CHAPTER 5. WINTER WORK

Essentially, the work involved removing everything from the main saloon so I could get the inside of the hull cleaned and painted prior to rebuilding. An interesting note along the way was that when I first began the project, I remember thinking how austere and cramped the space inside the hull seemed to be. Every step along the dark saloon, every turn of the body resulted in some form of bruise on the shins, the head, elbows, and lots of other protruding places. As time and work progressed, though, I began to get adjusted to the small space. Indeed it did help to remove some of the old panels that constricted movement, but in time I began to feel at ease within the space and this ease has actually turned to a certain form of comfort in the finished project of today. I guess the adaptability of human nature fits in somewhere here.

Since the entire interior was going to be reconfigured, I felt no obligation to save much of the Spartan furnishings, and thus there was a lot of heave-ho from under the tarps. Besides that, even with the greatest care, the most undivided attention and the most deliberate handling of tools, the removal of sixty-five-year-old screws and cabinet backing was sometimes less than perfect. And then when these carefully preserved parts were finally removed and examined for future use, it was mostly clear that they would certainly have no part in the greater scheme of things. Unless I was willing to simply rebuild the interior as it was originally built, no amount of reshaping, gluing, drilling, or screwing would make their presence any better than new, well-madecabinetry—and Zen screw removal in the belly of this boat was not happening. This means that occasionally the sound of wrenching timbers could be faintly heard across the frozen boatyard, along with a good string of the King’s English. Still I was always successful at keeping the structural members of the hull totally unharmed.

My goal was to only do one section of the interior at a time, and given the short working hours allowed, my immediate focus was the saloon only. That included removal of the engine box, the companionway steps (the stairway leading down below from the cockpit), the galley sink and stove—along with the cabinetry around them—the hotwater heater, freshwater pump (a green lump covered with corrosion), the settee frames and supports, the cabin sole, and most important, the two diesel tanks made of rusted steel, and leaking.

That explained the bad odor. Each tank held approximately 50 gallons of fuel, and while each had only a few gallons of diesel left, they had to be pumped empty before I could get them off the boat. A job. The empty tanks were then levered up over the engine, out into the cockpit, and finally up and over the side, where they dove to earth with a big thud. By the end of it I looked like a street person without a shopping cart; the folks in my apartment building elevator turned the other way when I showed up. Probably thought I would ask for money.

With the tanks out, the space became easier to deal with. Some serious cleaning and attempted painting began. As for the paint part, I stuck to basic covering of a cleaned hull with navy gray and used a revolutionary old product called Rustoleum. It dries rock hard even in chilly temperatures, somewhat slowly, doesn’t peel, and covers all kinds of bad crud. Progress was being made. By January 1, I had a sense of accomplishment, even if I was the only one who could see it. I also began to wake up in the night worrying about the putting-back-together part.

One night late I found some medium-weight smooth cardboard gift boxes left over from Christmas. Georgia likes to save packaging—Lord knows when there could be a run on cardboard just when you might need a gift box. I lifted it quietly to my tiny library and started in with a pair of scissors and a glue gun, creating a model of the saloon section of my boat. For the next week, I clipped and glued,feeling my way along the path to a new interior layout.

Keeping things in relative scale was difficult. It would be so easy to make little cabinets and tables and seating modules that worked perfectly in the tight little cardboard cabin—if only people measured no more than three feet tall. Little by little however, by week’s end I had devised a close approximation of the cabin design I finally built. For the time being, this exercise gave me great piece of mind and a feeling of control over the project. I knew I could build it. With the cardboard model complete, I put it on a low bookshelf and went back to work on the real thing with renewed vigor.

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