Sea Change

by Maxwell Taylor Kennedy

  With Jasper now part of the crew, he and I immediately went to work on the masts. We sawed through Valkyrien’s decks and chopped out huge chunks of rotting wood from the gallery down to the captain’s quarters. We rewired the starter and the generator. We got the new GPS installed on deck and made the radar work.

  Finally, we prepared to remove the seized engine.

  8. Prop Pullers

  Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

  —Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

  Before we could remove the engine we would have to disconnect the transmission and slide it backwards. But the propeller shaft blocked the transmission from moving aft, and the propeller blocked the prop shaft from moving aft, so in order to remove the engine, we first had to take off the propeller. I felt like the old woman who swallowed the fly.

  In a modern motorboat, where servicing the engine has been built into the design plan, one can often open a huge hatch above the engine, unbolt eight nuts, disconnect some wires and hoses and a link to the transmission, and then lift the motor out with a chain. Dropping it back in place is nearly as simple.

  This was not the case with Valkyrien. Lifting the engine meant removing a section of the cabin roof and then cutting through the floor above the engine, just to start. Then the engine had to be disconnected from all of the wires that controlled it and all of the hoses that fed it. We had to close off and plug the water-intake hose, then remove all of the control wires and the fuel and oil lines.

  Nowadays, when a large prop is taken off, boats are first lifted out of the water. Two or three men can then work with a front-end loader chained to the prop. Bulldozers and backhoes can pull with thousands of pounds of pressure and keep the bronze screw from damage by hitting the ground when it slips off the shaft. Yard workers on dry land toil together using hammers, propeller pullers, various chains, and even pistons to pull the propeller off the shaft. You may be wondering why is it so damn hard to take a propeller off in the first place. The answer lies in the fact that no one wants a propeller to come off while at sea. When a shipwright installs a propeller, they fasten it in such a way that it is nearly impossible to detach.

  The local shipyard would have charged us at least $1,000 just to lift Valkyrien out, and much more to remove the propeller and engine. I didn’t want to pay that kind of fee, so Jasper convinced the yardmen instead to lend us a hand-operated “prop puller,” a vintage contraption cast before World War II, that weighed about eighty-five pounds and was usually operated by two people working in a storage area of the yard. Jasper and I would instead have to manipulate the tool underwater, in scuba gear, to save the $1,000 boat-lifting fee.

  Intrepid divers swim year-round in Monterey wearing heavy wet suits—which makes the water bearable—but the thick neoprene restricts movement and renders any real work underwater at that time of year challenging.

  We tied on several life preservers to keep the prop puller from sinking, then spent hours fastening it onto the propeller and shaft, which were the absolute maximum dimensions that this puller could manage. The propeller was 46 inches in diameter, with three blades of solid bronze. Essentially a prop puller works like a pair of scissors: When you pull two ends together on one side, the other side opens wider.

  The tolerances for locking the puller in place were within a centimeter, and the eighty-five-pound puller became increasingly difficult for our numbed hands to maneuver. We tightened the puller. Then tightened it again. And again. But the prop did not move.

  We worked throughout the afternoon, most of the time submerged, exchanging scuba tanks every hour or so, or kicking over to the pier to swap tools. We worked until our lips became numb and blue and we could no longer move our fingers. Still, we could not get the prop off. We floated a huge sledgehammer, tied to life jackets, over from the pier, to assist the puller. The two steel handles used to turn the nuts on the puller are designed to withstand intense force. By evening, though, we had broken both. The nuts on the puller were more than two inches around, and we had no wrenches even close to that size.

  Jasper and I knew we had failed, but we refused to acknowledge our hopelessness. Valkyrien had so many old tools aboard, we figured there must be something we could use to turn those huge nuts.

  We remembered a gigantic pipe wrench—at least 50 inches long, probably built in Ohio in the 1930s. We could barely lift the wrench, so setting it on the propeller puller was possible only by suspending it in place. We tied the massive wrench to nylon lines from the deck and lowered it down to propeller level, roughly horizontal to the prop shaft.

