More Faster Backwards: Rebuilding David B
Christine Smith
More Faster Backwards: Rebuilding David B
Christine Smith
Copyright © 2012 by Christine Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Published by Old Heavy Duty Publishing at Smashwords
This book is available in print at most online retailers
Old Heavy Duty Publishing
PO Box 1431
Bellingham, WA. 98227
Cover Art by Rebecca West
Graphics by Jeffrey Smith
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
To those who believe in themselves and have the strength to follow their dreams.
&
To all of my friends and family who came to help.
Contents
There’s a Collection of Old Men on the Dock
A BMW with Two 16-Foot-Long Planks
The Boat’s Dying Faster Than We Can Save It
The Swainson’s Thrushes Began to Sing
We Were on a Mission for Fasteners
Thankful acknowledgment to everyone who helped in the reconstruction of the David B, the starting of our business, and the writing of this book. In particular I’d like to recognize: Grant Bird, Sean Bull, Marla Cilley, Andy and Jenny Cowan, Bill Dodson, Bonnie Gauthier, Jake Hartsoch, Lisa Hawkins, Rick Isackson, Dave Jackson, Loren Kapp, Christy Karras, Dan Krivonak, Greg Krivonak, Annie Leonard-Shannahan, Tim Mehrer, Aaron Mynatt, Jack Mynatt, Michael Naselow, Annie Patrick, Dan Pease, Abby Polus, Terry Richard, Phil Riise, Tom Riley, Drew Schmidt, Jon-Paul Shannahan, Ann Smith, Kirk Smith, Jeremy Snapp, Michael Start, Keith Sternberg, Barbee Teasley, Cynthia Topp, Cathy Wade, Rebecca West, Bruce Williams, Bob Woody, Carol Woody, Leigh Woody, Steve Woody, Pam Young.
In Memory of Ian Mynatt, Fran Stevens-Woody, and Dan Zimmerman, whose contributions to the David B will always be with us.
Most of all thank you to Jeffrey Smith who is my constant love and companion.
To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea—”cruising” it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and have the means, abandon the adventure until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about . . .
Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
~Sterling Hayden
Chapter 1
There’s a Collection of Old Men on the Dock
It was just over eight years since we first saw her. In fact, it was eight years, nineteen days and a handful of hours since she became ours. Jeffrey stood in the doorway of the pilothouse. “Ready for the bowline,” he said with a grin.
My stomach was nervous with excitement and apprehension as I waited for Jeffrey to say those words. The David B was heading back to Alaska for the first time since she was launched in 1929. Only this time, we were taking her to Juneau to carry passengers.
I looked at the collection of old men drawn to the David B while she waited to get underway. It was the sound of the boat’s antique engine that brought them here. It happens every time. “Ka-Pow!” The ancient engine starts. “Ching-ching-ching. . . Ching-ching-ching.” It begins its mechanical waltz, then a few smoke rings rise from the stack, and poof—old men seem to spontaneously generate out of thin air. Most days when they come, they come armed with questions about cylinders, injectors, stroke and bore, gears, RPM and horsepower. More often, they come to reminisce about their youth.
“How many cylinders ya got there?” one of the men asked Jeffrey as he walked up.
“Three cylinders, with a gear.” Jeffrey smiled from his perch in the pilothouse. The David B’s reverse gear is always a surprise to the old-timers who grew up with engines that could not go into reverse without first shutting down.
Jeffrey continued to answer questions while Sean and I worked together to untie the lines holding the David B to the dock.
“Excuse me,” I said to the man, who had now parked himself in front of the boarding gate. He moved out of the way and continued to ask Jeffrey about the boat’s engine.
Aaron, our engineer and business partner, was standing on the back deck with a fender. He looked up at the stack and noted the color of the smoke. He was nervous but stood leaning suavely on his fender, looking good in his sunglasses, Bowling Green University Ski Team sweatshirt, and slightly baggy shorts. His girlfriend, Havilah, was on board, and I think he wanted to make a good impression.
I’m not sure we’d have the boat today if it weren’t for Aaron. As a twenty-something, he’d sacrificed a lot for the boat, the least of which was living in our eight-hundred-square-foot house with us, married people in their mid-thirties.
Aaron had inherited some money from his grandfather, and with encouragement from his parents, he’d invested it in the David B. In the year and a half he had been living with us, he had won our hearts with his humor, hard work, and sleep habits. We’d asked a lot of this twenty-four-year old, and he had always kept up with the pace. I watched him for a minute, jealous that his medium build could still metabolize a six-pack of beer and bag of Cheetos with no obvious effect.
I shifted my gaze from Aaron to Sean, who was on the foredeck gathering up the dock lines and putting them away. He had been working for us as a shipwright for the last six months to help get the David B ready for this trip, and now that the carpentry was done, he was ready to help out as Mate. I turned around to close the gate and smiled at the man on the dock. He stepped back from the boat and stood still with his arms limp at his sides. He smiled back at me with a distant look in his eyes. I wondered what long-ago memories the sound of the David B’s engine sparked in him. When he was young, the harbor would have been filled with the distinct sounds of engines from Washington Iron Works, Atlas-Imperial, Enterprise, and Fairbanks-Morse. I sighed to myself at the sight of the slightly overweight, flannel-clad man on the dock as he listened to the David B’s 3-cylinder Washington-Estep.
“Ka-snap” and a long “shhhhhhhhh” of compressed air came from the engine room as Jeffrey shifted the David B into reverse. Slowly, we slid away from the dock.
Jeffrey spun the big wooden wheel and gently pushed the long-handled brass shifter forward. Another rush of compressed air: “sushhhh.”
