Ali and the gulls

This is a story about Ali the Hat, an ecologist. It's set in the Spring.

Ali catches the same train as me some nights. On these occasions we go for beer. He hates the word but he's what you and I would call a bit of a twitcher. Always ecstatic about a buzzard or some flight of jackdaws.

Bath Spa is fine old Brunel, with iron pillars on the two platforms supporting peaked glass roofs. Looking up you can't say you see the sky - more a guano brightness. I never paid this glass roof any attention until Ali pointed out the strange view of seagulls' bottoms one gets through it. Directly against the glass their yellow feet are crisp, then the legs disappear into a shadow wiggling its provocative tail.

So Ali and I were in the habit of calmly regarding seagulls' blurry bums while awaiting our train. No more. Over the last month all the Platform 2 seagulls - our gulls - have transfered to Platform 1 across the tracks. We could see them there, strutting the roof in the sun. Just not from the right angle.

Ali can't let it alone. Why have they abandoned him? Before we'd trundle back through the gorgeous countryside, smugly griping about work and pointing out natural phenomena through the window - newly shorn sheep, maggots of the field - until we'd settled on a dominant theme for the evening's drinking.

Not any more. Ali just gets stuck straight into the seagulls. They've gone to Platform 1 and there's no explaining it. I suggest they get more evening sun over there. Ali shakes his head. I suggest they're tired of him gazing at their bottoms. Ali doesn't even crack a smile. The man spends his days ticking biodiversity checkboxes for corporates. I think he's reached a tipping point. I think he's seeing an ecological significance where there are only gulls.

This evening Ali wasn't on the platform. I wandered up to the end where the construction is going on. Once a parking lot, soon to be the six restaurants that will make up Bath's New Dining Quarter. A re-paved paradise. Two teenage girls on a bench are excited to be going somewhere better, but express it by frowning and out-texting each other. Stupid kids.

I examine the scaffolding. My brother needs a two meter length of aluminium tubing for the windmill on his boat. Is scaffolding actually aluminium these days? This lot looks it.

My train is announced just as the squawking starts above Platform 1. Seagull sex. The male gull is inept: he keeps falling off. The female scurries forward a few steps raising a racket, then stops to let him on again. He tries his balance, angry concentration writ across his bill. And falls off. The girls have stopped texting. The fat one is filming it on her phone. They're laughing. Everyone on Platform 2 is.

Ali's in the pub when I get off the train. I tell him about it. Those people over on Platform 1 must've had quite a view from underneath, I conclude. He's not interested, not keenly anyway. But I think at last his mind is settled. Still bereft, yes, but content with a good, Darwinian explanation.

Mast Compression Two

If you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.

- Yogi Berra 

Coachroof rot.

I left off this woeful tale with the discovery that Kemara's coachroof was constructed of glassed-in rot. I wasn't going to be sailing her that summer, but I was confident a season's work would put her right again.

My initial plan was to cut away the boxed in rot with an angle grinder and epoxy in a framework built up from criss-crossing layers of 6mm marine ply.

It was filthy work. Clouds of fibreglass dust filled Kemara's interior and coated everything. My smoker's cough developed a whole new timbre as I learned that cheap B&Q dust masks are great at keeping snot and saliva in close proximity to your face, but pants at protecting lungs. Denizens of the Welcome soon got used to the ghost that arrived in an itchy cloud and gulped its pint before heading for the loo and a painful scrub.

Welcome relief

Hurley's are famously tough little boats and mine has sailed nearly forty years before needing this kind of work. It feels a little churlish to criticise her construction. But it was disconcerting to find sloppy great lumps of resin next to water-attracting voids lurking overhead. Just getting a flat surface onto which I could bond my ply required lots of filling and sanding, which is time consuming. And I only have weekends to work.

I soon became an epoxy artiste. This wonderful stuff comes in two tins and mixes together 5:1. With no additives you can use it as a tough coating. Add microfibres or microballons and it becomes an incredibly strong glue. Add colloidal silica to stop it slumping and it becomes a filler.

Epoxy-filled voids

I've mostly used SP 106 with a fast hardener. This gives around 20 minutes working time from when you first start to mix. The West Systems epoxies seem to go off faster, which makes them a bit panicky to use. For big jobs and hot days it's better to go with a slow hardener, but chandlers don't seem to stock it as often.

