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