I looked back at Aaron and then to the row of fiberglass yachts behind us. The aft end of the David B’s big black wooden hull neared them. Aaron shifted his stance and readied his two-foot-long rubber fender, which seemed ridiculously small to fend our 135,000-pound boat off from the shiny white fiberglass yacht directly behind us.
Jeffrey worked to maneuver the David B out of her slip by shifting in and out of gear. I gathered the lines from the back deck, smiled nervously at Aaron, then went forward, stopping for a moment at the pilothouse door to watch Jeffrey as he cajoled the David B back and forth. Between each bump of power, he let the boat coast just a bit, all the while taking in the feel of her momentum. Jeffrey worked the boat with the skill of a lover. Every movement she made, he watched carefully to see how she responded to his commands, the light breeze, and the incoming tide.
The sun was shining into the pilothouse and onto Jeffrey’s tall, thin runner’s body as he maneuvered the boat from our tight slip. I watched him pause, turn around, and crouch down to look out the back windows. It was a beautiful dance to watch. He loved this boat, and whatever he asked her to do, she loved him back with a predictable response that showed how much they already understood each other. We cleared the row of yachts behind us, and Jeffrey straightened up the David B. As we headed out of the harbor, people stood on their decks waving and cheering us on. A couple horns sounded in congratulations. Jeffrey sounded back. These people knew us, and they knew how long and how hard we had worked on the David B to get to this day. We rounded the breakwater and entered Bellingham Bay.
It was Sunday, a good day to start a journey. We had carefully planned to avoid leaving on a Friday since it is bad luck, and Sean, who’s well versed in the superstitions of sailors, was pleased with our decision. He had helped increase our good luck for a safe journey the night before by rearranging the mugs hanging in the galley to make sure they were all facing the proper way, banishing bananas, and informing us that both whistling and cutting our fingernails into the water were strictly forbidden.
Although it was a warm June day, it felt good to stand in the galley next to the warmth of the crackling wood-fired cookstove while I organized the pots and pans. On the bridge deck, Jeffrey and Sean discussed the long list of projects that needed to be completed while we were underway. Aaron passed me on his way down to the engine room. He needed to do his top-of-the-hour engine check. It had been roughly thirty years since the engine had been run regularly, and we didn’t know any of its habits. With that in mind, Aaron’s plan was to check the engine’s temperature every fifteen minutes and oil all seventy-two moving parts on the outside of the old Washington every other hour. He had been down there long enough for me to forget about him, and we weren’t much farther than Eliza Island when he came up out of the engine room with his forehead creased.
“Dude,” Aaron interrupted the guys. “Something’s up with the thrust bearing. I don’t know what’s going on, but the temp’s going though the roof. It’s a hundred and eighty degrees. We need to shut down pronto.”
Jeffrey looked at him with unbelieving eyes and stopped talking for a moment. “It was working fine last week when we went out to Sucia,” he finally said. “What’s different? Did you forget anything when you started the engine?”
Aaron shook his head. “No, I can’t think of what I could have missed.” He turned and stared out the window.
Maybe, I thought to myself, if Aaron stares long enough out the window, the answer will come jumping out of the water and land flopping on the deck, making everything all right. A loud ticking sound began to amplify from the engine directly below our feet.
“What’s the oil level in the Manzel?” Jeffrey asked.
Aaron straightened up. “I don’t know.”
“Go down to the engine room and slow us down so I can take the boat out of gear, then let’s check the Manzel’s oil level,” Jeffrey said in a calm tone.
Aaron disappeared down the ladder. There was no throttle in the pilothouse, so it was Aaron’s job to control the speed of the engine. When the engine slowed down to 175 rpm or so, Jeffrey shifted into neutral and joined Aaron down below.
I stepped up to the bridge deck and glanced at Sean. “I hope this isn’t serious,” I said.
“I think it will be all right. Like Jeffrey said, the engine worked fine last week. I’m sure the bearing just needs more oil.” Sean shrugged. “Problems are going to come up with that engine, and when they do, Jeffrey and Aaron are going to fix them.” He leaned forward and held on to the wheel.
“I know you’re right, but I’d hoped we’d get a little farther down the road before shit started breaking. We’re only forty-five minutes into a six-week cruise, and Juneau is looking a long way away right now.”
I consoled myself with the view out the window. Gulls and Caspian Terns wheeled overhead in search of small fish in the sparkling blue water. A seal watched us briefly, then slid quietly beneath the surface. “I’m just worried,” I confided to Sean, “that we won’t make it in time to meet up with our first-ever real passengers.”
Jeffrey’s voice, with its slight Midwest accent, rose above the idling engine. I couldn’t quite hear his words, but his tone sounded calm. It was a good sign. Then Aaron’s deeper voice boomed up though the deck. “Well, fuck me! I thought it filled itself.”
Sean smiled. “They evidently figured something out.”
Jeffrey emerged from the engine room and stepped up onto the bridge deck. I watched him draw a deep breath before taking the wheel. My eyes were glued on him. The muscles in his jaw were tight. I waited for him to say something. He lifted his right hand to the brass gear shifter and held on to it, then scanned the pilothouse. “I can’t believe that he thought that Manzel just filled itself with oil. If he’d put together a checklist, he’d have known to fill the damned thing up.” Slowly he pushed the handle forward. “The Manzel was empty. Nothing was getting any oil. We almost burned up the thrust bearing and who knows what else. Fuck, that was a close call.” Jeffrey held on to the shifter until the engine clicked into gear. “I’ve got to get him to make a checklist, but he’s just not interested.”
