Rowing, the Great Equalizer

Just for kicks, my uncle and I decided to sign up for classes at a rowing club on Lake Union.  We’ve been doing it now for almost three weeks.  At this point in life, I consider myself a fairly old hand at rowing, since we did it every single day on the Camp Parsons waterfront in the 14-foot aluminum Smokercrafts.  As you can imagine, though, rowing an eight-man racing shell is really a very different sort of game.  No longer am I slogging around in a heavy, metal bathtub.  Suddenly I’m in a seat that slides, I’m inches above the water, I’m sweeping on one side only, I have to keep tempo with seven other people, and I’m going a whole hell of a lot faster.

I never before realized how much of a science there was to rowing.  There is a whole technique designed to maximize the use of your strongest muscle groups (the legs) and minimize the use of your weaker muscle groups (the arms and back), while at the same time minimizing air resistance on the blades, minimizing the braking effect that comes from sliding your body forward, and maximizing the efficiency of the blade’s contact with the water.  For each iteration of a stroke, I’d say that there are about two dozen individual things that you have to remind your body to do, and you have to do them all in the right sequence every time.

I love that sort of thing.  There’s something remarkably therapeutic and anesthetic about it all.  It forces you to stop thinking about all the crap that goes on in the world and focus instead on the timing of your breaths, the depth of your blade, the squareness of your shoulders, the rotations of your wrist, the straightness of your back, the balance of the boat, and all the while you're trying to swing your body in perfect rhythm with the body in front of you, as if all eight of you were tied together with a string.  After a while, it becomes almost a form of self-hypnotism, and you reach a very different level of consciousness.

But it wasn't that way at first.  On the way to the first day of class, I was hoping that the other guys in the class would turn out to be rickety, pot-bellied, middle-aged men, and that way I didn’t have to feel insecure about my own deplorable lack of physique.  To my dismay, however, my classmates turned out to be your regular statuesque, gym-going types.  Yes, there they were in their tight workout clothes, and then here was scrawny, gangling, pathetic me.  Damn.

Yesterday, though, we were out on Lake Union, and there was a guy who hadn’t been to class in a while, so the instructor had him sit out and ride in the escort boat with him in order to watch us.  Now by the end of that class, I was getting a little vexed with the instructor, because he was giving a lot of feedback to every other guy, but he didn’t say a single damned thing to me, neither positive nor negative.  Sometimes that means that the instructor has given up on you as a lost cause.  After class, I talked with the guy who had to sit out and ride with the instructor.  It turns out that the reason the instructor never said anything to me was that whenever it was my turn to row, he turned around to talk to the guy and was using me as an example to explain how to row correctly. 

I have never been good at a sport before.  During Aquatics Instructor training last summer, Gary told me that I have a kind of gift for picturing what my body is supposed to do, and then doing it.  I didn’t really believe that then.  At the risk of sounding vain, I’m starting to think it might be true.  I’ve kind of already committed this lifetime to sailing, and I’m a little too over-the-hill to switch passions now, but I think in my next life, I’m going to be a rower.

GREAT NAUTICAL READS: Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville

“Struck dead by an angel of God. Yet the angel must hang!”  Here we confront the central moral dilemma of this classic sea tale by Herman Melville.

Billy Budd, a newly conscripted sailor aboard H.M.S. Bellipotent, finds himself on the wrong side of Mr. Claggart, one of the ship’s petty officer, who secretly loathes Billy for his popularity among the crew, which he garners through his easy temperament and Grecian good looks.  When Claggart trumps up charges that Billy is inciting a mutiny among the crew, Billy accidentally strikes and kills him—a capital offense under the rigid Articles of War that govern the warship—and now the ship’s officers must decide what fate is to befall this angelic yet luckless seaman.

Like much of Melville’s later work, Billy Budd can be read on several different levels, and the discerning reader will be surprised at the amount of depth Melville has given to such a short narrative.

On the most basic level, it can be read as a simple historical sea story that explores the sociology of the crew aboard a Napoleonic-era man-of-war and the various classes of men that had to coexist within its cramped quarters.  After all, the interplay among the sailors, petty officers, and commissioned officers lies at the heart of the plot, and Melville aptly conjures up a sense of the tensions that must have existed among them during a period that was already intensely hierarchical.

The story can also be read as a juristic thought-experiment, and indeed it is much discussed in law schools as a case study that encapsulates a moral-legal dilemma in which a law seems to condemn a good and arguably innocent man.  The haphazard approach of the drumhead court that tries Billy offers food for thought regarding how courts come to understand the facts of a case and render their verdicts.