The trick is to keep the stuff continuously moving in the pot. If you're mixing it thick or need more than a hundred mil it will heat up very quickly. If you put the pot down to rescue something going terribly wrong it'll start to smoke, melt the pot, turn toffee then almond brittle.

A large flat pot helps, but the best thing is organisation. Have all your wood laid out close to it's final destination. Do a dry run to make sure there won't be any hitches. Once the glue is mixed immediately drizzle it out across your work in long thin lines. With less volume contributing to the heat you'll have more time for smearing it around and getting everything into place for clamping.

Props and wedges

Except, for this job, there was very little I could actually clamp. Instead I used a dozen or so props and wedges to keep gluing pressure on. It's supposed to go like this: position strip of wood against ceiling with one hand, grab and roughly position first prop with other. Switch hands and position second prop at opposite end. Tap in wedges until it's supporting itself. Tap in remainder of props.

The dry run always went fine. But once there's glue involved things get a bit slippery. Just as you tap in the third prop, the first slides out. As you lunge for that the second pops off and crashes across your knee. As you twist in pain your lovely strip of wood lands butter-side down on your head.

Along with the microfibres and colloidal silica, my coachroof is reinforced with a fair quantity of human hair.

---

The original plan was to fix the problem at hand - mast compression - and leave the rest of the interior  untouched. This meant leaving the flimsy bulkhead in place (see pic above), running my reinforcements over the top of it. That wasn't easy, and I grew to hate the thing.

For starters, it can't be structural and it's in the wrong place. It clearly does nothing to support the mast, and it cuts the forward side windows in half. No self-respecting naval architect would have put it there. Sometime between the first hull being moulded and the boat going into production some sales monkey decided mom and dad would need an illusion of privacy up in the forward cabin while their bairns dozed in the quarter berths. Or mom and dad wouldn't buy the boat.

The sales monkey wasn't wrong. Hurley's were popular pocket cruisers in their day. But I was getting other ideas. There were (and, sigh, still mostly are) a few modest things I want to squeeze into Kemara's confined cabin:

• A proper chart table. This is as much about having some place to stow the expensive bits of paper flat and dry as some macho symbol of navigational prowess - but the latter can't hurt.
• A hanging locker. Hurleys are wet enough as it is. After a long bash into it you don't want to add the insult of dripping oilskins to already sodden cushions.
• A forward hatch that seals. My brother and I would gaffer tape the thing closed before any serious passage to prevent briny ingress. It worked, but there must be a better way.
• A gimballed stove. Soup in a thermos is a life saver, but nothing boosts morale better than heaving to and frying some pig.
• Organised stowage. Little drawers just for split pins, just for bolts, just for the sail repair kit. Bigger lockers for tins. Somewhere dry for rice and pasta that doesn't fly open when you fall off a wave on port tack.

That's not much to ask from a little boat. Is it? The trouble comes with the compromises I'd have to make with the available space. That chart table is going to take the number of berths from four to three. No bulkhead means no curtain saving the blushes of anyone enthroned on the head. This kind of thinking was leading inexorably to a complete redesign, centred on one thing: me.

I still dream of the young couple who'll buy Kemara to when I've finally had with her. The wife grew up sailing. He's stupid but keen. The kids are five and seven, awed by the prospect of going to sea. But I'm not sure this gorgeous family exists. Everything in the world has gotten bigger since Kemara was launched. "Starter" boats seem to come eight to twelve feet longer these days. Interior volume has trumped fine lines.

No, I have a feeling Kemara's next owner is going to be something like me: a bit of a loner, a little puzzled why. But I hope happy to sail his (her?) ship alone.

---

I can't honestly say any of these thoughts were fully formed when I finally tore out the bulkhead. I'd had another epoxy hair day and had pissed off to the Welcome while it cured. Mid afternoon I was back onboard and in a reasonable mood. I picked up the rubber mallet and two inch chisel and set to work. Forty minutes later I was lying on my back in the forward cabin, donkey kicking the fucker out.

Madness. Madness evidenced by the elation I felt standing at the companionway and, for the first time, seeing the entire inside of hull. Up forward was no longer a dark hole. The boat felt beamy. And long. You could actually seat six people below, if they let you.

