I may have drifted far away from what Roger Duncan meant by “flexibility of mind.” But that requirement for creative but practical thinking may be the deepest beauty of all imbedded in a boat, because the builder gets endless practice in figuring things out, discarding dogmas, adjusting to new realities. This is how civilizations, as well as individuals, make progress.
Sam Devlin’s Zephyr is an undeniably simple design, and yet there was almost nothing about it that was proving to be simple for a virgin boatbuilder. The next issue was paint. I gathered half a dozen book chapters, magazine articles, and marine paint manufacturers’ pamphlets on how to paint a boat, and all I gleaned from them was two words: it depends.
On what the boat is made of, how it’s going to be stored, how it’s going to be used, what latitude and climate it’s going to reside in, what kind of primer (if any) you apply, what kind of paint you choose (there are at least a dozen different formulations of marine paint) what kind of brush (or spray) you use, and the alignment of Mars’s two moons, Deimos and Phobos, at the moment you pop the can of paint. OK, I made that last one up, but there are so many variables, and so many different opinions, that astrology might as well be stirred into the can.
I had made one big decision: red. Interlux, one of the major marine paint companies, makes a dark, bloody hue called “Bounty” that looks so deep and rich that it could swallow up your reflection and it would free-fall into eternity. I couldn’t resist, despite an entire page of dire Devlin warnings about the perils of painting boats any dark color. Dark paint shows off surface imperfections, with which my boat was legion. It can even absorb so much heat in the sun that the epoxy underneath begins to soften, which could result in a suddenly flexible boat. But this was one choice I had made by emotion: I wanted a red sailboat.
With the boat turned over, I brushed on a test patch of about ten square feet on the B-minus port bottom and a couple more square feet on the B-plus starboard side. It looked stunning. I left it for the night, and the next morning I was up at five to see how it had dried. Both patches looked awful. They were speckled with dust, streaked with bristle marks, uneven, splotchy, runny, and broadcasting glorious surface imperfections to all the world.
I burrowed into my pile of references to learn how much of this I could fix. Quite a lot, it turned out. One obvious issue was that my garage by this time had more than a year’s worth of accumulated boat dust on the floor, and every footstep in the vicinity was launching some of it into the air, poised to waft into the wet paint. An article by Aimé Fraser in WoodenBoat magazine advised me to apply thinner coats. “Most bad paint jobs are caused in one way or another by trying to put on too much too fast,” he wrote, which is the sort of dog-simple instruction I could absorb. Fraser also recommended throwaway foam instead of expensive bristle brushes, which seemed like a dubious proposition. But I was taking flexible-mind practice, so I was willing to try it.
I borrowed a friend’s Shop-Vac, spent a long afternoon cleaning the garage and then the bare hull itself, then went out to buy expensive marine paint thinner and a bagful of sixty-fivecent foam brushes. It took about two hours to apply a thin coat to the entire hull, and it was pleasurable work. Painting was a morale-booster: no other step in the building process had made such a dramatic turn in the boat’s appearance so quickly. And Fraser was right about the foam; it laid down a smoother coat than the brush and didn’t leave a wake of orphaned bristles.
There was one immediate problem. Long months earlier, when I had cut out pieces of fiberglass cloth for sheathing the hull’s exterior, I had grabbed an old green permanent marker and scribbled an identifying label on each piece: PORT 2, STARBD 3 and so on. These directions were now screaming brightly through the paint. I wondered how many coats it would take to cover them up.
Four more mornings in a row I lightly sanded the previous day’s work, thoroughly cleaned the hull with a tack cloth, and applied another coat. STARBD 3 was remarkably tenacious; it didn’t give up until the fifth round. I craved for this to be the final coat, but it didn’t look great. There were runs and drips and wavy patches that needed to be sanded, and then what—still another coat? Where would it end? Devlin’s final words in his “Painting” chapter only informed me that “. . . you need a lot of patience, and a similar amount of luck.” Thanks, friend.