Few stories in Western literature can be said to be devoid of Biblical undercurrents, and here this story abounds with them.  Might this be a reworked version of the fall of Adam, with Claggart as the serpent and Captain Vere as God?  Or, more compellingly, might it be a story of the trial and death of Christ, with Claggart standing in for Judas and Captain Vere as Pontius Pilate? After all, doesn't Pontius Pilate ask that famous question, "What is truth?"  And here we have another case in which a hapless judge fails to see the truth and renders faulty justice.

Another angle that cannot be ignored is the latent homoerotic undertones in the work, which suggests that Melville was wrestling with his own conflicted sexuality.  Melville makes Billy’s “comeliness” a central element of the story and often paints him in an overtly feminine light, comparing him, to name just some examples, to a lily and a rose and the dames of the court.  It is even hinted in the book that Claggart may have loved the “Handsome Sailor” and despised himself for it, and resolved to destroy this affection by destroying the object of it.  This may likewise have been Melville’s way of vanquishing his own feelings for this Ganymede by restoring a repressive sense of law and order aboard his own ship.

Billy Budd remained incomplete at the time of Melville’s death and was only published when the manuscript fell into the hands of a literary scholar in the 1920s.  Its publication reignited interest in Melville, who went mostly unappreciated during his lifetime, and finally prompted his induction into the canon of American literature.

And how lucky we are that it was discovered.  Billy Budd, Sailor is a wonderfully complex nautical tale that is both a tribute to Melville's genius and an invaluable window into his psyche and ours.

GREAT NAUTICAL READS: The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers

This classic of maritime fiction is also considered to be among the first modern spy novels in English literature. Many of the tropes that we now associate with the spy genre—e.g., the clever hero, the suave villain, the gradual unfolding of clues, and the suspenseful reconnaissance missions under the nose of the enemy—all find their forebear in The Riddle of the Sands.

In 1902, when this book is set, Britain’s imperial power was at its height, but a growing German navy threatened to upend Britain's command of the seas. The story begins when the narrator, a young civil servant named Carruthers, receives an invitation from an old college acquaintance, Davies, to join him for some “yachting” and duck hunting on the German coast. Having no other vacation plans, Carruthers takes up the offer and sets off for the Baltic.

Expecting to spend the next few weeks in oceanic luxury, Carruthers is mortified to step off the train and find a “scrubby” little yawl. The Dulcibella, as it is called, is so small that he can’t even fit his trunk down the hatch to his cramped quarters. Needless to say, there are no servants, deckhands, or fellow passengers; Carruthers would be Davies's lone companion, even though he knows next to nothing about sailing.

In spite of everything, Carruthers resolves to enjoy himself, and he sets out with Davies through the fjords of Schleswig-Holstein. Davies, it turns out, is a good enough sailor, and Carruthers gradually learns to make himself useful aboard the yacht. He can’t help noticing, however, that Davies doesn't seem very interested in the ducks, which are few at this time of year anyway. He is also reticent to share much information about a recent excursion through the North Sea sandbanks, the description of which was torn out of his logbook and rewritten.

A chance encounter with another sailor reveals that Davies had run aground during a gale and would certainly have been killed if the other sailor hadn't towed him to safety. This finally forces Davies to tell Carruthers the real reason for asking him to come to Germany. A mysterious yachtsman named Dollmann had tried to murder Davies by deliberately guiding him into a wall of rocks during a storm. Davies suspects that Dollmann may also be an English traitor who is conspiring with the Germans on some secret naval project that has something to do with the sandbanks of the North Sea coast. Might Germany be preparing secret coastal defenses in case of war with England? Carruthers, who knows German, might be able to help Davies solve this mystery.

For the rest of the story, you will have to read the book for yourself. I assure you that it will be worth your while. The story compelling, and the writing itself is witty and robust. The novel is also “riddled” with nautical jargon and marvelously detailed descriptions of the rugged life aboard the Dulcibella. It invites the reader to participate in the harrowing trials of navigating the North Sea in tumultuous October weather.

For me, the novel’s real pièce de résistance is the character Davies, who is so much like many of the true old salts I’ve met.  By now you’ve guessed that he is no white-capped sailor in blue serge. Instead, he is short, disheveled, and strongly disdainful of the shore. His little boat is an extension of his being. It may look “scrubby” to the untrained eye, and so might he, but they are both perfectly well cut out for the task of coastal sailing. Davies's shrewd knowledge of the sea guides the pair through many a rough passage to allow Carruthers to investigate the mystery more closely.