In a few minutes Aaron came up, smiling. The temperature for the thrust bearing had come down to 121 degrees now that the Manzel high-pressure oiler had oil. He grabbed a bag of Cheetos and started munching.
“You’ve gotta get a checklist. It’s just too hard to remember everything in your head,” Jeffrey said as Aaron offered up some Cheetos.
“I know. I know. I’ll start working on one. There just hasn’t been any time,” Aaron countered with his mouth full. “I’ve got a little time before my next engine-room check, so I’ll be out on deck with Havilah.”
“There’s just so much that can go wrong,” Jeffrey said, taking a handful of Cheetos before Aaron left. “We can’t afford to screw up even a little bit. We’ve spent so much time bringing this boat back, we just can’t fuck it up. Think of all the years of work we’ve put into it.”
The first time we were shown the David B, I thought it was a mistake. I stood on her deck listening to Jeffrey talk to the boat’s owner as if he were interested in buying the rotten old thing. Honestly, I just thought Jeffrey was being nice.
“Rough” was a polite way of describing the David B’s condition. Her hull was black and weathered, with planks that were pitted, and her paint was peeling. The billboard, which protects the bow from the anchor, was rotting, with some of its vertical staves broken or missing, and the white pilothouse sat old and faded on the aft end of the deck like a forgotten old woman in her rocking chair.
We had first gotten the idea to rebuild a boat during a phone call Jeffrey had made to his friend Michael, whom he had known from his early days of working on the big schooners in Maine. Michael was sort of Jeffrey’s maritime confidant. Before then, Jeffrey and I had tried to raise money to build a new schooner. Jeffrey spent countless hours drafting the plans for this sailboat. She was to be named Ceremony. We put together an IPO and raised a little money, but that whole plan fell apart in 2001 when the stock market tumbled. Still, we wanted to run a passenger boat of our own, so we began to look for other options.
“Guess what?” Jeffrey said one evening after calling Michael to catch up on the gossip in Maine.
“I don’t know. What?” I sat back in my old hand-me-down green office chair.
“Michael just gave me the phone number of a guy out on Lopez Island who might be able to help us find a boat.” Jeffrey’s eyes sparkled. “His name’s Jeremy, and he evidently knows a shit-ton about old wooden boats and has a couple for sale. With the right-shaped hull we could re-rig it as a schooner.” The words were coming out of Jeffrey so fast I could hardly follow along. “We could redo the interior and set it up with private cabins to make the boat exactly how we want it.”
“How long do you think it would take to rebuild a boat and have it up and running?” I asked, wondering if this was the answer to our dream.
“I think we could do it in two years.” Jeffrey said without too much thought.
We spent the rest of the night talking eagerly about the prospect of finding a boat. Why had we not thought about this before?
“I wish we had done this instead of trying to build a boat,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe, but I still want to build Ceremony one day.” Jeffrey had a sadness in his voice.
“I know. I do too, but I wish we hadn’t gone eight thousand dollars into debt to pay a group of lawyers and accountants to produce a pile of paperwork for an IPO.” I knew this was a touchy subject. We had failed with the Ceremony IPO and we would be paying for it for a very long time.
“I feel sort of ripped off by that. Why does it have to be so impossible for people like us to get ahead?” Jeffrey said wistfully. “The system seems to be only for people who already have money, and neither one of us seems to be able earn enough to do what we want.”
“Well, Jeffrey, what’s done is done. We should leave Ceremony behind for a while and move forward with this new plan.” I stared at the blueprint of the Ceremony above Jeffrey’s desk. “She would have been beautiful if we could have pulled it off.” It hurt me to see all the work Jeffrey had put into her.
“Yeah, she would have been. Maybe we can build her some other time,” Jeffrey answered.
“Yeah, maybe.” I knew Ceremony was just a dream and probably always would be.
The new plan, however, was coming together fast. Jeffrey was going to call Jeremy the next morning to glean some information about his boats. If he had one we liked, we could use our business plan for Ceremony and change it to fit with whatever boat we found. Buying an old boat to refurbish was our new path, and I went to bed with dreams of entertaining and cooking on a boat that sailed through the San Juan Islands—so much more fun than my job as a receptionist and shipper for a small new-age record label.
I spent the next day at work packaging up music CDs and answering phones. While I worked, I daydreamed about our future boat and the people who would come with us. I dreamt up gourmet recipes I would cook for them, and I imagined the whales that would swim around the boat to the delight of our passengers. As much as I enjoyed working for Soundings of the Planet, I felt numb. There wasn’t any creativity in putting CDs into padded envelopes. Soundings was someone else’s dream. I wanted my own.
Jeffrey called around lunch time. “So, I talked with Jeremy. He wants to meet with us this weekend to show us his boats. We’ll need to catch the one p.m. ferry to Lopez Island.”
I felt my spirit lift with the hope of finding a boat and to hear Jeffrey so excited. Soon after the IPO for the Ceremony had failed, Jeffrey had become directionless. It was sad to see him frustrated with where his life was going.
“I was thinking,” he continued, “that it might be fun to walk the docks tonight after work where the fishing boats are tied up so we can see what’s for sale right here in town.”
“That sounds fun. I’ll hurry home.” I hung up after a few more words and couldn’t wait to get off work.
Later that evening we drove to Squalicum Harbor’s Gate Five, where the remnants of the once-bustling Bellingham fishing fleet are moored. The parking lot had a congregation of old beater pickup trucks and trailers containing enormous mounds of fishing nets. There was a kind of empty chill I felt as we drove past the nets. They looked like they had been sitting there a long time, waiting for some far-off day when the great runs of salmon would return. Some of the mounds had blue tarps protecting them from the weather, but most just sat out in the open.
