Cutting the Dragon's Tail

by Lynda Chidell

  Later, I knew exactly what I was looking for; the number of batteries I wanted (five), the type (lead acid), the capacity (about one hundred amp-hours each), and the general shape and size that would fit inside the engine room. I then contacted the Willard factory, glad to have another useful facility right on our doorstep – Port Elizabeth being a motor car manufacturing city well geared towards industry of all types. Willard supplied exactly what we needed at a reasonable price. Six years later, after much care and attention, those batteries were still going strong.

  10.12 paints

  Steel is one of the best materials for boat building, but it has one severe drawback. When exposed to air and water, particularly salt water, it will rust. I knew right at the beginning that the way in which our steel was painted would be of paramount importance.

  Before becoming too involved in paint research, however, I had some earlier decisions to make. What sort of steel should we use? There are some types that corrode less than others – for example, Corten steel or stainless steel of the correct grade. Then there was the possibility of not using steel at all in some areas, instead employing wood, aluminium or other materials.

  Looking back, I feel I was right to dismiss Corten. It would have been available in straight sheet form, but then the large flat areas of Tin Hau, where paint was easy to apply, were never a problem. The troubles with Corten would have started on seeking the various specific steel sections like flat bars, angles and hollow tube – about twenty shapes and sizes in all. Some of these might have been impossible to acquire, or at least would have caused us unnecessary delays and expense. I did not want to end up with a mixture of Corten steel and the steel we eventually chose, ordinary mild steel.

  I was prepared, however, to mix mild steel with other materials, or avoid the use of it altogether in certain areas. The pilothouse, for example, was constructed of wood over a steel frame; the cabin hatches were made in wood (and later remade of superior wood); the porthole frames were made in the same mistakenly chosen wood (and later reconstructed in bronze); and the eyes to which the moving sheet blocks were attached were made of stainless steel. There were some places where originally we used mild steel and afterwards changed to other materials; for example, the forepeak hatches (changed to aluminium); the davit framework (changed to stainless steel); the gate hinges (changed to stainless steel); the wind generator mast (changed to aluminium, perhaps mistakenly, as aluminium whips about much more than steel) and the deck boxes (removed altogether and changed to a most useful open structure made of stainless steel pipe). I was aware before we started building that steel boats often corrode from within, and so we were extremely conscientious about all our work on insulation above floor level, bilge painting, ballast epoxying, and drainage below the sole. As a result we had no problems in these areas.

  However, I underestimated the extent of the potential corrosion problem on deck. We discovered that nasty brown streaks would appear in two circumstances: firstly, wherever localised rubbing occurred; and secondly, wherever steelwork was kept permanently damp by contact with wood or other materials. After five years afloat, Tin Hau had the correct assortment of materials on deck (nearly), but we certainly learnt the hard way! One regret I will always have is that, when Munchie Moolman offered to obtain for us at a reasonable cost some stainless steel pipe for use as handrailing, I turned him down, thinking: what’s special about the exposure of the handrailing? Now I know better. Unthinking yachtsmen and officials just love to grab it with their boat-hooks, chipping off the paintwork and causing me days of work to put right.

  In case it may seem that we had all the ideas, perhaps I should emphasise that often only the final decisions came from us. Ronnie, Paul and Tony were always suggesting better ways of doing things. For example, in order to minimise painting problems, Ronnie had recommended flat bars for the bulwark and hull frames, keeping angle bars only for the overhead deck frames.

  Most of the detailing, however, had originated from Tom Colvin and was shown on the drawings – or at least on a separate sheet of steel scantlings, as the drawings were for an aluminium boat. One detail, which we particularly appreciated from the point of view of painting, was the one he made of the bottom of the keel. He specified for this an eleven metre length of 200mm by 200mm by 25 mm thick (eight inches by eight inches by one inch) steel angle weighing eight hundred kilograms, placed on its corner to form a V-shape. Vertical plates were welded to the top of each of the arms of the V to form the upper section of the keel. But what we liked so much was the generous thickness of steel in the area of the boat most likely to hit the seabed, together with the way the sides of the V could be painted easily whenever Tin Hau was hauled out for antifouling. Only a few isolated points on the bottom of the V could not be reached with a paint brush. This sort of detailing was just as important as the type of paint used.

  The next question to be answered was: how should the steelwork be prepared in readiness for painting? We decided to take some items, such as the mooring bitts and the air vents, for hot dip galvanising prior to being welded into place. However the bulk of the steelwork was not treated in this way. Instead it was sandblasted and primed before use, this being a much easier job in warm, rain-free Port Elizabeth than in, say, England. We could have left all of the sandblasting until after assembly, but it was more encouraging to watch the growth of a tidy matt-red skeleton than to watch a growing ‘rust-bucket’; and thanks to Ronnie’s tardiness we were at the watching stage for a long time! The importance of good sandblasting has since been well demonstrated to me; paintwork lifted or blistered in the one or two areas I know, or think, were not sandblasted.

