Living a Low Wake Life

"Why in the world would anybody put chains on me?"
                                                               -lionel richie



Chances are, if you're living in the Age of COVID, you're probably reading this at home.

Welcome to living a "No Wake Life"

It's what we called it back in 2013- https://docksixchronicles.blogspot.com/2013/03/another-dock-diatribe-debut.html

it's still true today.

Since the link is intermittent, here it is:

We work our asses off to buy stuff that we can’t enjoy because we are working our asses off to pay for the stuff we buy while diligently saving (or attempting to save) for our retirement which we keep pushing back because we keep working our asses off  to buy yet more stuff to enjoy  that we have to work our asses off to pay for, and there is always something else that we want or need or think we need (but really want) that we have to work our asses off to pay for and…

 A generation ago somebody coined the phrase “rat race” to describe this phenomenon of modern consumerism, and the term stuck.

It’s wrong. 

It ain’t a race.

You can win a race.

Modern consumerist  life is a strictly no-win proposition, friends…

…  and none of us gets out of here alive.

I began to think about this a few years ago, when I received a matched set of stainless steel rechargeable electric salt and pepper grinders as a gift.

Think about that:  Electric salt and pepper grinders.

 I am pretty sure this is an answer to a question nobody asked.

This gift made me ponder, and I came to some conclusions:

1.     I must be one of those “hard-to-shop-for” people.

2.     I’d rather have an LCBO gift card.

3.     Grinding pepper over your mashed potatoes is apparently much more strenuous than I ever thought., that somebody decided the world needed this.

4.     A gadget that doesn’t really save any appreciable time or effort and provides little entertainment required somebody to work to earn the money to purchase it.

5.     Enough is enough.

 At the time, I was working a gig that required me to work 12 hour days 6-7 days a week,  put in 40 000 km a year behind the wheel of a car traveling to meet prospects,  75% of whom either don’t want or can’t afford what I am selling, so that  I can afford the next toy/vacation/orthodontist payment/thing with the 50% of my income that the tax man has allowed me to keep.  I was alienated from, and alienating, my kids, my wife, because of my absence from home life, and I became an overcompensating asshole for the same reason which increased the tension and…

…any of you out there who have climbed out of the wreckage of a crashed marriage know exactly where I’m coming from.

Actually, scratch that vacation part.  At the time I hadn’t taken more than a long weekend off in over a decade.

  And I thought I was successful.

  I began to question where I was going, what I was doing, and why. 

   Frankly, I figured enjoying retirement is a myth.

  

That whole “Freedom 55” thing?  Bullshit.

 First, you gotta get there.  With my diet, hours, stress level and number of miles driven every year, the odds were good I wasn’t gonna make it. 

Second, you gotta pay for it.  You need to keep squirreling away the cash, tending your investments, watching your nest egg grow, deferring and sacrificing today for the dream of a better tomorrow…

….As long as the market doesn’t tank, your health holds up, property values don’t plummet, or your kids don’t move back in, with their kids.

    Money may not buy happiness, but always feeling like you don’t have enough will make you bitchy as hell.

I was sitting in the cockpit of our old, small, paid-for sailboat one morning, enjoying a cup of coffee when it hit me:

  As a society we are conditioned to approach life like a big twin-engine cabin cruiser- heavy consumption, lots of noise, lots of flash, throwing a big wake.  Unless you are getting noticed, you’re not succeeding.

   I finally figured out that there is a lot to be said for living a NO wake lifestyle. 

   But how?

  With a bit of soul searching we realized we had to quit confusing our wants with our needs.

  My wife and I realized that we were perfectly content spending time on our old, small, paid-off  boat in our low-cost slip on our no-frills dock. We didn’t need a bigger boat on a fancier dock.

  And we didn’t need new cars.  As long as the old cars keep running , it is always gonna be cheaper to fix ‘em than replace ‘em.  If I need a new whip to impress you, you’re likely not worth impressing.

    Besides, there’s something real liberating about parking wherever you damn well please, because dings and scratches just don’t matter.

   And we didn’t need a $20 000 kitchen reno or a $10 000 bathroom makeover.  Or a bigger house.  Or a bigger garage. 