At this point I had regressed to a five-yard boat, and however brilliant and glorious the color, my impatient or unlucky paint job had degraded my hard-won Grade B hull to a mousy C or worse. I couldn’t find any article titled “Salvaging a Crummy Paint Job,” so I seemed to be on my own. Flexibility was urgently needed.
Thirty years ago Patty and I owned a beloved old Peugeot whose red paint had oxidized severely in the Arizona sun. We couldn’t afford then to have it repainted, so I took a can of polishing compound—a last resort, unaccompanied by much hope—and spent a hot afternoon in the carport wiping and rubbing. It worked far better than expected, restoring the paint to near-showroom luster. On the slim promise of that experience, I developed a plan for rescuing the boat paint: Clean up the errors with two or three rounds of increasingly fine sandpaper, then go over the entire hull with grade 0000 steel wool (so fine it feels almost velvety), then polishing compound, and finally automotive wax.
Before committing to all this, I tried it on a dinner platesized section of the bottom. To my utter amazement, it worked. The worst of the scratches, streaks, and runs disappeared. The surface assumed a soft sheen, breaking up reflected light into a satiny glow instead of mirrored images. It’s what you want for a wooden boat, actually—a surface that looks carefully though imperfectly handcrafted instead of one that tries to imitate factory production.
It took three full afternoons to commit this four-step procedure on the entire hull. It was seriously fatiguing work, and I had no idea whether it was valid boat painting—nothing in my pile of references described anything remotely like what I was doing. Maybe it would all dissolve three minutes after Far From Perfect hit salt water. At the moment, though, it looked damned good.
I think that in building a boat, you have to chart an uncertain and necessarily wobbly path between asking advice and following directions on one hand, and figuring things out for yourself on the other. If you simply want to follow directions, you should build a kit. Nothing wrong with that, except humanity would never make any progress if we built only kits. At the other extreme is the trust-thyself-above-all commandment of Emerson: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.” However noble and eloquent that sounds, it exudes the ominous whiff of dogma. A flexible mind dances between the external chorus of other people’s experience, and the internal siren of invention or conviction. In the end, it boils down to this, which to me has always seemed like a more than adequate philosophy of life: whatever works is good.
CHAPTER 16
EBB TIDE
“SHE’S LOOKING GREAT. But I don’t see your deck brace in the photos. Did you take it out for better access?”
It’s an e-mail from Joel Bergen. I’m staring at the screen, trying to digest what he means, and suddenly I feel the hot dagger pangs of alarm, physically, right in my gut. Like I’ve boarded a flight for Tucson, only the plane is taxiing to the runway and the attendant has just announced our flying time to: Miami. Deck brace? I think I remember seeing the piece he’s referring to on the Zephyr he built—a richly varnished slab of okoume plywood underneath the forward rail of the coaming. I had assumed it was cosmetic. His use of the term “brace” seems to imply something more critical.
I hurry out to the garage to consult Devlin’s plans. There it is, or was, on the final sheet: a four-foot-long frame piece that could be made either of plywood or cedar, spanning the boat from one side of the hull to the other at the forward edge of the cockpit. You don’t have to be an engineer to see that it’s indeed a brace, an integral piece of the boat’s structure. But I didn
’t see it at all, unobtrusively lurking in the plans amid a thicket of larger bulkheads and hull pieces. I should have made and installed it in November, four months back, before I locked down the deck.
Early in this adventure, my reaction would have been to take decisive action, borne on wings of panic. Grab pencil, saw, and chisels, and retrofit the truant brace, whatever the cost in labor and appearance. But this isn’t an emergency, it’s a problem—one that I can at least contemplate for a while. It’s not procrastination if you’re using time to legitimately think through a problem and avoid compounding a mistake. I haven’t been very good at making this distinction, historically—I either bluster ahead with the first fix that pops into my head, or shunt the problem to a cold burner forever. Far From Perfect actually may be teaching me a new way of working. I think the reason is that I have so much invested in her at this point that I’m fiercely wary of doing anything dumb.