In its day, The Riddle of the Sands was more than an adventurous and innovative sea story. It was also a highly topical and much discussed political work, for it threw light on England’s woeful lack of preparedness for an eventual war with Germany. Davies and Carruthers both admire Germany, which had only recently unified and was now industrializing and militarizing rapidly. Hidden in their admiration was a thinly veiled warning to British readers about their own country’s worrisome state of affairs.  This makes it a rather timely political novel, for in it we find a tense mood not unlike our own, as we contrast China’s inexorable economic and military progress to our own languid and dismal situation in the United States.

The Riddle of the Sands is a book that has it all: excellent writing, a pioneering plot line, vivid sailing descriptions, and a political significance that is relevant even today. All of these serve to make it a masterful and classic novel and a great nautical read.

N.B.: The life of author, Erskine Childers, is a story unto itself. He was a civil servant and Boer War veteran who had taken up sailing after a sciatic injury precluded other sporting options.  He cruised extensively throughout the German coastal islands that served as his novel’s backdrop and was a Royal Navy intelligence officer during the First World War. Afterward, he became an Irish nationalist and revolutionary leader and was arrested and executed by firing squad. He was the father of a future president of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.

Shipshape and Bristol Fashion

So rather than being a good student and work on my two big graduate school papers this weekend, I of course went to Camp Parsons. It was, however, entirely worthwhile, because we were able to put the finishing touches on a lot of projects that we've been working on throughout the whole off season.  It's looking like everything's going to be shipshape and Bristol fashion in time for the start of the summer season.

I'm not going to dwell too long on this, because I seriously do need to work on those papers, so I'll just share a short list and some pictures:

(1) The sailboats finally have names, thanks to the financial support of Mr Al Hutchison.

(2) The big float from Port Gamble finally has a deck.  Ken bought about ten sheets of 3/4" marine-grade plywood, and Andy spent the whole morning and afternoon cutting them and nailing them all down, with only three inches of plywood to spare. I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but it's pretty solid.

(3) The Ranger 20 finally got patched up. I've been waiting months for the weather to be dry and warm enough to apply the epoxy putty—it hit about 80 degrees this weekend and it was clear skies the whole time, so conditions were perfect. It's still going to take some sanding and painting, however, before we can put the Ranger 20 back in the water.

(4) We have brand new ten-foot reach poles.

So everything's going according to plan. I recall a certain Assistant Camp Director telling me that many people have promised him that all of his sailboats would be working, but none have ever actually done it. I should've put a wager on it. 

Still haven't finished the pier sign though...

Here's one last picture of a bald eagle on Telescope Point. By my estimate, the area around Camp Parsons is home to about ten bald eagles.  I've actually seen so many bald eagles this weekend and last weekend that I'm starting to feel somewhat blasé about them.

Okay, now off for some serious studying/paper-writing. No distractions for the next five days!

Finally! A New Mast for the Hobie 21

The long-awaited CompTip for the Hobie 21SE mast has finally arrived at Camp Parsons this weekend. This is a project that’s been in the works for the entire off-season, ever since the old CompTip (the 10-foot-long fiberglass upper portion of the mast) was damaged, along with one of the rudder blades, when the mast was unstepped at the end of last summer.

When it happened, I looked into purchasing a new rudder blade and CompTip from the Hobie dealership in Seattle, but the rudder blade was going for about $300, and a new CompTip would’ve cost us about $850. Fortunately it turned out that Brian Horch was able to fix the rudder blade himself (it looks brand new), but the CompTip was a completely different story.

Brian and I bounced around some solutions, but none of them were even close to adequate. The best one was that we could probably replace the entire mast with a Hobie 18 mast, which I could’ve gotten from the UW yacht club, but it would’ve been much shorter than a Hobie 21 mast, and we would’ve had to find a sail for it. Not only that, but the boat would never again sail as well as did before, which is a sad fate to befall a boat that is widely considered among Hobie enthusiasts to be the best model that Hobie ever produced.

For a few months, we looked on Craigslist for any local Hobie 21SE that was being parted out, but that search turned up nothing—which isn’t surprising, because Hobie only produced the 21SE for about five years before replacing it with the vastly inferior Hobie 21 Sport Cruiser model. Brian posted to Hobie’s online forum asking if anyone knew where to find one, and felicitously enough, a gentleman in Sarasota, Florida replied very quickly, saying that he had a 21SE CompTip that he was trying to get rid of.

He initially offered to give it to us, as long as we footed the shipping cost, but then he asked for $100, which was just fine. I sent him the check, but there was a slight delay, because he wasn’t sure how to box it (I suggested a local shipping store), and he wasn’t sure how he was going to transport it to be boxed. He eventually worked it out, however, and took it to be boxed at a store in the neighboring city of Bradenton.