Or a bigger mortgage.

For a longer time.

 With fatter payments.

   We didn’t need to stand in line to be grilled by a soul-patch sporting “barista” first thing in the morning just to get a simple cup of coffee which costs as much as a Happy Meal, when we had a perfectly good underused coffee maker on the kitchen counter.

  

We needed to live life NOW, on OUR terms.

   A funny thing happened. By deciding what we could live without, we could now afford to live.

With less financial stress, I didn’t need to be on the road, living out of a car and fueling up on fast food three meals a day.  My wife and I discovered that cooking dinner together was a great way to re-connect at the end of the workday.  Chopping, sautéing, stirring with a glass of wine while recapping our respective days beats the hell out of eating a Whopper an hour from home.

  We didn’t have to save dining at restaurants with tablecloths for a special occasion to fit the budget.

  We could afford to drink the bottles of wine we could only read about before.

   We could take vacation days without figuring out what we had to sacrifice to make up for the lost wages.

   Hell, we could take whole damn vacations, for that matter!

    The sunsets look just as pretty from a small, paid-off sailboat as it does from the bridge of a six-figure cabin cruiser.

    The rum goes down just as well.

    And I can enjoy it instead of working to afford it.

    And so can you.

Small Boat Rules, Vol. 1

"told his wife, 'you can tell all your friends, it's been real but it ain't been fun, gonna get us one of them
boats'..." 
                                                                                                  -Kenny Chesney




 


     While Karma is a bigger than Whiskeyjack, and while she is a bigger "big small boat", at just shy of 26 feet LOA, she is still a small boat.

    We are perfectly fine with that.

    Someone once said, "Buy as little boat as you can stand, not as much boat as you can find, for what you can afford."

    Like all good advice, that one stuck with me.  It's a great life- have we thought about getting a bigger boat?


    Constantly.

    But going bigger would mean  leaving the Dock, and giving up the best sunsets in the marina:

   
       So, we make it work.

…. As seasonal small-boat liveaboards who still have full-time dirt jobs, here is a dozen things we have learned.

1. You wake up earlier. When the shower is a dinghy ride away, rather than just off the bedroom, you're not slapping the snoozebar as often.

2. The order of the morning ritual changes. Instead of stumbling out of the shower and surveying the closet, you have to figure out what you are going to wear, take it with you into the shower and hang it off the back of the door to steam out the inevitable wrinkles.

3. You don't need 8 pairs of shoes.

4. No one notices that you only have two sport coats.

5. If your clothes are black, khaki and beige, you don't need to have as many clothes because everything goes together.

6. As a salesperson, I find you can get away with guayaberas and flowered shirts when you tell people you live on your boat. It's also a great warm-up. In fact, if you don't wear flowered shirts and guayaberas, prospects look at you suspiciously. Dress too well and they think you are living on a 60 ft motoryacht, which means you are making waaaayyy too much.

7. Tight on storage? Underwear,socks, t-shirts and shorts go in pillow cases, your good clothes go in the drawers/bins. Voila- extra pillows, and less-wrinkled workwear.
edit-  CLEAN underwear and socks!

8. When doing laundry, let everything spend extra time in the dryer. You want your clothes DRY. Mildew is not your friend.

9. Keep a package or two of silica gel and a sachet of pot pourri, or at least a dryer sheet, in your clothes storage bins, and/or drawers, and/or lockers. Your clothes will stay mildew free and smell good.

10. Keep your bilge and engine bay/ room CLEAN. I like the nautical funk of diesel, icebox runoff and stuffing box drippings as much as the next sailor, but your clothes will pick up the smell, and it ain't as provocative in a client's office.

11.  There's no place for packaging aboard.  Unbox it, unwrap it, unpack it, recycle the box, wrapping and packaging before you hit the dock or the dinghy, label what's left and stow it.

12.  If something new comes aboard, something old has to leave- don't become an accidental hoarder. It takes a hell of a lot less time, and stuff, to fill up 200 sq ft. of space on the water than it does 2500 sq ft on the dirt.

and a bonus:

13.  if you take it out, move it, or use it, put it back.