  Now and then a friend would pull us out of the water up onto the dock, and help us waddle up to the men’s showers where we would fill the neoprene wet suits with hot water. We needed a landsman to turn on the shower valves because we were afraid of scalding ourselves, as we no longer had the ability to sense water temperature in the showers.

  Over and over, we swam back to the dock, waddled up and stood in the men’s room hot showers, filling our wet suits with warm water, then hobbled back down the pier and into the cold bay and across the slip to the stern of the boat, then down again to the prop.

  Various tools—wrenches, knives, pliers, pincers, a huge sledgehammer, and the preposterously gigantic pipe wrench—festooned the area around the propeller, dangling from assorted colorful flotation devices, including life rings, foam life preservers, and vests. Our work area darkened as the afternoon wore on, and our dive lights, flashing around as we moved, created an odd, almost whimsical discotheque effect.

  The whole while I struggled to hold the precarious apparatus in place, I remained terrified that it would actually work. We had torqued down enormous potential force against the propeller. I knew if it ever slipped free the prop would be launched off the shaft as though fired from a cannon. Eventually, even using long improvised breaker bars, we could tighten the bolts no further, and began hitting the breaker bars with a sledgehammer, over and over, and still it would not move.

  As night fell, we were finally on the verge of giving up once and for all. I said to Jasper, “Well, just one more hit.”

  Using a hammer, we twisted the bolts down just one-eighth of a turn more than we had in the past. Twisting the nuts was a harrowing job because we could sense the enormous force on the propeller, the prop puller, and the shaft, and knew that when the prop finally moved it was going to tear off hard and fast. We figured it would kill either of us if we were in the way. I had heard stories about prop pullers that had launched propellers straight through the sterns of nearby vessels. Yard workers lost fingers and hands and parts of their shoulders to prop pullers.

  I gave the puller one final twist, and bang! I witnessed the loudest underwater noise I had ever heard in my life. I thought for a moment that I had snapped off the stern of the Valkyrien, and prepared my head to be struck by fast-sinking debris. But when the bubbles cleared the propeller was gone. Valkyrien floated safely and Jasper and I drifted serenely, uninjured. Jasper told me later that the prop had hurled loose like a fighter jet catapulted off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

  We slept well that night, and in the morning made an easy dive down, finding the shimmering propeller half-buried in the muck on the bottom of the harbor. I tied the old propeller to a rope and Jasper hauled it up—victorious—to the floating dock.

  It was only after staring at the prop on that floating dock that we realized Valkyrien’s propeller was backwards. It turned counterclockwise, which is the opposite direction that most propellers turn. Left-turning props go only with left-hand engines, which manufacturers make only for boats with twin engines. If dual props spin in the same direction, the boat will tend to turn to the right. The helmsman must then disrupt the turning force by oversteering to the left. The left-turning-engine-and-propeller combo as part of a dual-engine system prevents this.

  Back when the Detroit 6V53 was built, a few of the engines were con
structed to turn to the left. These would be sold paired with a normal clockwise engine. My guess is that someone tore down an old boat and sold the left-turn engine at a discount to the owner of Valkyrien.

  We had a hell of a hard time finding a backward-turning 6V53 engine in good-enough shape to justify installing it in Valkyrien. We searched the internet, walked through junkyards, and talked with bus companies and every old machine shop we could find. No one had a 6V53 that turned backwards. Finally, we found some sellers in Pennsylvania who had a backward 6V53 in a crate. It had probably come from the US government in a surplus sale and never been used. The negotiation was tricky because the sellers knew we needed a left-turn engine, and we knew that if they did not sell it to us, they would never be able to sell it. We worried and bargained, and in the end we bought the engine.

