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

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.

Spring Break at Camp Parsons

Andy and I just returned from Camp Parsons, where we've been for the last 10 days. Spring Break started off badly for me - I came down with a mild flu two days after arriving at camp, and to make matters worse, I also had to finish writing two short papers for one of my classes - the very last assignments I had to do before I could finally bid good riddance to Winter Quarter 2011 forever.

Once I submitted those hateful papers, and after I shook off the flu with a good night's rest, I felt my whole demeanor brighten, and the rest of my stay at camp was thoroughly rejuvenating and carefree.

Although I let Spring Break pass at a fairly relaxed pace, I nevertheless managed to cram it full of wonderful experiences and exploits. I took advantage of the sunny days by going canoeing and teaching myself the J-stroke, and I also badgered Jim into letting me go sailing on his Kent Ranger 26. When we finally did, he said it was the first time he had ever sailed it, and it was the first time he had sailed a boat that he owned since about 1995.

When Andy Hoyle, Anthony, and Daniel came, we had a rowing lesson in choppy water, which was good practice - I think I now have feathering down. I also did odd jobs like chopping wood (something I had never done before), digging up a tree stump, cleaning Folton Creek Cabin, and so on. And with Andy's help, I also made a lot of progress in restoring the old Camp Parsons sign that went at the end of the pier.

What I've really enjoyed about this week, and what I enjoy about being at camp in general, is that I learn something new practically every hour that I'm there. It's a way for me to compensate for the many skills I never had a chance to learn as a child. I spent most of my younger days with my head buried in books, so although I can easily spout out esoteric facts like what languages are spoken in Belgium, I never learned practical things like what the difference was between a table saw and a chop saw. I also never had a reason to swing a maul (why would you build a fire in Hawaii? It was 85 degrees outside), so I never even knew that such a thing existed. And rowing just isn't done in the Islands, so until this past summer, it was completely alien to me. So it seems like every time I do something at camp, I'm quite literally experiencing it for the first time in my life.

I've done about as much with the camp's sailboats as I can do without spending money, but alas, money must be spent, so now comes the delicate task of figuring out how much Ken will let me spend. So far I've ordered a new $40 rudder pin for one of the Zumas, and I ordered a new drain screw for the Holder 12. But I'm certain that we'll discover many more little expenditures that must be made once we test-rig all of the boats. With luck, the test-rigging will occur next month, and everything will be ordered in time for camp.

The biggest headache so far has been the new mast section for the Hobie 21. We bought one used for $100 in Sarasota, FL, and it's all boxed and ready to go - it's just a matter of shipping it to Seattle. FedEx wants $550, but that's just not going to happen. Things started moving forward when Mike enlisted Tom Roger's help.  As an Alaska Airlines pilot, he flies between Orlando and Seattle, so he can have it put on his plane for practically nothing. But the trick is getting it from Sarasota, where it was boxed three weeks ago, to the Alaska Airlines cargo center at Orlando Int'l Airport, where it must be delivered in person. Tom tried to enlist his pilot friend who lives in Tampa to pick it up, but this friend is flying all the time and hasn't had the chance to trek down to Bradenton. Plus, I found out today that Tom's father-in-law passed away recently, so he's understandably focusing exclusively on his family for the time being. All is not lost, however - I just got permission from Mike to have the mast shipped via FedEx to Max Frisch in St. Cloud, FL, and then have Max drive it to Orlando when Tom is ready for it. Once I get an address from Max, I'm going to make the shipping arrangements.

Al Hutchison has graciously offered to pay for the new vinyl names for the sailboats. They are drawn from the names of the olden-day ferries that used to convey scouts to Camp Parsons. They are as follows:

Ranger 20: TYEE SCOUT

Hobie 21: SKOOKUM

Hobie 16: TILIKUM

Harpoon: ROOSEVELT

C-15: ADVENTUROUS

Flying Junior: KINGSTON

Flying Junior: CARLISLE

Flying Junior: REEVES

Flying Junior: MANITOU

Lido 14: TWANA

Holder 12: ROLLING HITCH
Laser: HYAK

Zuma: FORTUNA

Zuma: CONCORDIA

Zuma: ATLANTA

CP Sailboat Repairs - Progress Report

It's certainly been a long time since I've updated this blog. Not that I regret it, necessarily - not having time to update a blog means that I've been busy doing other fun things. Classes have been eating up a lot more of my time this quarter, especially my diplomacy course.