  At last, we reach the painting itself. I am glad to be writing about it and not doing it. Clean fingers are such wonderful things to have! It was a massive job on Tin Hau, taking about one thousand five hundred hours altogether. We were most fortunate to have received help from many sources, such as from Mark and Tandy Helliwell (Lynda’s son and daughter), out in South Africa from England for their summer school holidays (winter in South Africa); Ronnie and his gang on the initial interior steel painting; Kim Ockenden, who came all the way from Cape Town to give a total of six hard weeks doing considerably more than just painting; Clive Battell, who passed his two week ‘holiday’ with us beavering away from dawn to dusk; likewise, Jan and Jeff, visiting again from Swaziland; and another useful young volunteer, Nigel. Then there was Ike, whom we employed for a total of one hundred hours (the lazaret became known as the ‘Ike house’); Lynda’s father, Ernie (Royle), who came regularly every Thursday afternoon for nine months, complete with ‘sustenance’ baked by Lynda’s mother, Marjorie; my mother, Margaret (Chidell), our faithful supporter, out from England for another so-called ‘holiday’; Lynda’s brother-in-law, Wally, who tackled some of the tightest spots in the bilge, adopting his usual perfectionist principle (‘if you do a job, do it properly’); Lynda’s brother, Andy, equivalent in muscle power to two normal mortals, who helped us with many tasks; Hugh Jagoe and Chantal Kraus, a couple we grew to know and like, who were at that time considering the construction of their own boat; Bill from the yacht club; and last, but by no means least, Jacqui and her mother, Wendy.

  The paints we used over the shop-primed steelwork were numerous: two-part coal tar epoxy on the hull below the waterline, mixed in the easy ratio of 1:1, four thick coats in all, alternating in colour between brown and black. The final coat was a special one in preparation for the two coats of copper based scrubbable antifoul paint. Above the waterline on the hull we applied (mainly by roller) two coats of two-part aluminium-coloured epoxy primer, followed by two coats of epoxy black paint – a type that could be overcoated with a different colour, if required, although we both admired Henry Ford’s famous dictum ‘Any colour as long as it’s black.’ The deck area, including the cabin top, was given the same treatment, except the top two coats were white instead of black. The final job was to mask off all the areas where we might tread, and then apply two furth
er coats of non-slip white epoxy paint, mixing the normal white epoxy with what we termed ‘wood flour’, fine wood powder obtained from sanding machines. Sand is often used for this purpose, but we decided that the surface thus obtained would be too hard on kneecaps.

  On subsequent maintenance painting, we kept to the same specification below the waterline, but above it and on deck we switched to two-part and subsequently one-part polyurethane paints. We discovered to our cost that the epoxy paint powdered in the sun and it was a lengthy business to clean and sand it in preparation for an overcoat.

  There were various special areas of exterior paintwork, including the two ‘oculi’, Tin Hau’s eyes, which were welded and painted on the bow – and aligned to scan the horizon – thus depicting a trading junk as opposed to a fishing junk. On the stern we had a beautiful Chinese dragon, painted in red and yellow (later changed to black, red and yellow) by our friend Ivor Sing Key. First he drew the dragon on his drawing board, then he set himself up on a scaffold to paint the real thing. This took four days, during which time he was bitten to pieces by mosquitoes. Ivor may have suffered, but the dragon was a work of art.

  Inside the boat there was plenty of painting to be done: three coats of coal tar epoxy in the bilges, and two coats of two-part white above the waterline, subsequently covered by the cork insulation and more paint. Most of the interior woodwork was varnished, and we found that by doing it properly in the first place, with much sanding between coats and extensive use of thinners in the first coats, it rarely needed any further treatment. Some woodwork, such as that forming the ceiling panels, was painted with an excellent non-drip jelly-like satin gloss paint made by Plascon Evans; this was called Velvaglow.

  Plascon Evans, who in South Africa are licensed to produce International yacht paints, deserve a special mention, although much of our excellent treatment from them was due to our contact there, a long-standing friend of Lynda’s parents, Don Durham. He helped us in the early days when I was struggling over the types of paint we needed (which weighed – wet – a quarter of a ton in total). He proceeded to make it his personal responsibility that we never had any delays or problems. We were very lucky to have had such a friend, and years later we were to see more of him on board Tin Hau.

  11. The Build-up Towards the Launch

  May 1985, found me scouring our newly acquired British Admiralty routeing charts of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (one for each month), gleaning all the information I could from these wonderful sources. Even though there was still an enormous amount of work to be done – in fact most of the boat to be built – it really did seem that the biggest difficulties of the construction had been overcome and that Tin Hau would be in the water within a year. I had to give some advance thought as to what would happen after that.

  Assuming we stuck to our original aims of becoming a charter boat in Greece or Turkey, the first question of navigation was: Do we leave Africa to the left or the right? Do we sail up the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and through the Suez Canal? Or do we sail up the Atlantic Ocean, entering the Mediterranean Sea at Gibraltar?

  I knew there were two types of weather conditions we would prefer to avoid, the first being hurricanes (or cyclones) and the second being prevailing headwinds. A Chinese junk would get nowhere in either. I knew the type of weather we would like most: winds dead abeam or just aft of abeam, force three to six and plenty of sunshine, with temperatures over twenty-five degrees centigrade.