After we parked the car, we strolled down the ramp to see the boats. The fishing fleet was old, some boats from as early as the 1920s. Each boat seemed to have a personality and an old-timer’s knowledge of tides, currents, weather, and the ways of fish, stored like pages of an encyclopedia between untold of layers of paint. We stopped at the Leith W. It had a For Sale sign on it: $50,000.
“She’s pretty,” I said as Jeffrey sized up the boat.
“And in the right price range, too. If Jeremy’s boats don’t work out, then we can take a better look at this one.” Jeffrey walked down the dock alongside the Leith W.
“It’s nice to feel like we have some options,” I said later as we headed for home. “I can’t wait to check out Jeremy’s boats.”
***
I love to ride the ferry. There’s always an interesting mix of islanders and tourists to watch. While I waited for Jeffrey to return to our seats from the on-board cafeteria, I listened to the clacking sound of cars being loaded on to the vehicle deck below. The vibration of the ferry as it powered ahead in its berth was soothing to my nervous energy. Outside, a couple gulls stood on a piling, one with its mouth wide open and its head bowed to announce the arrival of another.
When we got off the ferry, Jeremy was there waiting. He reminded me of an oversized leprechaun and was dressed straight out of the Dust Bowl with a wool vest over the top of a flannel shirt, dirty black jeans, and a newsboy cap. He looked to be in his late forties.
It was a short drive to the first boat he wanted to show us. We turned left and drove down a private road, past a couple of old buildings. The road ended at an abandoned rock quarry near the shore.
There were two old boats anchored twenty or so feet off the beach, the Yakatat and the David B. We walked toward the rock-lined shore where the quarry’s operations had apparently taken place. Dandelions and buttercups poked through the rocks. There was no dock to get out to the boats, so Jeremy had rigged up a long float that swung from the boats to the shore. It looked sketchy, built with some two-by-fours, plywood, Styrofoam and a little bit of non-skid taped to the surface for safety.
“I have to be careful not to leave the float up against the beach,” Jeremy said as he grabbed hold of a line and began hauling in the float. “You see, if you’re working out on the boats and the tide starts going out, the float will fetch up on the rocks.” He kept pulling on the line and the float slowly began to pivot. “When we get over to the other side, we’ll pull the float back out. It’s a bear to get the thing off the rocks if it gets stuck. Even worse, if the tide is really low, it can break the float.” Jeffrey and I nodded that we understood how important it was to keep the float off the beach.
Jeremy led the way with a slight skip in his step. I carefully stepped on after Jeffrey, and the combined weight of the three of us caused the float to sag so that the top was even with the water. Any more weight and it would have been partially submerged.
I looked down and saw some sea stars grazing on the intertidal rocks. As I got over deeper water, I could see anemones and mussels that clung under the middle of the float. The visibility was good, and I wished I could lie down on my belly and spend the day watching the fish that swam under the float. I stepped off the swing float and onto another set of floats tied to the decaying David B.
Maybe I was hearing the conversation wrong, but as I followed Jeffrey onto the David B, it became clear that Jeremy wasn’t interested in selling the Yakatat. She was in better condition. It was the David B he was trying to get rid of. The voice in my head kept saying, This can’t be the boat we’re here to see. It’s so old and rotten. There’s no way we can take this project on. It’s just too big. I stood on deck trying to take it all in while Jeremy did his best to talk up the finer points of the David B.
“What’s underneath the plywood?” Jeffrey asked as he examined the deck, which was covered in a thick layer of black tar. It was ugly but radiated pleasing warmth from the heat of the sun.
“There’s two-and-a-quarter-inch decking under there.” Jeremy said with his hands thrust deep into his pockets as he rocked back on his heels. “The deck’s a little soft in places, so I put the plywood down, and then once a year I give it a good coat of tar to kinda hold everything together.”
I looked down at the deck as he talked, not really knowing what to think or say and feeling a little disappointed. This boat was beyond anything I knew, but I trusted Jeffrey’s judgment, and he seemed to be asking thoughtful questions.
Jeremy, I noticed, was not very neat in his tarring, as there were tar splatters up the side of the bulwarks and on the forward break beam. With my eyes, I followed the splatters to the foredeck. At the bow, the stem rose about a foot and a half above the deck. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was unusual for the stem to be sticking out of the foredeck like that. There should have been bulwarks attached to it. Just behind the stem there were two holes in the deck where the anchor chain came up, but the windlass that hauls the chain was missing and the empty space where it should have been was covered with more tar-soaked plywood. On the port side of the foredeck, a big rusty pipe stuck out of the deck, and just inboard of the pipe on the centerline was a mast. A spider’s web connected the two, and it swayed lightly in the soft breeze, its occupant curled up somewhere out of sight. Not far from the mast was the scuttle leading down to the interior of the boat. It seemed odd, but for some reason it didn’t have any doors.
What a wreck. I wondered if this was a good idea, but I continued my survey of the boat while Jeffrey talked with Jeremy.
Where the plywood and tar decking met the outside edges of the boat, a “new” covering board had been added to protect the frame ends from rainwater. It was unfinished and looked as if a careless beaver had chewed out the curve that was supposed to channel rainwater off the foredeck. I imagined that in a big downpour, the water would run down the covering board and off the foredeck in rapids instead of a smooth sheet of water. Even through the covering board was clearly unfinished, it, too, had multiple layers of tar, and the “chew” marks added to the David B’s overall ambience of old age and decay.
At the aft edge of the foredeck there was an eighteen-inch step down to the main deck where the three of us stood around a large hatch. Its removable cover was a hacked-together plywood lid with a good dousing of tar. Jeremy kept the lid propped open a few inches to allow fresh air into the belly of the boat.