At the same time, I’m deeply worried that I’ve already done something dumb.
Far From Perfect’s story to this point has been a tidal cycle of emotional highs and lows, peaks of pleasure and optimism followed by troughs of fatigue and discouragement. What’s happening now is a convergence of lows, some of them outside the scope of the boat. My father is still alive, against all his caregivers’ expectations, but the last discernible quality has drained out of his life. I’ve made five trips to El Paso to try to solve problems and offer some comfort, but it feels like we are in a confined space of emotion that we are still unable to navigate. At home I’m fixating on Far From Perfect’s flaws, and no self-administered pep talk or reasoning seems to make it go away. I don’t have the craftsmanship to make everything happen as it should—corners mitered with furniture-like precision, epoxy skin as smooth as glass. It’s eerily reminiscent of where I was twenty years ago when I quit the piano: I now know enough about boatbuilding to visualize exactly what I want, but I don’t have the chops to make it happen. I’m surprised that such a persistent malaise has settled in now, so close to the end. I don’t like my emotions being so deeply tied into the boat with a life of their own that I can’t control.
A few days ago I actually was about to board a flight to Tucson when I bumped into Ken Slade, another Boeing engineer I know in Seattle. It’s a mixed blessing to build a boat in a town crawling with aircraft designers: they cheerfully volunteer their expertise, much of which translates seamlessly from aircraft to watercraft, but they’re in the habit of fishing for potential problems everywhere in the pond.
Ken studied photos of my boat-in-progress while we waited for our flight, and then started questioning me about various points of structure. I proudly explained all my beefy bracing under the mast, where the wind force will translate into horsepower to propel the boat. He seemed satisfied, if not impressed. His eyes roamed to the boat’s stern. “What do you have at the corners where the transom meets the sides of the hull?” he asked.
“Epoxy fillets and glass.”
“How big are the fillets?”
“A little less than an inch radius.” I demonstrated with my thumb. “Why?”
“Those joints are where all the loads from the rudder end up.”
“I made them pretty much according to Devlin’s plan.”
“I’d be glad to come over and look at them for you.”
“You can’t get at them. They’re underneath the deck and behind a big block of flotation foam.”
“I’d be a little worried about them,” he concluded, helpfully.
I’d be a little happier if he had praised my muscle-bound mast step or fiberglassed centerboard trunk or the double layer of plywood reinforcing the side decks, but I guess that isn’t what they do at Boeing. Nor, for obvious reasons, do they test aircraft by the empirical method: fly ’em until something literally falls apart, then redesign the failed piece a little stronger. Ken explained that they employ ground testing that simulates the stresses of twenty-five years of flying, bending a wing, for example, until it breaks. Lacking such an engineering department, my possibly half-cocked plan is to sail Far From Perfect in winds that gradually progress up the scale, hoping that any part that’s about to croak will issue a warning groan or screech enough in advance that I can do something about it—or if it doesn’t, praying that its failure will be merely embarrassing rather than catastrophic. This plan, of course, will depend on predictable and cooperative weather, an unusual condition in nature.
Here is my functional worry list:• The rudder, which swivels off the transom on two pairs of stainless-steel widgets called pintles and gudgeons. I don’t know if the gudgeons are screwed securely enough to the transom or if the working end of the rudder will wobble and flutter or even torque itself loose because there’s no attachment point down low. I tried twice to install a third gudgeon, but it proved impossible to align with the other two.
• The gooseneck, another specialized steel gadget that allows the boom to rotate around the mast in both the vertical and horizontal planes. I paid $22.88 for one designed for “small boats,” which decidedly describes the Zephyr, but it seems awfully petite and delicate to digest the stress of an angry ten-foot boom slamming through the wind.
