, you will be working on her a lot whether she’s brand new, or say forty-something years old. Our boat happens not to be new.

I’ve poked a lot of fun in the past at boaters who seem to have more interest in working on their rides than sailing them. There is an honorable aspect to the tinkerer, who will always find something more to do on his project before he’s prepared to declare it finished. And I must say I’m thankful to our yard that they allow us to do our own damage to our investments with minimal interference. Yards like ours are going the way of the local seaside dives, which are being pushed out by what are charmingly referred to as developers. Development is what happens to an otherwise vital community when people with excessive amounts of ill-begotten money interfere.

While I worked away these last few months, sanding and grinding and sweating and swearing, abutting my stern was the skeleton of a condo development rising from its seaside foundation. Those nascent parapets will doubtlessly soon house a gallery of blue-hairs, staring with pinched looks of disapproval (just wait till they get an ear-load of the sound of flailing winter halyards) at the eyesore that has been servicing sailors since long before they were soiling their cloth diapers. And there will have gone the neighborhood.

But that will be then. During the last few months I found myself spending a lot of time amid the subculture of owner/fixers, an elite group of mostly guys with bottomless to do lists. Even amid this rarified clique there are distinct subsets. There are, I imagine, more guys like me, who wish the first item on their lists was “burn this list,” (and perhaps wonder if a buyer could be found in this anemic economy), guys who religiously maintain their boats for racing purposes (shysters of the sea, I'll call them), guys like my pal Ron, who lapse into depression if there is nothing to fix at all, and perhaps the most intriguing, guys like Zoltan, who claim to despise every blood-soaked second of the work, yet perversely insist on rebuilding every square inch of their boats to Stradivariun specs.

My punch list consisted of rebuilding our stern tube, which required the demolition of my aborted attempt to 5200 back into place the old failed tube. Guys had warned me never to use 5200 if ever I intended to undo the repair. They were right. Also on the list: refit the new driveshaft and associated components, repair the blisters revealed by a thorough hull sanding (never thoroughly sand your bottom, as it will reveal what you are truly made of), as well as grind, fill and fair a disturbing symmetrical gelcoat crack running the entire length of the keel.

Also on the list would be the cosmetic improvements I could give a rat’s ass about, but which make my mate happy. And you really need to keep your mate happy, because in truth she is what makes the boat go. So it was one more go-round of brightwork “varnishing” (Cetol this time - you fetishists can squeal all you want) and hull polishing, to spiffy up the sad state of affairs brought on by lack of attention.

George, our yard manager, gave us the call to ask, "Ready to see if she'll float or not?" and I wont deny to a plague of butterflies as he drove the travelift down the tracks to lower us into the ocean. While our Laura Lynn’s tush dangled in the water, George let me scamper aboard and check my work. Inexplicably, the repair was holding.

So there we were one 4^th of July later, watching the fireworks on the kind of night that'll make a man say out loud to anyone who'll listen, “This is why you buy a boat.” After we'd made it back to our mooring around midnight, I threw the switch on the bilge pump to hear the satisfying gurgle you get with your last slurp of soda through a straw. Sweet.

Off Season

This is a good idea because why again?

It’s the time of year when, comfortably cuddled in the bosom of winter, a sailor up North can reflect on the fact that he’s in about as much trouble out of the water as he was in.

We had an early reprieve from the travails of sailing this season when our stern tube, it being part of a quixotically designed driveshaft arrangement, finally unseated itself from the hull, and we began to take on water at a fairly precipitous rate. The symptom was discovered on the Fourth of July, at the end of a carefree visit to a nearby harbor hosting their annual fireworks spectacle. Thankfully, none of the revelers onboard had become aware of the fact that they’d come close to having to swim home.

We were removed from the ocean the next day, after I’d pumped a hundred or so gallons out of the bilge for the second time in a matter of hours. Game over. Or rather, let the games begin. I made the somewhat energized call to our yard to please pull our boat ASAP, and then spent the next couple weekends trying to figure out where the hell all the water was coming from.

We pumped water all over the boat in an attempt to find the leak. There are myriad possibilities for water ingress on a modestly sized sailboat, and any boater will tell you that where the water ends up is frequently nowhere near where the water entered in the first place. Usually the most suspicious looking areas have nothing to do with it, I can tell you that.

I finally pumped water under pressure around the prop shaft, after removing the prop and jury-rigging some fire hose to a water hose. Bingo. But before you go, “I knew it – the stuffing box!” know that you would be wrong.  I used a small digital camera on a rod with a flashlight attached, and got video of a trickle I thought I’d heard, buried below the underside of a packing gland in perfect working order, thank you very much. See, I know all the damn terminology, so there.

The important take-away here is that, having finally diagnosed the problem, I then proceeded to attempt the repair myself, with the obvious result. I botched it, and in so doing I squandered time and money, and now someone who does this for a living is going to have to work harder and charge me more money then if I were to have walked away with my hands up, credit card clutched in one of them.

Along with the serious structural problem, I also noticed hull blistering for the first time, or rather a boating pal did, the bastard. This problem is anathema to owners of old plastic boats, and was probably exacerbated by our having left the boat in the water for two straight winters, for no good reason. After having employed the dubious strategy of wet storage in the Northeast, we can retire Deb’s fantasy for good. She’d convinced me that we’d save a couple bucks and put ourselves in the enviable position of being able to take to sea should we be visited by a stretch of unseasonably pleasant weather.

Just think, if it warms up some...

I don’t care if global warming brings our bay to a slow simmer in the near future. The fact that we’d have to re and de-commission the boat every time we feel like a joyride in January when temperatures soar into the mid-forties would put a killjoy on my boat jones, you dig? Unless you’re from South Florida, winter is for winter activities, fruitcake frost-biters be damned.

With skewed knowledge as to what blister repair involves, and in an attempt to incite general wharf-side derision, I went at the hull to expose the extent of the decay. Armed with a borrowed grinder, and a purchased Tyvek suit, respirator and goggles, I over-abraded about an eighth of the hull before conceding ignominious defeat. Folks, this is a job left to lunatics, slaves, and disreputable “handymen.”

So, facing the two-pronged assault of rapid and long-term boat dissolution, I considered with some interest the approach of Hurricane Sandy. With weather forecasting coming into its own in recent years, I was looking at a fairly reliable insurer’s report declaring a total write-off. Predictions of a seventeen-foot storm surge practically assured that our boatyard would be turned into a giant billiard table, with everybody renaming their floating investments “Eight-Ball.”

We did our best to prepare our lovely Laura Lynn for the coming apocalypse, because we’re responsible citizens. But the dark lizard brain in me saw an escape route. You feel me? Hey, I paid my premium.

Yet it was not meant to be. A near miraculous wind shift at the crucial hour staved off the midnight surge, and virtually everyone in our harbor was spared. Wahoo.

Visiting the boat depresses me now, so I rarely do it. As a result, the seacocks are corroded shut, or open if that’s the way they’re supposed to be. I can’t remember. Vermin can’t get in; water can’t get out. Whatever. In any event, you should tend to your boat in the winter.

Deb and I passed the yard a couple days ago, on a walk, because the weather was tolerable. Walks are not to be confused with sails. Anyway, we noticed one mast conspicuously heeled to port. That always makes a sailor take notice, so we tacked. Sure enough, a nice mid-sized boat had fallen on its hip, a victim of high winds, most likely. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did. The owner is likely going to pitch a fit when he finds out. Us, we’d had our mast pulled, so as I approached, I did so without any sense of hopeful expectation.

There's absolutely nothing half so much worth doing...