Jeffrey asked him, “So, what did you do with the boat?”
“Well, I was going to do some fish-buying with it. I built pens down below that I thought I’d use for storing fish, but I never got around to it,” Jeremy explained. “I’ve mostly done some mooring-stone setting with the boat. The last time I tried to set one, it turned out to be too heavy and the windlass went right though the deck.” He pointed toward the beach. “It’s over there now.”
This was Jeffrey’s show, and while I agreed that buying an old boat was what we should do, I had no prior interest in or much knowledge about boats. We hadn’t really talked much about the care and ownership of an old wooden boat; we just suddenly had an extremely large bee in our bonnets to get one. Sure, Jeffrey had worked on wood boats and even built a small one himself, but this boat was big, built in 1929 and showing her age.
As I contemplated this old boat, I was reminded of my great-grandmother, old and wrinkled, sitting proud and silent waiting for someone to ask her about her story. The pilothouse, like the rest of the boat, was in need of care. The David B’s windows had the faraway expression of an old woman who’d seen much hardship and was tired of living. Maybe the soul of the David B entertained the idea of slowly sinking into the waters here in Shoal Bay and resting its tired keel on the rocks just below.
Not too long ago, a boat in the condition of the David B would have been burned on the beach in a spectacular funeral pyre. Today, old wood boats are dismantled with chainsaws and heavy equipment, their toxic remains unceremoniously discarded into dumpsters and then hauled off to landfills.
The boat rocked a bit as Jeffrey and Jeremy walked to the back end of the pilothouse. I took off my backpack and dug out my camera. It was warm on deck, so I lingered with my camera to take pictures and to soak up some sunshine.
I walked the opposite direction from Jeffrey and Jeremy over to the doorless scuttle and leaned my head into the dark interior of the boat. It smelled old, like a mildewy canvas tent. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that the area called the fo’c’sle had mounds of junk piled up everywhere. There were heavy lines, cast-iron things, mattresses, fifty-five-gallon drums, oversized handmade wrenches, a potbelly woodstove, and a host of other items hiding in the shadows. There were some bunks that were crammed full with the majority of this collection of crap. I climbed down the ladder to get a better look.
The overhead and the inner hull planking, known confusingly as the ceiling planking, were painted white, the flooring a dark red. It had a very nautical feel to it, in an old-fashioned sort of way. The fo’c’sle, like the foredeck, was marked at the aft end by a step down. There was a bulkhead made up of two layers of diagonal tongue–and-groove with a heavy door separating the fo’c’sle from the middle of the boat and the area that Jeremy had called the fish hold.
The entrance to the fish hold from the fo’c’sle was guarded by two fifty-five-gallon drums that had been laid down against the boat’s fuel tanks. I snapped a few pictures and then squeezed past the drums. On either side of the boat were the two fish pens that Jeremy had built but had never gotten around to using. The fish hold opened up like a cavern. It was dark, with a thin stream of sunlight coming through the hatch.
I scanned the underside of the original deck planking that from the topside was obscured by plywood and tar. The planking was old, weathered and in places rotten, but some of the beautiful tight, vertical-grained Douglas fir still remained firm. These planks were laid down almost seventy years ago, when people thought that the old-growth trees of the Pacific Northwest were an inexhaustible resource. People like my great-grandfather had flocked to the Northwest to make their fortunes cutting down the enormous slow-growing monarchs of the forest that made up the David B and other boats like her.
I continued my tour of the interior of the boat. Just aft of the fish pens was another bulkhead. This one was newer and made of plywood. It appeared to have been constructed by Jeremy. At the bottom center of the bulkhead he had attached a wok, like you would use to make a stir-fry. It was odd and a bit puzzling, but as I leaned in to investigate, I saw that the wok covered up some part of the engine that was sticking out through the bulkhead.
Jeffrey and Jeremy were talking in the engine room just behind the bulkhead with the wok. I went though the doorway and stopped to look at the engine. It was big and green, the size of a Volkswagen. In the low light, it seemed more sculpture than late-1920s state-of-the-art technology. It stood about six feet tall. On the outside was a confusing array of pipes, rods, and tiny copper lines. I slid up next to Jeffrey, who was asking rapid-fire questions. The conversation was over my head, and their voices quickly faded away, like the voices of adults in a Peanuts cartoon. While I took pictures, Jeffrey eventually exhausted his questions about the engine and left with Jeremy to continue his tour into the fish hold.
For a moment I was alone in the near dark with just the single light bulb casting shadows around the edges of the engine room. I bent down to read the company name cast into the engine’s inspection plates: Washington Iron Works. The name sounded strong and conjured up images of molten metal and exploding sparks. I stood back up and leaned against the tool bench. This boat had Jeffrey written all over it. He loved old things and old technology. I smiled to myself, and in that moment I knew in my heart that this boat was ours. It wasn’t so much a voice in my head as it was a grip around my heart. I sometimes like to pretend that it was at this moment that the boat picked us to save it from its long years of neglect and decline. I left the engine room ready to see Jeremy’s other boat, knowing already that we had found our future here with the David B.
“Hey guys, does it feel like we’re slowing down?” Jeffrey asked not long after he and Aaron fixed the problem with the thrust bearing.
“What?” I said, startled, as his voice pulled me back from the past.
“Hey, take the wheel for a moment,” Jeffrey told Sean and raced down to the engine room.
“What do you think’s going on?” I asked Sean.
He pressed his lips together and raised his shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask your engineer.”