The premise of this course, which is instructed by two Foreign Service Officers, is to simulate the Six Party Talks on the North Korean nuclear weapons program.  We are divided into six "delegations" that represent North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea, and we're trying to hash out an agreement to denuclearize North Korea. Needless to say, it's been great fun for me so far, but also massively time-consuming and energy-depleting. Plus I'm on the American delegation, so we have to work about three times as hard as everyone else.

But now on to camp matters. It was a great work party this weekend, stormy weather notwithstanding. Brian Horch, the camp's volunteer boat-fixer extraordinaire, had come in last weekend and finished the Coronado 15 glass job, so we moved it back to the boat house, and I put all the hardware back on it. The cockpit floor was soft and we worried that it might crack, so Brian and I had reinforced it by laying down another layer of fiberglass.  Except for some minor touch-up glass work that I could do myself, it's pretty much ready to go. Camp Parsons now has one more operational sailboat.

Meanwhile, Meredith began building a sailing equipment storage unit in the boat house. This has been on the aquatics to-do list for about a half dozen years, but now it's finally getting done. In just two hours, it went from being a twinkle in our eye to being an almost complete frame, and when Meredith finishes it off, it's going to have crown molding, a cool New England paint scheme (blue-grey with white trim) - the whole works. Most importantly, it's going to have padlocks, so that everything stays where it's supposed to be.

I feel like a lot of things that people have been wanting to do for years are finally getting done now. There's the sailing cabinet and the C-15 project. There's the Hobie 16, which has sat in pieces for years - it's being reassembled, and its frayed shroud is being replaced. One of the two boats that broke last year is patched and ready to go again, while the other one is just one step away from being ready to go. The sails are sorted and labeled, and the torn ones are being re-sewn. Ralph, the camp's volunteer metalworker, reconstructed the brass and aluminum fittings for the C-15. He also welded the gooseneck back onto the boom of the Ranger 20, the old boat that's been sitting on that rusty trailer for three years, and we've diagnosed the Ranger's keel problem as being a relatively simple fiberglass repair.  Even I could probably do it - the hard part is tilting the Ranger so that the keel is accessible. And Greg Hammond is sprucing up the four new FJ tillers that he made last summer.

Back in September, I was afraid it might be totally unrealistic to try to repair the entire sailboat fleet before next summer. Well, it's only been five months now, and I'm actually running out of things to do. I've started fixing broken canoes.

November Work Party

Yesterday morning, after sleeping for half a day, I woke up, looked at the clock, and realized I only had a few minutes to do my Arabic homework, shower, get ready, and run out the door in time to catch my 10:38 a.m. bus. I somehow managed to do all of that, and as I waited at the bus stop in the rain, it suddenly dawned on me: it was only 9:38 a.m.

In my defense, that sort of disorientation is to be expected after a weekend as wild as this past one.

I’m happy to report that we made huge progress on the sailing equipment. Over the past month, I got in contact with Brian Horch, a Port Orchard scout master who has worked extensively on the camp's boats in the past, and I cajoled him into coming up and doing some glasswork on the sailboats.

Thanks to Brian, both the Harpoon and Hobie's impact damages are patched over. The two boats somehow managed to crash into one another last summer—I may or may not have been skippering one of them at the time.  Brian also repaired the Hobie's rudder blade, which saved us a good $300, and he made some progress on the mast, grinding off the broken CompTip and chiseling out its remnants from the lower mast. Brian says the mast is semi-salvageable - it just might be a foot or two shorter.

Meanwhile, Steve Petek and I inventoried all of the sailing equipment, collected and properly stowed all of the sails, which had been stuffed away haphazardly at the end of the season.  We also determined which sails were for sailboats that we still owned, and we planned out a new shelving unit in the Boathouse for sails, rudders, centerboards, and other sailing equipment. Tom Rogers is already starting to work on it.

Not bad for just one weekend.  Much more remains to be done, but I'm impressed by the progress we've been able to make so far.  At this point, I'm confident that we can get at least 10 sailboats in the water for next summer.