  With this in mind, I worked out that in order to reach Cape Town, four hundred miles to the west (and thus setting off to leave Africa to the right), we should be ready to sail from Port Elizabeth by February or March before the onset of the adverse westerlies. There would be little point in leaving any earlier than February, as the summer south-easterlies in Cape Town, although favourable in direction, are extremely strong – often blowing at gale or storm force for days on end. By March or April they are much less violent and Cape Town is generally basking in its best weather of the year. If we departed from there without too much delay, it would be feasible to reach the steady South Atlantic south-east trade winds within a week. Perhaps we would stop for a break in St Helena before setting off on the long haul northwards during which we would encounter first the south-east trades, then the doldrum equatorial belt, then the northern hemisphere’s north-east trades (before the hurricane season), then– assuming we could bear to pass by the West Indies – the Horse Latitudes, and finally the North Atlantic’s prevailing westerly winds bringing us to the Azores, Portugal and Gibraltar. After Gibraltar there would still be enough of the summer left to sail the length of the Mediterranean to Greece, making many stops on route and arriving, say, in October, after an eight month passage from Port Elizabeth.

  If we were not ready to leave by April, then none of the above would be possible and we would have to wait in Port Elizabeth until the following February, perhaps losing our customs drawback sums valid only on items re-exported within two years.

  Alternatively we could set off for the Indian Ocean. If we did this (leaving Africa to the left), we would have to start our voyaging with a midwinter passage to Mauritius, in which gales, although generally favourable in direction, could be expected on one day in five. Then we would have to proceed northwards, before the November cyclones, in good trade wind beam reach conditions towards the Seychelles and the entrance to the Red Sea. I concluded that the best time to sail up the lower half of the Red Sea was from January until March. However, the northern six hundred miles appeared to present a near-insurmountable problem. In this area, on-the-nose headwinds seemed to be a permanent feature, not of gale force strength, but strong enough to stop all progress in the right direction. Perhaps we would be able to ‘coastal hop’, anchoring along the coasts of Sudan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but politically this did not look easy. Assuming a successful outcome, our next obstacle would be the Suez Canal. Fine, as long as it remained open to shipping; but hadn’t there been one or two problems in the past in this area? On reaching Port Said, the remaining four hundred miles or so to Greece in early spring would be a pleasure, and we would arrive at the nearest Greek island in May – after twelve months of ‘snakes and ladders’ adventuring from Port Elizabeth.

  Having done this much preliminary passage planning, I resolved to complete the construction of Tin Hau as quickly as possible, so we could take the easier option of the Atlantic route. I set my sights on launching her in January 1986, and being ready to set off by March; perhaps a somewhat ambitious target, but with Tony and Paul on the job (and the third man in their team, Lenny, keeping things moving in the background), and with Lynda and myself now able to work unimpeded, it seemed that we could at long last move quickly and effectively.

  However, one further change would still have to be made. Much as I appreciated my work at HKS, and the company of those who worked there, I would shortly have to give it up and start working on the boat full time. From HKS’s point of view the timing seemed good, in that my work on various long standing projects such as Livingstone Hospital (the African hospital in Port Elizabeth), was just coming to an end. Perhaps Port Elizabeth was finally heading for the recession that had hit Johannesburg two years earlier?

  Regrettably, before I could submit my notice, an unexpected event happened. On 26th April I was called into the office of Mike Williams, HKS’s manager. Initially he told me that my department head was leaving at the end of the year. Then he went on to say that another engineer from a branch office with no work was being transferred to Port Elizabeth on 1st July to become the new department head. Finally he came to the point – there was no room for three senior structural engineers, even for a month or two, and so my services were no longer required after 30th June. I was being made redundant! This may seem unimportant, in that I was about to leave anyway, but it was a sharp blow to my morale and confidence. Even a slap-up party at which I was given a generous leaving present did not remove totally the sour taste at the way in which I was departing. I was aware that t
his was more than just the completion of a job. This was the final break from ‘normal life’. For fifteen years I had kept my eye on safeguarding the future, particularly from the point of view of employment. Now I had cut all the ties – or at least they had been cut for me.

  On 26th July, 1985, Mark and Tandy flew in to Port Elizabeth airport from England for their school holidays. They were arriving in a South Africa torn apart by all sorts of suffering and atrocities in the townships, but of course they saw very little of this. The system kept visitors out of the problem areas – in fact, most white South African citizens never saw the inside of an African home. I had had a glimpse of the disturbances during my work for HKS, which took me to some of the local trouble spots. During one site visit, while fifteen feet below ground level in a test pit where I was sampling the subsoil, I remember looking up to see the pit perimeter lined with black faces peering down. Knowing what they were going through in their homes, the thought crossed my mind that it must have been tempting for them to do a bit of ‘back-filling’. One less white man! But I smiled at them, got on with the job and later, on chatting with them, realised how unfair my thoughts had been. These were just light-hearted, friendly school children, full of fun and life. How could I have thought otherwise, particularly with all my happy memories of racially harmonious Swaziland? Was I being naïve, or were other people showing undue prejudice and unnecessary fear?