Fellow liveaboards and cruisers, I'd love to add to this list, so feel free to sing out and comment with what works for you.

As always, thanks for stopping by.  Please, "Talk the Dock!"- spread the word.

The Benefits of Bottom Feeding

  "But I gotta stay paid, gotta stay above water..."
                                              - Three Six Mafia



*Originally published in Ontario Sailor magazine, now published here.  Enjoy.




    I admit, I am hard pressed to find the value in a new boat.
Before anybody goes grabbin' pitchforks and torches, let me disclaim here for a minute:

    There is absolutely nothing wrong with buying a new boat.

  At all.

  Ever.


   Some sailors  like to buy new and trade the uncovered unknowns of an old boat  for the hopefully-warranty-covered unknowns of commissioning, others have scrimped and saved and worked damn hard over the years to trade up and up, with the goal of buying a boat that is not just new-to-them, but brand-spankin' NEW, while other others are just plain filthy rich and wouldn't think of anything BUT buying big, brand new and blinged out.

   Good on 'em, I say!

   If that is what floats your boat and puts a smile on your face, Neptune love ya!

   But I can't do it.

   Or, more correctly, I won't do it, because if I can't justify the value, I definitely can't justify carrying the 25 year note, so "can't" and "won't" are damn near enough interchangeable  in this equation.

    I am a bottom feeder- and I like it down here.

    As my 40th birthday gets ever smaller in the rearview mirror, my gut gets bigger, and 50 looms at damn near the next exit on my life as a highway, a few stone truths have become apparent:

     I was never all that good looking.

     I was never  all that talented.

    Compared to the dreams I had when I was 18, I am a damn failure.

    I never became a rock star, I didn't get a three book deal and a 6 figure advance cheque, and I didn't become a multi-millionaire by 30.  Thus, to 18 year old me, I failed.

     And, I am okay with all of that.

     Because I am a failure, because I am nothing but unrealized potential stuffed into a pair of Dockers, (aka Toughskins for adults) I have learned the life hacks and workarounds necessary to live like I made it.
Which is why sailing is perfect for me.

     There are virtually no seaworthy 40 year old 30 foot powerboats on the market for less than the price of a 2007 Hyundai...

     ... But, there are a crapload of perfectly acceptable sailboats out there for four figures.

 The best part?  I can sail the bejeezus out of a $5000 boat for four or five seasons and likely sell it for....
....$5000.


and if I can't?
    Hell, even if I have to give it away five seasons down the road, my loss is only $1000/year.
   Less than $3 a day.

   A draft beer a day.

   Domestic draft.

     When was the last time a draft beer gave us this much fun, this many grins, this much excitement and life?

     Yes, I hear you, Yeahbutniks:  "Yeah, but, there are repairs and maintenance and upgrades and dockage and ..."

    ...and all of that is cheaper down here on the bottom as well.  When you buy an expensive boat, the idea of buying used gear is, to some, a little unseemly, and rightly so.  Used gear on a newish boat devalues the boat and raises suspicions of the next buyer.
On the bottom, used gear looks LESS out of place and LESS suspicious than NEW gear.

   It is also a lot less nerve-wracking to drill new holes in an old deck than it is to drill new holes in a new deck.


   As Gunny Highway said, "You improvise, you adapt, you overcome."

    Oh yeah, back to that nerve-wracking thing- with less invested, there is less risk in attempting new skills and new (at least to you) ideas to refit or upgrade your ride.

    A generation ago, a 30 foot cruising boat was what you traded up TO, and you kept her for 20 years, because you'd made it- you had space and luxury, and comfort to cruise or weekend comfortably- it was the boat you never felt you would outgrow...and most didn't.

    Today, a 30 foot boat is marketed as an "entry level" cruising boat, a boat to start with, and trade out of as quickly as possible.

   Thankfully.

       Because the more often a boat is traded, the faster it depreciates, and the sooner it hits the bottom of it's depreciation curve, which means there is a whole new batch of boats at the bottom of their depreciation curve sooner,  hopefully for new generations of adventuresome failures to discover.

   And the price of admission is only a draft beer a day.


 

    If you're a bottom feeder, keep on keeping on. And take a newbie for a sail every once in a while.  We need more greenhorns sailing.

