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!