I got to know the manager of that store fairly well over the next month or so. He offered to arrange the shipping for us and said that his store had a discount with FedEx. However, that “discount” still left the price at $550 to ship directly to camp, and not much less to ship to Seattle. There was no way I was going to convince anyone at camp to spend that much money, so I shop around and look into other freight services. I had heard UPS freight might be cheaper, but it turned out to cost even more. It was the same case for every other carrier too.

I was beginning to worry that the CompTip was going to sit in that Bradenton store forever. But then Mike came up with the idea of having Tom Rogers fly it back to Seattle on his plane—an elaborate solution, but a pretty cool one. The trick, however, was figuring out how to get the CompTip from Bradenton to Orlando Int’l Airport. The airport rules were such that the package couldn’t simply be shipped there—someone would have to drop it off at the airport shipping facility in person.

Tom had the idea of calling another pilot friend of his who lives in Tampa and commutes frequently between Tampa and MCO. Tampa, however, turned out to be a pretty long jaunt from Bradenton, let alone from Tampa to Bradenton to Orlando, and that friend had a busy flight schedule and didn’t have much time for this detour. Tom’s father-in-law also passed away during this time, so he was also taking some time off from the world in order to take care of his family.

After about a month, the store manager was starting to get impatient, so I got permission from Mike to have him FedEx the CompTip to Max Frisch, who’s now living in St. Cloud, and who of course said he would be happy to drop it off at MCO for us, even though he had just traded in his big old Suburban for a little new Kia. The freight shipment from Bradenton (western Florida) to Max’s mother’s office in Orlando (central Florida) surprisingly cost $219, despite the fact that it was business-to-business.

It seemed like everything was finally ready to go, but when Tom went to make the arrangements with Alaska Airlines, he discovered that there was this thing called the “known shipper” list, and he wasn’t on it. So things halted for about month while Tom underwent the ordeal to get approval to ship cargo. The process even included having a TSA guy come to Tom’s house to verify that he did in fact live at that address.

Finally, Max called me last Monday and said that he had dropped off the package at the airport that morning (he had to wake up at 5:00 a.m. to get it there) and that the plane was leaving for Seattle that day. Grand total for the shipment: $24.

Tom picked it up from SEA two days later, but he wasn’t sure if he would be able to come to the work party last weekend. Come Saturday, however, there he was, CompTip in hand. Brian and I took it out of its box, and lo and behold, it was the right part, it was in very good condition, and it fit into its slot on our mast perfectly.

So it's been a long, rough, and expensive journey, but one that was entirely worthwhile. This is the coolest and one of the most valuable boat in camp, and it will be a thrill, not just for me personally, but hopefully for a scads of scouts and staff members this summer and in the future as well, to have that boat back in action. Thank you to everyone who played a part in this adventure!

Cruising Right Along

We’ve made a good deal of progress with aquatics over the past week:

• The Ranger 20 is now tipped on its side and ready to have its keel worked on.  It has a number of abrasions, meaning it must have run aground repeatedly in its past life.  Those nicks and dings have to be patched before it goes back in the water, or the water might soak into the fiberglass and ruin the whole keel. Brian is coming up next weekend to do that. 
• All of our torn sails have been mended.
• We finished towing the 12’ by 32’ float to camp. We had taken it directly back to the marina at Pleasant Harbor when we towed it from Port Gamble two weekends ago, because it was already approaching nightfall by the time we were in view of camp.  Chris and Antone had the privilege of meeting Jim’s boater-friend Ralph, in all his salty splendor.  Ralph is the skipper of the trawler that we used to tow the float.
• Chris rigged up the Holder 12, which, thanks to a new drainscrew, is seaworthy once again, for the first time in several years. I got a chance to sail it in pretty good winds on Saturday evening. It's really a fantastic little boat.
• Jim managed to get two very nice-looking floats donated to us from the Point Whitney Shellfish Lab.
• I finished painting the Thunderbird design on the pier sign—now I just need to touch up the white areas around it. 
• Tom Rogers completed the two-week-long rigmarole to get on Alaska Air’s approved cargo-shipper list.  Once he's squared away, he'll be able to fly our new Hobie 21 CompTip from Florida.
• Lastly, I just got a message from Jim saying that Brian came up today to raise the 750-lb. ship’s anchor that he found on the east side of Jackson Cove and move it somewhere near the pier. That’s what’s going to be holding down our massive new float.

Things are just cruising right along.