After all, we need someone to sell our boats to.

Thanks for stopping by.  Please, feel free to "Talk the Dock!" Pass the word!

Good Enough.

"There must be something else..."
                                  -Lifehouse






   

     A fleet of beveraged sailors congregating to celebrate sundown (and we had some great ones last season:

),

inevitably leads to discussion deep into the dark hours.  One such confab  meandered through the usual "Cruising versus Racing", "Tiller versus Wheel", "Power versus Sail", "Rum versus Rye", "Dock 6 versus Dock 5" debates to a topic which we discovered is a lot more nuanced:

"Correct versus Incorrect Gear and Installation."

or, "When is Good Enough, Good Enough?"

  One thing all in attendance agreed on:

  The answer, as it so often is, is...

..."It depends."

  Except when it doesn't.

   Electrical/electronical stuff is kinda fussy about how it is connected, for example.  Get yer positives and yer negatives backversed and all the smoke comes out of the wires and you're left pondering how to lie on the warranty claim for your new, but now dead, chartsounderhaildar thingy.

  Same thing with wrapping jibsheets around the winch- it only works one way, clockwise, dumbass!

   On BOTH sides of the boat!

  (At least 8 of you out there just air-wrapped an invisible winch to see if I was right... after you first pointed your finger in front of you like a pistol and then rotated it in the air, lefty-loosey and then righty-tighty, to remind yourself what "clockwise" meant.)


  (( You KNOW you did.  Don't even try.))

   Restringing  6:1 mainsheet tackle takes at least two tries because nobody ever gets the sheave order right the first time and nobody bothers to take "before"  pictures before unstringing the old sheet from the blocks... and, of course, it only works one way.


   Adjusting  the valve clearance on your engine,  and flushing the head are other examples of "one way only" systems, gear and procedures.

  Most of the other stuff on your boat?

  Not so much.

  Which is kinda reassuring.

  When I am not sailing, and boatbuilding and boatpart building and wordsmithing, I am a gearhead.

   But not as gearheady as I used to be.

    Back in the day, BB (the era Before Boats),  I was a die-hard 24/7 VW freak.  Since I was 16, I owned 'em, fixed 'em, bought 'em, built 'em, sold 'em, lived 'em, and, sometimes, in 'em.  At last count I had owned 47.3 of them.

 The .3 is still in the backyard of Stately Jones Manor.

  (NOT the backyard of SJM, but at times, it was close.)

 I've laid hands on some of the rarest of the rare,

    ...and rubbed elbows with some of the coolest of the cool.

    At the top of my "I Shit You Not" Stories list, I helped a bunch of local Canadian high school kids build a race car that ran in the 2005 Baja 1000:

 As the old NASCAR joke goes, I wasn't involved, I was committed.  (Look it up.)


Occasionally my wheeled obsession met my keeled obsession.  Little known fact: my first dinghy , Chirp , built back in 2009, was sized to fit inside my VW Vanagon Syncro.

     Confession: I haven't wrenched on a VW in 5 years.

   What happened?

    I  discovered the "good enough" freedom of boats, and realized the math worked.

     See here's the deal:

     Old VWs  are not just collectible, they are appreciating.  Like crazy.  Like, a -$5000 -price -tag -on- a- rusty- dented -non-running- project- bus- that- needs -everything -is -a -steal kind of crazy.

   The shit got serious.    And when the shit gets serious, you gotta get serious about the shit- an incorrect part, an ill-fitting aftermarket panel, a wheel with the wrong date stamp, is a step backward.  A perfectly serviceable, but incorrect, $100 aftermarket muffler might cut the value of your pride and joy by $150.  

   And there are plenty of enthusiasts who will happily let you know, at every show and swap meet you attend with your incorrect ride.

   As the value of the vehicles rose, the price of original and good aftermarket parts rose accordingly,  stretching my always tight fun budget.

   Meanwhile, in Old Boat World, or at least the part of it I discovered and happily reside in, nobody gives a shit about whether there are period correct bolts holding the stanchions to decks that are covered with unscuffed original non-skid.  Having peeling decals on the air filter will not hurt the value of my boat at all.