More work required

Mast Compression One

Bottle jack action

"Ooh. That's a Hurley 22?"

Say yes.

"Scott had a Hurley 22 back when we first met. Then there were the kids so we bought Jenbenbav. But Hurley's are such lovely boats. We had so much fun back then!"

Smile.

"Of course Jenben is very comfortable. Still, sometimes I miss the old Hurley. I think we enjoyed sailing more then, didn't we Scott?"

Feign incomprehension. Then, through the course of Scott's tale - involving crab pots, Chapman's Pool, an omelette and fog - allow appreciation and amazement to educate your wind-burnt mug. All you want is an invite into their shore-powered warmth and, perhaps, a tot of their malts.

But they're not wrong. Hurleys are lovely boats. Mine suffers from mast compression.

---

The bermudan rig relies on a tension for performance. The stays and shrouds pull the mast downwards. On some boats, the mast starts at the keel and pokes up through the deck. On most others there's a solid kingpost between the the keel and the underside of the deck-stepped mast. With Kemara's ilk, there's nothing but thin air under the mast.

So Hurley 22s are prone to mast compression: under rigging load the deck sags, just aft of the mast step. On Kemara it didn't look fatal: the deck hadn't cracked, I didn't think the mast was in danger of crashing down into the hideaway toilet directly beneath it. But the rig wouldn't tension. Beating into a stiff breeze she carried unmanageable weather helm and pointed about as well a red setter on heat.

Roger and I had already made several attempts at a fix.

I'd laminated up a formidable beam and bolted it in place just forward of the bulkhead, around half a meter aft of the mast. We put a stainless plate between the underside of the mast step and the beam and hoped this would take the strain aft and out to the edge of the coachroof. But we skimped on the thickness of the stainless plate. It bent, the deck still buckled and, worse, the bolt holes leaked.

The following year I ordered up a serious 8mm stainless plate, with the long edges bent down for additional strength. I should have realised that 8mm was overdoing it when the engineering company started scratching grey heads over the size of press needed to fold those edges. But they did what was asked and a terrifying lump of metal arrived at my workplace.

Down at the Exeter Canal Basin, the weekend before we were due to get craned in, I found the folly of my never-too-strong ways. Those chunky bent down edges would need cutting off where the plate had to sit atop the beam. And that would take a plasma cutter. Which I don't own. And B&Q don't sell. We stepped the mast without it, and again sailed the season with a sagging deck and leaky bolt holes.

---

This time last year, the boat now mine, I was determined to lick the problem. Precision Profiles of Bristol did me another 8mm plate, without the bent down edges. It still would take an icebreaker to bend. With a couple of weeks to spare before the convoy went down the canal I set about installing it.

I had decided to epoxy the beam and plate to the underside of the coach roof: no more leaky bolts. To do this I had to find something solid on which to glue. The interior ceiling of Kemara's cabin is moulded out of thin fibreglass, with a blueish textured finish. Tapping it I could hear solid patch running aft from the mast to the companionway. So I nervously drilled and chiselled the thin glass away.

Crack of doom

Underneath was a mess of water-stained glass-over-wood, shot with ancient holes. Just aft of the mast it had cracked, precisely where the deck was sagging. I put 40 grit on the angle grinder and proceeded to make a nice flat surface.

The result was cleaner, but disconcerting. The angle grinder had torn away a chunk of glass on the starboard side of the crack, exposing a wet brown substrate. I pushed a chisel in. Dark lumps of cheddar-ish matter fell away.

The Hurley 22 has a three quarter inch mahogany plank running from the front of the coachroof aft to the companion way. It's encased in a (typically) hefty amount of fibreglass. Six bolts run through it to hold the mast step in place.

Some past someone moved Kemara's mast forward a couple of inches, probably in attempt to balance the sails and reduce weather helm. So instead of six holes through the mahogany and glass, I had twelve. The aft two had been repurposed: the VHF antennae and navlight wiring now ran through them, providing an easy ingress for rain, spray and the green salty sea. The weakened wood has rotted; that terrible crack now joined the holes.