Aaron was on deck, sleeping like a princess. I felt my stomach tighten and wished we had a normal boat with a normal engine. The kind that you turned a key to start, not one that ran on 1929 technology and required you to take a bar to the flywheel to start, oil all the moving parts, and constantly monitor. I chewed on the inside of my lower lip, in the same way my mother does when she’s nervous. I waited for Jeffrey to come back, hating that I didn’t know much about how the engine works.
After a couple minutes, Jeffrey came up through the engine room scuttle. “Aaron’s got to get a checklist. He forgot to open up the valve for the day tank and we almost ran out of fuel. He just won’t fucking listen; thinks he can remember everything, and it turns out he can’t. Look at him out there now, sound asleep.”
I stared hard at Jeffrey. It wasn’t like him to be so angry. He’s usually very mellow. It wasn’t really all that surprising, though; he was under a lot of stress.
“Don’t be so hard on Aaron,” I said hoping to calm Jeffrey down. “He’s worked really hard the last two years, and this is a pretty big step for him. Remember how hard it was for you to run the engine when we first brought the boat to Bellingham?” I watched Jeffrey stare out the window. “If you recall, there was that one time when we came back to the dock and you forgot to do something and that caused the engine to speed up and run away on you. He’ll figure it out soon.”
“I know. There’s just so much that can go wrong,” Jeffrey replied. “Aaron’s doing a fine job, but he still has so much to learn, and I don’t want to be chief engineer and captain.”
“I understand, but Aaron’s still young and he’s never been given this much responsibility before,” I said, sensing that Jeffrey was returning to normal. “It will take some time, and you’ll need to mentor him for a while. I’m sure that by the end of the season, he’ll be a rock star when it comes to running the engine.”
“Yeah, I know. I think I need to go wake him up and talk about what just happened.” Jeffrey had returned to his normal demeanor and went out on deck.
I worried about all of our personalities and how well we would hold together. We would be on the boat and working in close quarters for a total of six weeks. I wondered what other trials we faced further down the road.
***
Later that afternoon, Sean was at the wheel while Jeffrey and Aaron talked on deck. I sat quietly hoping that everything at home would be all right. I already missed my cat, Harold, and wondered if he would miss me. I was happy that we had good house sitters who would be taking care of him.
What worried me more than the operation of the boat and the mental state of my cat was money. Our resources were exhausted, and Jeffrey had taken a large cash advance from one of our credit cards that he hoped would cover all of our bills. We had been bouncing checks like basketballs. It seemed that the moment we thought we had all of our bills paid, we’d forget about some automatic payment and be slapped with another round of overdraft fees. It felt as if we were drowning. I sighed, thinking how nice it was going to be to leave our financial disaster on shore for a few days. I couldn’t wait to get into the wilderness and away from our checking account.
Money has always been my biggest obstacle, and I’ve often felt that I’m somehow a “money repellent.” Any time cash gets too close to me, it gets deflected in another direction. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering how people with money make the opportunities that cause money to stick to them. It’s one of those things that perplexes me. I know I’ve chosen a difficult path, trying to live a fulfilling lifestyle that’s outside the mainstream, but I still believe the notion that if you work hard and have a passion, you’ll be successful. When I think about our debt, I wonder about our chosen path and whether our hard work will lead us over a high cliff to our financial doom or if our path is just extra hilly and all this work will lead us to a successful and rewarding life.
The business of running a six-passenger boat is not an easy sell to investors or bankers. No one stands to make much money keeping an old wooden boat alive. Our desire to own and operate the David B is something we do for love and adventure, not for financial security and the hopes of an early retirement.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to survive on love and adventure alone. Jeffrey’s parents have been very supportive of the David B over the years, and the money that Aaron invested also went a long way, but it paled in comparison to what we really needed.
We bought the David B for $15,000. Jeremy said the engine was about the only thing of any value on the boat. At first we were able to pay for the projects we were doing with cash, but as we discovered more and more rot in the boat, the costs just kept climbing. We’ve mortgaged ourselves well into our next lives and have over $50,000 in credit card debt with ridiculously high interest rates, but we carry the burden of that debt proudly. We believe in ourselves and that running the David B is the right thing for us. “Go big or go home!” we joke to each other regularly.
Hopefully, we won’t have to go home before we’ve made this business work. The specter of bankruptcy and losing everything we have striven for just adds to all the stress and uncertainty that comes with starting a new business. I’d rather live a life full of adventure but on the razor-thin edge of financial disaster than have a safe, dull life shoved inside a corporate box.
Years earlier, when I worked on a whale-watch boat, I talked with a woman who was unhappy with her job and her life. She wished for my summer job, but her desk job in a cubicle under a bank of florescent lights paid too well. Her words will always remain with me: “It’s simply inhumane to place human beings inside windowless cubicles for eight hours a day.”
Jeffrey returned to the pilothouse after discussing the importance of checklists with Aaron. We were getting close to Roche Harbor, and he needed to get the U.S. Customs paperwork in order. Unlike a pleasure craft, the David B is a commercial vessel, so we needed to let Customs know that we were going to Canada. Jeffrey couldn’t find his Customs folder and had started tearing through his cabinets on the bridge deck.
“Are you sure it’s not up here?” I asked, dreading that he was going to ask me to go below and face the mound of clothing, bedding, and tools that were piled sky-high in our unfinished cabin.
“I can’t find it anywhere up here,” he said. “I think I remember seeing the folder down by my side of the bunk. Can you go below and see if you can find it?” He gave me an urgent look.
“All right, I’ll see what I can find.” I reluctantly slid off my comfortable seat in the pilothouse.