    Owning a floating summer home that will likely not appreciate in value, but will just as likely not depreciate much either, is kinda liberating.

    I was spending more time messing around with boats, and less time in the garage.  Finally, I had to face the fiscal reality:

  My fun budget can support messing around with boats, or messing around with cars. Not both.

   For now.

So, back to the original question. What was the consensus that our confab reached that night?

  When is good enough, good enough?

   We came up with the  "Good Enough" rule of thumb:  Every part, part replacement and modification on-board must answer  "Yes" to three questions-
1. Does it work?
2. Is it safe?
3. Is it durable?

   That's a standard I can meet.



Thanks for stopping by.  Feel free to "Talk the Dock" and pass the word.



 

Let's Talk. Not About Boats.

"...and I hope you are having the time of your life..."
                                                 -Gnarls Barkley"




*Deep breath*

This is an… interesting... day in Canada- this is "Let's Talk" Day, a day designed to open dialogue about mental illness and destigmatize crazy…

...sponsored  by a telecom company, a national corporation in an industry where it sometimes seems like the customer service staff and telemarketers are trained to drive you batshit crazy.  

     Anyirony,  Let’s Talk Day has been revered and reviled and retweeted throughout it’s short history, but this year LTD seems to  be at a tipping point- people WANT to have the conversation.

So, Let’s Talk.

*Deeper breath*

Hi, I’m Brian and I’m crazy. 

I’ve been crazy for over 30 years…but it took me at least 25 of those years to figure it out.

See, sometimes when you’re crazy, crazy seems normal, because it’s all you know.

And that is one of the reasons to talk.

When I was a kid, because no one ever talked about crazy, I thought EVERYONE felt like me.  I thought that everyone wanted to sleep all the time. I thought everyone felt like throwing up every morning on the school bus.   I thought that everyone felt they were a completely useless failure and never did anything right.  I thought everyone found it so damn hard to make even small decisions. I thought everyone felt every failure was a huge disaster, no matter how minor, and every success was a statistical blip, no matter how major.
I thought everyone was always on the verge of either anger or tears.

I thought that everyone wanted to die.

Crazy is thinking that everything bad that happens is "luck."

And everything good that happens is "luck."

And unable to care either way.

The fucking insidious thing about crazy, at least my crazy, is that I functioned, and occasionally functioned very successfully, on a daily basis…

...and thus, I must not be crazy.

     Because crazy is obvious, right?  Crazy is on the news, in the papers, in the hospital, in the morgue…

      Ergo, ipso facto,  I must not be crazy.

     So, I sucked it up, dealt with it, walked it off, lived with it, and worked around it, because…

…we didn’t talk about it.

     When I was up,  I was really gawddam UP- I was unbeatable.
I wasn’t just king of the hill, I was King of  KickAss Mountain.  I got the awards, earned the bonuses, bought the toys…

….But, when I was down, I was REALLY down.

    The attendant mood swings were epic and often ugly.  Happiness was rare, but anger was a  running theme.  I was mad at everybody, everything, and myself, and I could never quite figure out why.  That anger saddened me and I really didn't like me very much because of it.  Hell, since we're being honest, I hated me.   I loathed me and the impact of me on those closest to me.  No one deserved a dose of "me", and I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

   But, I could fake the fuck out of being "normal."
  I could force a grin onto my face, and shake hands and slap backs and make small talk and write the exams and go to the dances and parties and, later, close the deals and give the seminars, and write...

  ...and it took a toll.

     As time passed the ups became fewer and the mountains more like molehills, while the downs became more frequent and valleys became abysses…

But up or down, it was so. damn. much. WORK.

And that work got harder every year… and then every month…and then every week… and then every day.

     Every morning, for over eight thousand mornings, I found a reason to get out of bed, and then a reason to get dressed, and then a reason to go to work, and then a reason to work and then a reason to…

    I got through the day by breaking my day down into a survival to-do list, and I got through it by finding reasons to tick off another list-item, and then another, until I got near the end of my list or the end of my endurance and could fall into bed, exhausted, but unable to sleep….  and I always had to remember to find a reason to be happy. 

Every day.

… and then I started running out of reasons.

