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

Pier Sign Restoration Project

Made some progress with the pier sign this weekend. I think it's shaping up rather well:

New lettering on the pier sign

The next step will be painting the Thunderbird, which is probably going to take about as much time as everything else combined:

The design of the thunderbird laid out using graphite transfer paper

I wish I had taken a picture of what the sign looked like in the beginning.  The paint had taken quite a beating from the weather, to the point that it was almost unrecognizable.  We scraped off all the old paint and started anew.  I'm very pleased with the way its restoration is going so far. It will look brand new by the time summer rolls around.

Life Lessons from a Sea Snail

This week, I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite poems: "The Chambered Nautilus," by Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The background context of this poem is that the narrator has found the broken shell of a chambered nautilus that has washed up on shore. Through the cracks, he can see the individual, nacreous chambers that the creature had built within the spiral shell. He can see that, as the nautilus outgrew each chamber, he would build another that was even larger, sealing up the old cell forever. The narrator finds spiritual inspiration from the "dim dreaming life" of this shell's former tenant.

I love this poem, for one, because it's so wonderfully nautical, but also because it offers an uplifting message to those of us who are growing into our shells, so to speak. It should have especial poignancy and meaning for us staff members at Camp Parsons, because we are, after all, in the business of character development, and our job is to foster the kind of personal growth that this poem advocates.

This poem, by the way, also happens to have been written by the father of one of our most notable Supreme Court Justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

And now, without further ado...

THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

THIS is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main,—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings,
And coral reefs lie bare,
Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;
Wrecked is the ship of pearl!
And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed,—
Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil
That spread his lustrous coil;
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee,
Child of the wandering sea,
Cast from her lap, forlorn!
From thy dead lips a clearer note is born
Than ever Triton blew from wreathèd horn!
While on mine ear it rings,
Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings:—

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Oar Length Formula

In the process of gearing up for this summer, I've been trying to educate myself as much as possible about aquatics skills and aquatics equipment. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that rowing is probably the one with which I'm most unfamiliar. Today, however, I've managed to learn something new about rowing.

A review of our equipment inventory revealed that we currently have only eleven 7-ft oars, one (yes, one) 7.5-ft oar, and six 8-ft oars (though two of them look questionable, and I'd rather not use them). That means that we can put only seven fully-equipped row boats in the water, with only one spare 7-ft oar. Pretty scary.

So the camp needs more oars. The problem, however, is what length of oar we are supposed to get. No one seems to know what the proper oar length is for our rowboats.  I know from reading the Rowing Merit Badge pamphlet that oar length is a function of the distance between the oarlocks, but it doesn't get much more specific than that.

The best lead I got was from Jim, who said that oar length is governed by something the Red Cross used to call "Van Claussen's formula." So I tried to search for it on Google. No dice. But I did find that there was a 1956 canoeing book that was published by the Red Cross and written by W. Van B. Claussen, and I also found that the UW had it in its libraries. I picked it up this morning, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but information and diagrams about rowing and proper oar length.

Here are the results of my research:

So there it is, simple and elegant. There needs to be a leverage ratio of 7:18 between the inboard and outboard oar lengths. Where x is the distance between the oarlocks, the oar length should [(x/2) + 2] (25/7). The formula does ask for the oars to overlap by four inches in the middle, but it's easy to recalculate if one wants to hold the oars with the grips just touching one another, as Jim prefers.

I don't know off hand what the precise beam of our rowboats is.  My guess, however, is that it's about 60 inches, which means that we should be using oars that are around eight feet in length. This confirms my own suspicion that our 7-ft oars are too short. Granted, my rowing knowledge has been limited so far, but they nevertheless did feel pretty weak to me when I used them. Regardless, Gary Smith, our in-house rowing aficionado, will be going in a rowboat this weekend to test our oars and find out what works for him, and we'll see if this formula holds up empirically. So stay tuned for the results of this experiment (I know this just has you all on the edge of your seats)...

Sailing Full and By

It was an eventful weekend at Camp Parsons. Andy and I reprised our old roles and opened the rifle range to the Venture Scouts for five hours on Saturday. It was fun to relive old times like that.

We now have only nine weeks to get things ready for the summer – crunch time. My boat repair project has been sailing full and by for the last several months and is close to being finished, but other important things still need to be done as well. For one, we don’t have enough 10-foot reach poles. The three 8-hp motors still haven’t been serviced. And we still have no pier float ladder. Getting those things done this month will be critical. Then on top of that, our oars are in disrepair, and we have no fins for the Snorkeling BSA program.

The replacement rudder pin for one of the Zumas came in the mail today. That’s one more sailboat that can go back in the water now.

I also found some industrial rubber to adhere to the transom as an additional means of preventing the boom from bashing holes in it overnight. Andy Briggs also suggested using some shock cord to secure the boom, which is an easy and elegant fix as well. Regardless, the whole thing needs to be completely fool-proof, so that (to give a random hypothetical) some know-nothing first-year who works on the rifle range can’t sail it during the weekend and forget to secure the boom and cause the aquatics crew to have to haul the hole-ridden boat out of the water the next day…

One big and exciting change this summer is that we’re acquiring a 12’ x 32’ float. It will need some new decking, but otherwise it's in good shape and should be ready to go by June. Right now, I’m picturing the four FJs being moored to it, and teaching sailing merit badge classes on the float with the sailboats right there for the scouts to see as I’m explaining things. That would be perfect. Whatever happens to that float, though, the trick will be placing it in a position where it’s easily accessible, secure, out of the way, and picturesque – all at the same time. That’s a tall order, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.