Gas lit solace

Fibreglass boats aren't supposed to rot, I cried at the startled quay. Then I did the only sensible thing: retreat to the Welcome. There, pint of Ferryman in hand, was the Captain, owner of the oldest wooden sailboat on the Exe. He was inured to rot. So I asked him what to do.

"You will never enjoy sailing a boat you do not trust."

OK, quite possibly true. But do I just epoxy the stainless over the crack and pretend I haven't probed it, smelt the cheese? I bought him one.

"There are people who sail boats. There are people who mend boats. People who mend boats don't do much sailing."

Ah. I should bodge it. Another pint.

"You will never enjoy sailing a boat you do not trust."

Shit.

Just how bad was that rot? Back onboard I drilled some exploratory holes, first aft along the mahogany plank, then into the stiffeners that crossed it. Except for the aftmost 60cm, the plank was rotten. And, when I drilled into the stiffener black water sprayed off the bit, blinding me.

That decided it. I couldn't live with a fetid aquarium in my coachroof. I fired up the angle grinder. And became one of those people who mend boats, not sail them.

How to get mellified

As you feel your final days hardening - as I do, every birthday - you must go on a diet. For months you eat nothing but honey. Sooner or later everything you exude - your shit, piss, sweat and spunk, your earwax! - will be entirely composed of honey. And then you will die.

Your few friends take your sticky corpse and stuff it in a barrel. This they top up with yet more honey. On the lid they chalk the date of your demise. And then you can be put to one side.


Your sweet cadaver will remain undisturbed for one hundred years.


On the centenary any surviving descendants of those few good friends - or, in their absence, a suspiciously plump curator - will crack the spigot at the base of your barrel. Out will ooze a darkened syrup: enough to fill one thousand, one hundred and eighty nine vials. Which they - or he - will sell on eBay for a whopping sum.

For Mellified Man, rubbed on the skin, can erase wrinkles' appearance. Put a towel over your head, breath the vapours of just a few drops dissolved in boiling water: it may well relieve the sense of disorientation. Imbibed in sufficient quantities mellified man can do more. Though not yet subject to double-blind trials, anecdotal evidence suggests it can turn your eyes blue.

Coming by Kemara

Kemara leaving Brixham, 2007

My love. Difficult as ever.

I was aboard her late July, 2009, when she became mine.

I'd just started two weeks off. I'd caught the train down to Plymouth, a cab to the Torpoint Ferry, stood up top as a bus and ten cars and I were dragged across the skinny, deep Tamar. The sea grape, the sky grapefruit, the warships gold over grey, halogen and tannoy; the broken pubs on the far shore crooning. Devonport docks on a midsummer night: I'd been down a few times already that spring, seen drab Babcock, police launches, dying barges and frigate hangers. But this!

Seaward of the ferry Kemara pitched in her lumpy moorings off the entrance to the ballast pond - a stone pen plunked in the Torpoint mud by a taller sailing age, now one of the Huggins brothers' lairs. Kemara is small, and that evening inconspicuous amongst the big sticks.

I thought I was borrowing her from my brother.

---

"Never own a boat", my yatch-broking father advised us, "just use other people's." My brother Roger and I inherited Petruska - a darling wooden Drascombe Lugger - when our father died, happily still capable of ignoring his own advice.

Rog and I trailed and sailed her, he more than I. On a voyage from Poole west to see the eclipse, sleeping under an old-sail tent, we finally figured out how to get along with each other. So long as we're aboard, he's Skipper and I'm Gilligan.

He bought Kemara while I was living in Tenerife. She's a Hurley 22, a few years younger than me. She's got the overbuilt strength of early fibreglass, a longish keel, a galley, a toilet, osmosis and real boat lines. I can't stand up down below, but whole families have crossed to the Caribbean in her sisters.

On the delivery trip from Plymouth to Poole with Roger's wife Audrey we discovered water pouring through the rusted-out rudder stock and bodged it up with gauze and Liquid Metal.

A couple of years later off Teignmouth we fried the VHS, listening intent as its rising scream cut out the instant lightening struck a mile to starboard. What electronic necessities survived that leg we drowned off the Start in the deep green overfalls. Kemara has a fine bow and low freeboard. In a short sea she digs into any challenger, leaving her cockpit awash and her insides salt soup.