I descended into the engine room. It was hot and smelled strongly of diesel. I stooped through the doorless break in the bulkhead that leads into our cabin, ignoring the pool of water on the floor. It was a mess. In our rush to finish the boat for passengers, we’d left our space in the very back of the boat undone. Its overall shape is a half-oval and ends at the rudder post. It has two bunks. The one we sleep on is tucked away on the port side of the boat. It’s king-sized at the shoulders and tapers down to just enough space for our feet to snuggle together. The frames and the planking in this part of the boat are all new. I had barely had enough time to get them coated with a layer of gray primer paint before we moved aboard. The bulkhead that divides the engine room from our cabin is also unfinished, and it is really just a partially sectioned-off corner of the engine room. It gets hot during the day while the engine is running, with the temperature in the cabin regularly rising above ninety. I try not to be bothered by living in an unhealthy environment, since it is only for a few weeks. Even if I were bothered, there wasn’t much that we could do about it until fall.
Once inside the cabin, I made a sharp right turn past the exhaust pipe, which comes over the top of the partially finished bulkhead. The pipe makes a ninety-degree bend above my side of the bunk before heading up into the pilothouse. Fiberglass from the wrapping on the exhaust sometimes flakes onto my pillow while the engine is running. There was enough light from the portholes to make a quick scan of the cabin. I didn’t see the Customs folder, so I flipped on the light, shook off my clogs, and crawled up onto the bunk where our sea bags were stacked along with sleeping bags; extra blankets; a guitar, a violin, and a mandolin; as well as my spotting scope, cookbooks, a box of stuff I needed to file, and the bills that I would need to pay when we got to Ketchikan. After some digging, I found Jeffrey’s folder and crawled back off the bunk.
As I backed down, I put my foot into the pool of water that I’d carefully ignored on my way in. It was cold, and I was annoyed that I would have to find a new pair of socks. Jeffrey was perplexed about where the water was coming from and why it only came in when we were underway. It was frustrating because we had just spent six months in the shipyard rebuilding the stern, and to have a leak was a big disappointment. The boat didn’t leak when we were at anchor or tied to the dock. The only plausible explanation we could come up with was that water was pushed up through the wooden rudder post as the David B squatted down while it was underway. We were going to have to wait until next spring’s haul-out to work on the leak. To fix the problem of having water on our floor, Jeffrey bought a couple bags of concrete and some plywood to reroute the water into the bilge, where it could be pumped out. A dry floor in our cabin would be nice, even if it was just hacked together.
I slid my shoes back on and stepped out of the cabin. I looked at my watch. It was late in the afternoon. We were almost to Roche Harbor and I’d need to think about dinner soon. As I passed though the doorway, I paused to watch the engine, its nine push-rods moving up and down to the beat of the three cylinders. We had a long way to go, but for the moment, things were all right.
CHAPTER 2
Bienvenue au Canada
I fumbled with my alarm clock. It was 0500. From the porthole above our bed, cool air and early morning light streamed down. I could see blue sky. Good, I thought as I sat up and leaned over to kiss Jeffrey. He still had a couple of hours to sleep, so I quietly got dressed and left our cabin. I’m an unapologetic morning person, and I relish being the first up. It’s a time of day when all things seem possible and nothing is spoiled.
My first job of the morning is to make a log entry. Outside, the sky was a soft pastel of light blue, pink, and purple. It looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. I flipped the page to a new day and wrote down my observations:
TIME: 0508
WIND: NE at 3 knots
DEPTH: 18 feet
BAROMETER: 1030 millibars
SKY: Clear
Then I stepped down into the galley to start the stove. I store kindling and newspaper under the starboard-side seat cushion; I grabbed some of both to put into the firebox. On the left side of the stove are two nickel-coated half-spheres with handles sticking out. These bells, as they are called, control the airflow into the stove. I opened them up all the way. I’ve discovered that some newspapers burn better than others, with the maritime equivalent of the want ads, called Boats and Harbors, being the best fire starter, whereas The Whatcom Watch and Bellingham Business Journal both seem to be made of some sort of fire-retardant paper. I lit the fire and left the firebox door slightly open. While the fire starts, I plan my meals for the day.
Breakfast would be lemon-blueberry muffins, scrambled eggs, and a pork product, maybe bacon. For reasons that I don’t understand, all the best breakfast meats seem to be made from pigs. I could make minestrone soup and fresh-baked bread for lunch, since the weather would be nice and the seas calm. If it had looked as if we would be in for rough weather, then something easy to eat, like sandwiches, would have been on the menu. We usually have breakfast and dinner at anchor, so I don’t worry about those meals being weather-dependent.
With the fire going, I opened the pilothouse door to step on deck. The faint smell of wood smoke lingered in the still air outside. I heard the high, whistling call of a bald eagle that was perched atop a tall Douglas fir and the short, rapid breath of a harbor seal just a few feet off the boat. I brushed and braided my hair, cherishing this hushed window of time when I can coexist quietly with nature. Later in the day, these sounds will be drowned out by the hustle and bustle of people and the buzz of floatplanes landing and taking off in Roche Harbor. I’ve always felt that by eight a.m., the day is spoiled by the business of humans.
Back inside, I stoked the stove while I waited for the teakettle to boil. I like to have the first cup of coffee ready by six a.m. I keep two French presses on the stove for the strong black coffee that I often refer to as “starter fluid.” I had almost a half hour to wait, so I pulled out the grinder and ground the beans in preparation for the crew’s morning coffee rituals. Jeffrey, Sean, and I need our morning caffeine, or “medicine,” to make the day right. Aaron doesn’t drink coffee; he maintains that it’s a dirty habit. The rest of us, however, are hopelessly hooked.