  When we got the “crate” engine replacement out to California, we could not find a GM-certified mechanic who was not booked up for months. We finally located a guy who said he could do the job. Of course it gave me pause that he was apparently the only diesel mechanic in Northern California whom no one would hire, but we needed to get moving.

  The new engine was designed to replace any Detroit 6V53, in any application, whether it be a tank, a bus, a backhoe, or a boat. But boat engines are much different on the outside than engines that power land craft. Instead of radiators, older marine engines have a series of components bolted to the side of the engine that use seawater for cooling. There’s one system for the engine block, one for engine oil, and a third for transmission oil. We had to remove all of the specialty marine parts and coolers from the broken engine, then attach them to the new engine. Our mechanic had no idea how to do this. Jasper figured it out mostly by instinct.

  I asked Jasper how he did it, and he described to me, in a childlike but brilliant way, that the diesel lit on fire and when the fire came, it made a big boom—that was part heat and part boom. And every time we put more diesel in, the heat and the boom had to leave. Jasper explained that we had to attach the pipes in a line so the engine could separate the heat from the boom—otherwise the engine would get too hot. The boom would leave by making the propeller turn, and the heat would leave through the pipes into the ocean.

  In the end, Jasper installed all of the key components of the engine, locking everything in place employing huge bolts and pry bars. Jasper used a tiny set of cards to measure precisely how perfectly lined up the transmission was to the engine (it had to be within 1/32 of an inch in a full circle—and Jasper made it so).

  Finally, it was time to try to start the engine. The ignition had burned out, so we started the engine by placing the positive and ground battery leads manually onto the starter.

  A small group of people (mostly men, out of work) had been toiling on the boat engine to various degrees over the last month or so. They sat in a circle on the floor joists, each looking down at the engine. Communally we held our breath as I touched a screwdriver to jump electricity around the starter solenoid. The starter clicked and threw a wide arcing spark, then began turning hard. I held the screwdriver in place for what seemed like forever—probably around thirty seconds—as the fuel made its way from a plastic tank, through a small fuel pump, and into the injection pump.

  Then, sudden but smooth, the engine caught and roared forth. We all cheered. Midwinter had come and we wanted to get out of the North Pacific as soon as possible. We ran the engine for several hours that evening and determined to leave first thing in the morning. The wind had been building all week, and it occurred to me that perhaps I should delay the start of the next phase of our trip.

  I had become depressed over the long days spent working on the engine—so disappointed in myself for missing out on the lives of our children, and for abandoning Vicki to the daily responsibilities of carpool, making dinners, helping with homework, and all that needed tending—but mainly I missed being present in their lives and simply being with them. I wanted to be a father and husband they could count on, and here I was spending my time focused more on this voyage than enjoying their everyday lives. Some days I told myself that Vicki and our children might be having an easier, smoother, less chaotic time without me around, but I knew they missed me and wanted me to come home soon.

  Valkyrien baffled me. I had spent so much time away from my family and friends, but I still could not admit to myself, let alone my family, that the voyage simply was not possible. I confided only in Vicki about my misgivings and the decrepit state of Valkyrien. For a long while I had been trying to figure out how to cancel the trip altogether.

  Vicki and I spoke every few days. She assured me that she and our children were doing well, filling me in on their swim meets and football and basketball games, their weekend activities with friends, laughing when she shared her latest stories about completing her own book about teaching.

  Vicki also sensed that I still needed to work on this boat. She understood that I had begun to identify myself—my own value and competency as a person—with the success or failure of this voyage. While she knew this was irrational, she gave me room to try to figure this out on my own. I’m sure Vicki would rather I had quit then and there, but Valkyrien had taken on a great deal of meaning to me. I needed the boat far more than the boat needed me. Vicki knew that if I quit then, leaving the boat in Monterey Bay, she would have me back, but that a vital part of me would remain with Valkyrien for a long time.