We've hove to off Dartmouth, out of fuel and out of navigation lights, waiting for dawn and enough flood to get us past the castle. Audrey, Roger and I copper-botted her, and in the process discovered Kemara's rectum: where a prop shaft once ran she suffered the indignity of an disintegrating cork bung, capped by delaminating plywood. It's all glassed up now.

I sailed her solo first in 2007. In 2008 I got up the guts for a coastal jaunt, making it from the Exe to Fowey in two hops, and leaned against the wall at Steamer Quay in Totnes for a tide while I picked up old Canadian friend Graham from the train station. Does that sound boastful? I hope not. The entire trip I was anxious. Being by myself on a boat makes me anxious.

---

The Torpoint Ferry skinned its lips on the concrete slope. The passenger gate opened before they let the traffic off. Up ramp, bladderwrack, tarmac, duffle bag, into the little town and the Co-Op for food and wine. Downhill, said hello to the disreputable swans occupying the grassy knoll at the corner of Ferry St, along to the ballast pond. I dropped my bags in the entrance the the Mosquito Sailing Club and entered the bar in search of a water taxi driver.

Two pints of Proper Job later I was aboard. I heaved the outboard up the companionway and into it's well then checked the bilges - a packet of green bacon thoughtfully left by Audrey - put beans on the stove and unpacked my brand new chart of the Scilly Islands. And opened a bottle of wine.

Sleeping bag cosy in the cockpit, I gave Roger a call to let him know his boat was fine. "Happy birthday," he said. The day had passed two weeks before, but that was fine. "She's yours."

A late start

I sent my first email in 1986. That's a quarter of a century ago. I'd spent an haphazard gap year in the UK, the Bay of Biscay, Israel and Greece, then started university back in Canada.

Graham was the brightest guy in my high school. When I got back he was battering his way through the second year of a Physics BSc. One day he mentioned this email thing to me. We went down to computer labs: a basement bathed in terminal green. I figured out how to log in and he helped me gopher for a list of students in Haifa. I found the address of a girl I'd met in Tel Aviv the year before and sent her an email.

I never heard back.

Five years later the web was invented. I installed the Mosaic browser on my Mac Plus and gave it a go. What a thing. What a world-changing thing. For a while I became an evangelist, packing floppies full of command line tools round any friends and businesses with a 14-4 modem and hooking them in to the new religion.

Back then the last thing I wanted to do was work in IT. Computers were a tool. Fun, but a tool. Now I'm a programmer. Not so fun.

Over the years I've built static websites, dynamic web sites, porn sites, online reservation systems, online procurement systems, web servers, web services, web-enabled seagull droppings. I had a writing job editing the froth of the dot com bubble and lost it when the damn thing popped. I've lived off the avails of large German car manufacturers' pension funds, siphoned illicitly into hopeless startups on trashy Atlantic islands. I've flogged the Cloud.

But I've never felt the urge to put myself on the web.

So, I have to ask, why now?

It's Saturday. I've worked all day and half the night swearing at crappy SOAP implementations that just won't do what I want. Some German guy was expecting it yesterday. Monday I brief an Indian outsourcing team about a project I know nothing about. My boat down in Exeter is still a tool-strewn shell. I won't get to working on her for another two weeks. I blame it all on computers.

So, again, why now? Maybe because I think this blogging thing has had it's day: there are far too many of us already; no one cares. I'm a late adopter: I feel a dusty affection for the outmoded. And the format - rant, no response - suites me.

I'm not on Facebook. I reply with sweary admonishments if ever invited to be someone's 'friend'. I would hate myself if I ever tweeted. But somewhere under my fundamental reticence must lurk a lamb just wanting to bleat out at the world. And so, at this unseemly age, in this crabbed time, I will.

Small boats undergoing surgery. A few of the pubs I use, and the characters therein. A truthful record of every tooth I lose. My dreams of getting from Halifax to Vancouver via the North West Passage: solo, non-stop, and under sail. Explications of the cult of honey. And, if I can't help myself, grumblings about code.

It's all coming. I promise. Continuously and to everyone.

And if, in 1985, you sat aboard a 30-foot sailboat in Tel Aviv marina, flicking your gorgeous black locks at a broke, buck-toothed Canadian, REPLY TO YOUR DAMN EMAILS!