   And death began to look really, really, attractive.

   I was lucky.  I have a wife who loves me in spite of, or maybe because of, my craziness.

   We had The Talk.

   She made The Appointment.

   I got The Prescription

  And we get through it every day.

  Because we had The Talk.

   Life is no longer so much damn work.

   And being happy is no longer something I have to remember to do.
 
   Now the anger is an emotion, not a pulse. I am no longer low-key angry about everything.

   Now, I am angry, and happy, and sad, and all those other emotions, in balance, not out of proportion.

   There are still Bad Days, those days when Churchill’s black dogs scratch at the door. 

   But, there are far far, far more Good Days.

I’m Brian. 

And I’m crazy. 

And I’m okay with that.

Let’s talk.

October.

"So, when crowds disappear and only silence is here..."
                                                      -Supertramp


Labour Day marks the beginning of the end of the season.

Bright and early Tuesday morning,  L-Day +1, boats start coming out of the water, and the metaphorical countdown clock start ticking.

After the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend the ticking gets louder and the tempo picks up as the shrubbery shows it's true colours:

By mid-October, this place is a ghost town:

  As we enter the last week of October, there are only a double handful of boats still hull wet.  Among the few and the proud is Whiskeyjack, as new owner Phil carries on the tradition of not hauling out until you absolutely damn well have to.

  Taking a cruise through the marina in our new/used tender (more on that later),  I notice a pattern- some of the most interesting boats in the marina stay in the water later....

  "Why,"  we are occasionally asked, " keep your boat in the water into October? October can be cold and miserable and rainy and unpredictable."

...  and, this year, it certainly was all of that.

But it was also all of this:

    It's worth sticking around.


And thank you, loyal readers, for sticking around as well.

Remember, "Talk the dock!"

28 Days... Plus

“She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy….”

                                                     - Red Hot Chili Peppers

 Many years ago, I picked up an info-nugget that has stuck with me.   Here’s the backstory:  A speaker at a sales conference actually got my attention by NOT sounding like every other speaker at a sales conference I had ever heard.    He woke up the room by asking us all if we realized that we all really needed to go into rehab.

  Er…what do you know?…and first of all, “allegedly.”  Nobody can prove anything.

Rick went on to explain that any habit takes 28 days to develop, and 28 days to break….  Which is why most rehab programs are  no less than 28 days long.

Huh.  That makes sense.

 Looking back at my blogging habit over the past few months, I see a pattern-  I fell out of the pattern.

 So, I gotta spend the next 28 days getting back INTO it.

Brace yourselves- the blogstorm is coming.

In the meantime, here's a teaser:

Thanks for sticking around.

“Talk the Dock!”

Offerings from Off-site, Vol. 1

     " 'Til there was nothing left to burn and nothing left to prove "
                                                                             -Bob Seger

    

       A few months back, I was asked to contribute a regular column to Ontario Sailor Magazine .  As regional sailing magazines go, in my unabashedly biased opinion, I think it is a pretty good one, covering all aspects of the local sailing scene. You can pick up a current issue at any local reputable book store in Ontario, some marinas, a few chandleries, or you can subscribe at the link above.  I recommend you do so.  Then maybe I could get a raise.
 
       I'll occasionally re-publish a back-issue column here from time to time.  This is one of those times.


      An Ode to Orphans

The good news:  Sailboat manufacturers are still building new sailboats, and they are, generally, faster and better handling and more comfortable and better equipped than ever before.

The bad news:  There are a lot fewer of them than a generation ago.

My wife likes to point out that I was born at least 20 years too late.  I think “Gimme Shelter” may be the best song ever written or performed, I appreciate the occasionally troubled soul of triple Weber carburetors lying in wait under a Ferrari Daytona’s hood, and  I feel that mankind’s greatest technological achievement was traveling to the moon.

And back.

Repeatedly.

So, it stands to reason that I have a soft spot for boats from the “Golden Age” of boatbuilding in the 60s and 70s.

    As wonderful as new boats are, as shapely and sleek and polished and equipped and better than back in the day boats, they have become….safe.

    Today we have so much more design knowledge, so much more computing power, and so much more real-world experience than four decades ago, that fewer chances are taken because there are fewer chances to take.