Ken picking up the Ranger 20 and shifting it on its side to give us access to its damaged keel.

The Thunderbird design on the newly repainted pier sign.  Just some touch-up work is needed before it'll be good as new.

Weekend Boat Cruise

It feels like the weather gods have been really angry with us this "spring," but at long last, they finally relented and deigned to grant us one day of perfect weather in Brinnon.  On Saturday, the temperature was about 60F, and the sky was cloudless except for a few streaks of contrails.

I spent the sunny day in the grandest possible fashion. Jim had conscripted his boater-friend Ralph to chug us up to Port Gamble to pick up the 32' x 12' ex-State Park float that was donated to Camp Parsons. Ralph has spent more of his life at sea than on land, and the evidence of this lay both in his profanity-laden speech and in the amazingness of his 34-foot trawler. The boat was fitted out with four radar systems/depth sounders, two GPS systems, auto-steering, a full kitchen and barbecue—the whole works.

A view of Brinnon and a peek at the Olympics

So we shoved off together at about 9:15 a.m. to take advantage of the ebb tide. It was speedy and wonderful trip up Hood Canal on calm seas with a full panorama view of the Olympic Mountains, from the Brothers to Mt Townsend.  We passed by Bangor Naval Base without incident, and slipped under the east side of the Hood Canal Bridge.

The underside of the Hood Canal Bridge

At Port Gamble, we spotted our new float in a little cove lying alongside a dilapidated pier, and we crept in closer. Everything was going great until...the incident. I heard the thud, but I didn't think it was anything serious. Standing at the transom, I looked down into the water at our stern, and with my polarised sunglass lenses, I could see a submerged line making the shape of a V, coming to a point at about where our propeller should be. Then I saw the V begin to twist...

Our propeller had been fouled on a submerged line.  There was a lot of swearing at this point. As the youngest guy, it was my job to get into the inflatable dinghy and try to saw at the line with an harpoon-like contraption specially designed for this purpose.  We were so glad we had this thing, because it was going to spare us the nightmare of jumping in and cutting it by hand. We had just managed to cut through one part of the knot, however, when the multi-hundred-dollar knife snapped.

More swearing. At that point, it was either game over, or someone was jumping in. Just sticking my hand in the ice-cold water to handle the knife was enough for me to know that I didn't want to put my whole skinny arse in it.  Jim, however, was not as lily-livered as I was. Luckily, the skipper had a dry suit (but no hood) and a mask for Jim to use.

In about five dives, he was able to cut another major portion of the knot, breaking another expensive knife in the process, but because he couldn't get all the air out of the suit before he went in, he was very buoyant, so he was getting stuck upside-down on the underside of the boat. When he came out for a break, they decided to have me try to tow the boat closer to the shore so Jim could stand under the boat and cut. So I started rowing my little heart out, and lo and behold, that tugging action managed to free us.

Once free, we weren't about to start the motor again while still in the cove, so it was up to me to tow us toward the float, which we then married to our hull with our stern facing out toward deep water, and then Jim and I got on the float and moved us seaward by pushing on each rotten, barnacle-covered piling of the pier by hand. Once the stern was in deep water, we got back in the boat, turned the motor on, and set out for home with float in tow. The nightmare was over.

We pass slowly back under the Hood Canal Bridge, float in tow, after an aggravating two hours spent freeing our fouled propeller

We literally proceeded at walking pace back south toward Brinnon—a necessity, given the resistance from the huge 12-foot-wide float behind us. We were making an aggravating two knots, but the tide was shifting from an ebb to a flood tide, and it eventually began to carry us with it as it filled into Hood Canal.

It was getting so late, and we had already lost so much time, that we decided not to take it back around the Toandos Peninsula to Camp Parsons, but that we would instead go directly back to Pleasant Harbor in Brinnon and tow the float up to camp some other day. We finally made it back to port at about 8:00 p.m.—a full eleven hours after we had set out.

An enchanting view of Hood Canal as we headed back toward Brinnon

The trip ended up being quite a bit more than I had bargained for, but honestly, what better way could I have spent such a beautiful day? This float, by the way, doesn't look like much to the casual observer, because most of its decking is missing, but even my untrained eye could tell that it's very solidly built (the timbers are huge and in good condition), all of the flotation is there, and it's so big that four dinghies could be moored to it and 30 people could easily stand on it. Perfect for a sailing class, in my opinion. Ken's already committed to buying the timber for the decking, so this thing is getting fixed up for sure. What a great find, and what a great weekend it made.

Our huge new float - a thing of beauty, though maybe not at first glance