The muffins that were on the docket for the morning would take three bowls. In the largest bowl I added three cups of all-purpose flour, half a cup of sugar, half a cup of brown sugar, one-and-a-half teaspoons of baking powder, and a dash or so of salt. I gave the dry ingredients a swirl. I melted a stick and a half of butter on the stove. It had been a few minutes since I checked the firebox, so I twisted around, took a step to the left, and stuffed it with more wood, then swirled the butter. I stepped back to my counter but kept my ears tuned to the fire crackling and the water in the teakettle. In the second, smaller bowl, I added a cup of whole milk, two eggs, and the zest of a lemon. I lightly beat the ingredients together as I watched the sun begin to rise over the harbor and peek through the trees. I set the mixture aside. The thermometer on the stovetop read 550 degrees, meaning that the oven temperature was probably around 425. I grabbed my muffin tin from the top of the warming box and gave it a good spray of cooking oil before setting it on the counter. The pilothouse was starting to warm with the heat from the stove, and the light of the sun gave the space around me a warm glow. I stoked the fire and exhaled a relaxed breath. The teakettle began to simmer.
The last bowl was reserved for the muffin topping. I wanted to make enough topping to last a few days, so into this bowl I placed a cup of all-purpose flour in with a cup of brown sugar and a couple large handfuls of rolled oats. I again checked the firebox before grabbing a stick of butter out of the small fridge that’s just opposite the stove. I used a cheese grater to grate about half of the cold butter, which I then mixed with my fingers into the dry ingredients. The rhythm of my thumbs moving against my fingertips carried me into a deep meditation. The grit of the sugar, the silk of the flour, and the bulk of the oats cleared all my thoughts until my fingers recognized that butter was spread evenly though the coarse mixture.
I walked out on deck to the freezer and returned with some blueberries, mixing one cup of them into the dry mixture until each berry had a light coating of flour. Next, I stirred in the liquids, filled the muffin tin with batter, sprinkled the muffins with topping, and slid them into the oven. I stoked the fire and added another stick of wood. The teakettle began to boil. It was time to make coffee.
After the coffee was brewed, I went back to the fridge and took out some bacon. The morning was marching on and it was nearing six o’clock. I took a cup of coffee to Jeffrey. He was still asleep, so I rubbed his shoulder and sang him an irritatingly happy good morning song and switched on the light.
“It’s time to get up. I’m excited to get underway and through Canada Customs and Dodd Narrows today,” I said as I kissed him on the cheek.
“What time again is slack water at Dodd?” Jeffrey asked in a groggy voice.
“Oh, I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s sometime between twelve-thirty and thirteen-hundred. We should check again when you get up,” I said.
I’d spent all winter planning our course to Alaska. Jeffrey had taught me how to use the current tables and how to figure the time of slack water for the narrows and tidal rapids that were like the gates of the Inside Passage. Our first, Dodd Narrows, dictated today’s schedule.
Sean was up soon after the coffee was ready. He likes a little milk and sugar in his coffee and has his own special stainless steel cup with decorative rope work on the handle. Steam, lit up by the sun, escaped from the hole in his coffee cup’s lid. He’d slept well, he said, sliding into the settee. His shaggy strawberry-blond hair was glowing a bit like a halo in the sunlight that illuminated the varnish in the pilothouse.
We had met Sean while he was the mate on the Schooner Zodiac. He’s an excellent shipwright and sailor, and for the last year he had been an indispensable fixture on the David B. We knew we would need an extra hand taking the boat to Alaska because Jeffrey and Aaron would be spending a lot of time in the engine room working out the bugs with the engine. We asked Sean if he’d come along since he has a captain’s license and could drive the boat without instruction. He agreed and was very excited about going to Alaska, especially about the day we planned to visit a tidewater glacier.
Sean took a slow sip of coffee as we chatted about what we hoped to see today. The smell of muffins just out of the oven drew Jeffrey up from our cabin.
“What’s for breakfast?” was his first real sentence of the day.
“Lemon-blueberry muffins, eggs, and some bacon.” I motioned to the table where I’d set out the muffins alongside some fruit I’d sliced up.
Jeffrey had his red bag of toiletries and his coffee mug with him. His mug was old, with a broken handle that had been epoxied back in place and a cartoon drawing of a crowd of Vikings. Bold capital lettering below the cartoon says the word NORGE. Jeffrey’s never been to Norway, but it’s his favorite mug and it goes with him everywhere. He handed me his NORGE mug and set his bag on the counter, then lay down on the floor to stretch his neck and lower back.
“Good morning, Captain,” Sean said, watching Jeffrey’s morning routine with interest.
“Good morning, Captain,” Jeffrey joked as multiple vertebrae in his neck popped in an unsettling musical ascension.
After Jeffrey finished cracking his neck, he picked up the current tables to check on the time for slack water at Dodd Narrows.
“Looks like we need to have the anchor up at oh-seven to get to Dodd on time.” Jeffrey confirmed what we already knew, but he was happy to double check just in case we’d missed some information in the current tables.
Aaron dragged himself into the pilothouse at 0645. He had just taken Havilah ashore and said his goodbyes to her. He was tired, and his humor wouldn’t kick in until he had been awake for about an hour. Besides not liking coffee, Aaron doesn’t eat breakfast, although if there is a pork product on the table he’s likely to grab a sausage or slice of bacon on his way down to the engine room.
“Good morning,” he grumbled and descended directly to start his engine.
With Aaron ready to go, Sean and Jeffrey broke from their conversation about what they were going to do when we got to Nanaimo. They both stood up and went out on deck to get ready to raise the anchor.