• The axle for the centerboard, which lurks below the waterline in the centerboard trunk. If it leaks, it’s going to be a colossal undertaking to fix it. And if the centerboard binds in either its up or down position, I’ll be in a boat that can’t be fully controlled under sail or can’t get to shore without grounding the board.
• The transom-to-side joints, thanks to Ken Slade’s scrutiny.
• The nonexistent deck brace, thanks to Joel Bergen’s review.
It’s a March afternoon, uncharacteristically sunny and warm enough for some quality time working on the boat, but after a few token probes with my fingers under the deck to test the feasibility of implanting a deck brace—conclusion: not easy—I go inside. Instead of making a boat, I make a New Mexican enchilada sauce for dinner. Butter, flour, chicken stock, powdered Chimayó and pasilla chile, cumin, honey. The pungent earthiness is an aromatic balm. I’ve been looking forward more and more to the hour I spend every weekday making dinner for Patty as a kind of organic tranquilizer to smooth over the emotional serrations left by the afternoon’s boat work. I feel completely competent in the kitchen; I don’t often make mistakes and don’t agonize over them when I do. My cooking, an avocation into which I long ago settled into a zone of comfort, is now giving the relief from boatbuilding that boatbuilding was supposed to give from writing.
While the enchilada sauce is simmering, I write Peter Gron a note:Have you had to fight through cycles of discouragement? Every evening after I finish work I seem to limp into the house feeling crappy because of another mistake or uncertainty about the meaning and value of this whole exercise. I don’t know where this is coming from, since I thought I came to terms with a fairly high ambient level of imperfection a long time ago.
He replies early the next morning:I think it has to do, partly, with grieving. No, really! This (as you near completion) is where you finally, really, come to grips with the level of quality that you’ve achieved. You may be grieving the opportunity to make it better.
I had sent the same note to Joel, and he also has a thoughtful reply:It’s easy to get discouraged when we make mistakes. None of us are professional boatbuilders. We’ve never taken on a project anywhere near this magnitude. We don’t know what we’re doing from the outset, and we frequently get conflicting advice. But because we’re amateurs it’s OK if we make mistakes. My boat has plenty. The bow is about three inches to port, giving Quality Time a banana shape. My rudder is off center despite my doing everything I could possibly think of to center it accurately. I could go on and on, but you know what? None of this bothers me. The imperfections are just reminders of the new skills I’ve learned and how I’ve grown. And finally, when I put my boat in the water and climb on board, all my worries and problems fade away.
I chew on Peter’s and Joel’s words
over the next several days of work. I think Peter is right about the grief. I’m astonished to learn that Joel’s boat curls like a banana on its side—I never noticed, which might be prima facie evidence that such cosmetic defects really don’t matter. I’m annoyed with myself for struggling, apparently, with a resurgence of the perfectionist demon. I thought I’d killed it a year ago.
But perfectionism is a complex beast, and not something you can easily broom away with go-easy-on-yourself aphorisms or even hard reasoning. In the broad sweep of human affairs, perfectionism is not a bad thing. Voltaire famously said, “The best is the enemy of the good,” but the observation is just as valid if we whirl it around: The good is the enemy of the best. In many cases, pushing for perfection is clearly the right thing to do. It can even be a moral imperative. Where would we be in air travel if Boeing weren’t continually striving to make the perfectly safe airliner? Fifty years ago flying was vastly more hazardous than it is today. But consider Brahms, the classic self-torturing perfectionist. He relentlessly burned scores that didn’t meet his own standards, and once told a protégé (whose music we have easily forgotten) that “you seem to me too easily satisfied.... I never cool down over a work, once begun, until it’s perfected, unassailable.” Brahms’s perfect music has enriched humanity beyond measure, but my reading of his life is that it also extracted an enormous price in the composer’s personal misery. He sought perfection in love and friendship, but because human behavior, unlike his musical creations, was beyond his control, he failed again and again. He lived a lonely and anguished life.
The Year of the Boat Page 19