  I have a lust for wandering, particularly out on the sea. From our home in Los Angeles we drive along the Pacific Coast Highway every day, and each time we do I stare out at the sea and wonder. Vicki knew that I had to sail Valkyrien farther.

  9. Maxey

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  —Mary Oliver, The Summer Day

  My son Maxey, who had turned fifteen that September, arrived in Monterey from our home in Los Angeles on the afternoon of the day we got the engine started.

  When Maxey was two and a half years old, I would take him out with me on the Glide, our family sailboat. When we sailed at night, which was frequent, I would stretch a blanket onto the cockpit sole3 and lay him down on it, folding the blanket tightly over him. From that vantage he could see the wooden wheel, my right leg up to my knee, and then my face from a steep angle. Above it all was the sky, which on August nights filled with stars and the Perseid meteor shower. When we returned to the mooring in Hyannis Port, I would tie our little dinghy a few hundred yards off the beach and slip into the water.

  Maxey would climb down and place his arms around my neck and ride in on my back. Bioluminescent marine plankton would congregate in the warm harbor waters during summertime. The action of the seawater swirling around my arms and passing across my shoulders excited the microscopic creatures, causing them to emit a blue-green light, which passed from one tiny organism to the next, creating an echo of our path as we wended our way toward shore. We always began the trip with me swimming underwater for two or three strokes, Maxey holding on but completely submerged. He became almost as comfortable in the water as he was on shore.

  By the time he was three, Maxey could move anywhere on the sailboat by himself. He would climb up onto the boom, then slide into the bag along the foot of the mainsail and fall asleep in the afternoons as we sailed together. The following year he got in the habit of jumping overboard whenever and wherever we were, as soon as I shouted, “Maxey, jump.” (In this way we practiced man-overboard drills, and he became accustomed to going from boat to ocean and back, even in heavy seas.) When Maxey turned seven, he began refusing towels. Drying off in the wind made him tougher. By the time he was ten, Maxey could pull himself into the boat, along the lee rail, in a fairly stiff breeze.

  Maxey also loves climbing trees.

  Ten years earlier, while visiting the Solomon Islands, I met the two islanders who saved my uncle and his crew after a Japanese destroyer rammed their PT bo
at during the Second World War. Eroni Kumana, aging and still living in a grass-roofed hut on an isolated island, greeted me at a dock on Gizo, the small island the Japanese had used as a naval base during the war.

  Eroni traveled with his son, whom he had named for my uncle Jack. I showed Maxey, who was about five years old at the time, the photographs of Eroni’s son climbing a palm tree to retrieve several coconuts for lunch. Maxey loved the picture and asked me dozens of questions about how the young man climbed the tree with no branches and no ladder. He marveled that Eroni’s son could swing himself to the top of the tree, holding on only to palm fronds.

  “Are they really that strong, Dad?” Maxey asked. I said that they were, as long as you only pulled straight down on them; if you bent them by accident, they would likely break.

  A few years later we visited my mother in Florida and Max spent the entire Easter week trying to climb palm trees. About halfway through he asked me how the climbers kept their feet from coming apart. I told him that I recalled Eroni’s son wrapping a burlap sack around his feet, in a sort of half knot. I had not realized how essential this was to palm-tree climbing.

  Maxey tied a strong towel around his ankles, and soon was able to climb the tall straight palms in South Florida. He used a similar technique later, climbing on the bowsprit of Valkyrien, locking his feet together around the arches at the low side of the sprit, as he wriggled outward.

  His friends say that Maxey is part fish. I don’t know about that, but he is a strong swimmer, and as comfortable on a boat as he is in the water. I missed our children so much, I convinced Vicki to send Maxey up to join me on the boat for the sail along Big Sur. Vicki knew that I needed to share at least a part of this trip with my son. She knew how much Maxey and I loved to sail with one another on the Cape, and that he could handle a turbulent sea. Maxey loved to swim and to climb trees. I put these two loves of his to a severe test off of Big Sur.