 If you know what works, you do it.
 And you don’t do anything else.

Flash back a few decades:  There may not be bliss in ignorance, but there sure is enthusiasm. See, if you don’t know everything, if you don’t really know what won’t work or what won’t sell, you’re free to try damn near anything.

  There were lots of boatbuilding hits, and a lot more misses, and a lot of enthusiasm as entrepreneurs discovered that it was possible.   If you had a space big enough to hold a mould and enough cash to buy enough wood, resin, cloth, hardware and sails to build a boat that you could display at a boat show, then you could become a boatbuilder!  No courses to take, no mandatory building codes to worry about, if it floated and moved under it’s own power and you could sell it, you were in business.

   Looking back from our well-regulated and thoroughly thought out 21st century, it’s pretty amazing.

   Some great designs came out of that era, boats that are still built today, in one iteration or another, like the Laser and the Hobie Cat and the Catalina 30.

    Others, the vast majority, were far less successful.

    In some cases, marques died an untimely death due to bad management, cashflow issues, or the vagaries of the economy.  In other cases, the boats just weren’t very good- poorly designed or poorly built or poor performers.  In many cases, it was simply a matter of a boat that was just too … weird.

    And I love them all.  From North Sea -inspired Nordica and Halman double enders built in the farmland of southern Ontario to comfortable and clumsy Grampians to the Tardis-like accommodations of the fish-tug shaped Tanzer 28,  these boats represented a freedom of design that has been paved over by the superhighway of  knowledge.  Hell, no one in their right mind would ever even consider building a Willard Vega or Fales Navigator again:  a center cockpit, pilothouse, sloop-rigged sail trawler?  That idea, on paper is insane.
    Yet dozens were sold.

                                                                                                       -image courtesy of yachtworld.com

   The Golden Age saw some weird stuff, but also some better than fine boats that…
  Just.  Won’t.  Die.
 Look at the racing fleets throughout North America- for every close pointing late model J Boat on a course,  there’s a dozen elderly C&Cs and Mirages nipping at her transom, waiting for the skipper to slip, still competitive (enough) three decades on.

   And maybe that is one of the other reasons why there are far, far fewer manufacturers building far, far fewer boats today:  They Just.  Won’t.  Die.

     How many 30 year old cars do you see on the road today?   Maybe boatbuilders could have, or should have, learned something from automakers back in the day- you don’t have to build it to last forever.
You just have to build it to last long enough.

     I’m glad they didn’t.

     I enjoy walking down the Dock and passing Sirens and Sirius 21s and Tanzer 22s and  DS20s and Bluenoses and C&C 24s, seeing the optimism in the designs, the belief that if we could put a man on the moon, then, dadgummit! we can certainly build and sell a full keel, bowspritted and trailboarded, full headroom, 25 foot cruiser.

     Alas, the newest Bayfield 25 is now more than a quarter century old.  Bayfield  Boats closed up in 1988.  Tanzer boats died a year earlier.  So Did Vandestadt and McGruer, Sirius builders. Nordica packed it in even earlier, while Halman managed to hang on until the mid 90s.  Whitby, Ouyang, Mirage, Grampian, Aloha, Ontario, Hughes, CS, Paceship, McVay?  Gone, gone, gone, gone, nada, done, closed, history, no more, goodbye.

     We don’t go to the moon anymore, either.

      I’m not sure we’re better off.     BDJ.






     Let me know what you think.



   Thanks for checking in, and don't forget to "Talk the Dock!"

Dinghy Dalliance Digest

          "Everybody's got a story..."
                      -Amanda Marshall


          If you can click past the endless played-out cat memes, genealogy sites, facebook, and you don't get sucked into YouTube for hours on end, you discover that there are actually some interesting places to visit out there in the WorldWideWeb.  Like one I stumbled over recently, Humans of New York .

        The concept is genius.  It's nothing more, and nothing less, than stripped-down photojournalism:  One man, one city, one camera, one subject, one interview, one question, one story, repeat. Every day.

        One interview struck home with me last week.

                            "I’m a philosophy professor."
"If you could give one piece of advice to a large group of people, what would it be?"
"Never make an exception of yourself."
"What does that mean?"
"People like to make exceptions of themselves. They hold other people to moral codes that they aren’t willing to follow themselves. For example, people tend to think that if they tell a lie, it’s because it was absolutely necessary. But if someone else tells a lie, it means they’re dishonest. So never make an exception of yourself. If you're a thief, don't complain about being robbed.


       Guilty.

       I have made an exception of myself.

       Boat projects, even small boat projects, are usually labour-intensive.  Because I have done a bunch of them, and because I am more than happy to share my opinion (solicited or otherwise), fellow boaters occasionally ask how to do something...
    ...before I am able to tell them how to do it anyway.

     Usually, halfway through explaining, for example, that the only way to finish brightwork is a  multi-coat repeatedly sanded varnish schedule, the enquirer interjects, "Isn't there an easier, cheaper, quicker way to do it?"

     Which earns my standard response, "If you haven't got the time or money to do it right, when will you have the time and money to do it again?"


      My inflatable adventures over the last couple of seasons demonstrate how I have made myself an exception.

      Last year, Quack  needed a floor.  So, I quickly laminated some ply, slapped some epoxy on the exposed on all the surfaces, sloshed some varnish over it, screwed it in place, and, as the french say, Vwuh-Lah, I had me a new floor.

      Five months later, I needed another new floor:

   So, I spent the time and the money to do it...again.

    I figured out that part of the issue was that the floor was screwed into place, an issue created because I was determined to work with scraps on hand.  For Floor 2.0, I decided to make a full floor that would be freefloating, heldp in place by the tubes.  So I measured, and cut, and sheathed it in fiberglass cloth and wetted it out and filled it...

.....and sealed the edges with thickened epoxy and sanded it, and then painted it and painted it and painted it again, applied a couple of big swaths of grip-tape and I had...

   ...a durable and practical floor.

   Next item on the punchlist was a tiller extension for Quack's doughty little outboard.

 I repurposed a piece of scrap aluminum tube, formed the ends to fit the flat stock tiller, drilled and riveted the new extension into place, and ...

     It works great, and allows stand-up piloting, very nice when one has a load of dogs and water jugs.

   So, one dinghy, two projects, two successes.  What of the newest member of the growing fleet?

     This demonic deflating dinghy is proving to be my Moriarty.

     Look at her up there!  Plump. Firm. Ready for action, no?

     Hours later:

Not Honk's fault, really.  I have no one and no boat to blame for my making an exception of myself.

 See, I found the leak.
 And I patched it.
With a patch that was too small.
Unable to withstand the pressure, the patch leaked.
So, I patched the patch.
The patched patch leaked.
So I slathered it in sealant and covered it in duct tape for a few hours and pulled off the tape and...
...It leaked.


So I tore off the patch over the patch and then tore off the original patch and sanded and cleaned and repatched...
...and instead of waiting the necessary 24 hours for the patch to fully cure and harden, I reinflated to full pressure after 6 hours.

   And it leaked.

    So I deflated the offending chamber, slathered sealant on, covered it in duct tape, let it cure for 24 hours, uncovered it, reinflated and ...

    It looks like hell and it leaks, albeit more slowly.

    The patch is still too small, and the adhesive area inadequate.

     (Small and inadequate- welcome to the story of my life.)

     Tomorrow I will have to make the time and find the money to do it again.  

     This time, it is obvious I need to pull the "Zodiac" label off the tube, as the leak is actually a previously patched puncture just off the lower right corner of the label that was inadequately patched originally.   With a bigger patch, a properly prepared surface, the  patch firmly affixed to the tube with no air bubbles, longer cure time for the adhesive, and no inflation until fully cured,  I expect that I will have an inflatable that remains inflated.

    Hopefully.


    So, have I learned anything from being exceptional?

    Yep.

     I am not special.  I don't get any luckier than anyone else.  If there aren't shortcuts for anyone else, I don't have a Thruway either.

     And I guarandamntee I will be tempted, repeatedly, in the future to make an exception of myself.

     Once in a while, I will likely give in.

     You'll probably hear about it.



"Talk the Dock!"