Weekend Sailing Excursion

I had another great weekend, this time spending it on Puget Sound aboard the Perspicacious, a San Juan 28, owned and skippered by the WYC Head Fleet Captain, Goran. We were among a party that included all of the club's three keelboats, as well as Idefix, the sailboat that won the 2010 Transpac Race from San Francisco to Kauai. We all set out yesterday morning for Kingston, where we spent the night aboard the boats before sailing back today.

Goran's quite the sage when it comes to sailing, and we also had a few interesting discussions about foreign affairs, among other things. He took a walkabout after college and has been pretty much everywhere in the world, so for an International Studies student, he made for great company.

The first task was sailing through the locks between Salmon Bay and Puget Sound. We all got into the locks and tied off, and bantered with some of the many kids who were watching from the bulkhead above us.

We made our way across the sound in a relatively short amount of time, helped along by a southerly wind. Having practised what we needed to practise and now having little else to do, Goran and I mischievously decided to show off our sailing prowess by sailing circles around Deception, one of the club boats, which was going far slower than it could have been going. Deception's crew just gave us a dumbstruck look and weren't lured into any friendly competition.

As we got closer to Kingston, there was still lots of both daylight and wind, so we decided to head back out. Along the way, we came across Rascal, the club's Ranger 26, which was skippered by the class instructor. Goran decided he'd teach me some racing tactics, so we came right up to Rascal's windward in an attempt to steal its wind. Rascal's crew, however, caught on to our malevolent intents and, after trying some evasive tactic, managed to pull ahead of us. They tacked upwind, and we followed in pursuit. The strong winds heeled us over to the point that our gunwales dipped down into the water and Rascal's crew, we later heard, could see our keel. Rascal was a slightly faster boat, and as it got farther away, I worried that we might lose, but it turns out that Perspicacious can point higher into the wind than Rascal by about 10 degrees.  We also did a better job of trimming or sails. So after beating upwind for a while, we did finally pull ahead, and Rascal never caught up again. Goran and I both, however, wanted to render our victory beyond dispute, so we sailed farther and farther ahead until Rascal's crew could read our boat's name on our stern.

As sunset approached, we headed toward Kingston, hauled down our sails, and docked in the harbour. It felt odd being in Kingston without continuing on to camp (where Andy was actually holding down the fort for Ken this weekend). But I didn't spend too much time thinking about it, since there was was much merry-making at the picnic hut on our dock.

I think I was the last one to wake up this morning, and although we only had a half-hour before shoving off for home, I thought that that would be plenty of time to get one of Kingston's famous crepes. Silly me. The line was out the door, and ahead of me were all these Californian women with a gaggle of bratty kids. I gave up and left with a snarl.

The journey back was great. The sun was shining and the winds were fresh but manageable. We stopped at the Shilshole Marina to "pump out," meaning empty the holding tank for the head. It's one of the less glamorous aspects of sailing.

We passed again through the locks, and again some little kids were waving at us. I took in the pleasant scenery along the passageway from Puget Sound to Lake Washington, and just for the fun of it, Goran and I calculated our speed by dropping potato chips off the bow and timing how long it took to reach the stern. We had just enjoyed a few beverages, so it was tough trying to convert from feet-per-second (28 ft / 3.9 sec) to miles-per-hour and then to knots, but we did finally come up with 4.4 knots, which seemed like a plausible answer.

All in all, it was a fantastic little cruise. But now I think it's time for a shower and a long nap...

Addicted to Sailing

Sailing this past Sunday couldn't have been better. Most of the cloud cover from Saturday has gone away, but the fresh breeze hasn't, so it made for quite the agreeable sailing outing. Normally in Seattle, you either have clear skies or you have wind, but this weekend we managed to have both.  

Next weekend, the class is taking the three WYC keelboats and two other associate members' boats and sailing from the university to Kingston, where we'll spend the night before heading back. I'm looking forward to that, since I'll be crewing on Perspicacious, the Head Fleet Captain's San Juan 28.  He's a bubbly character from Australia and the club's doyen of sailboat repair, so this is bound to be both entertaining and educational for me.  Unfortunately for us, however, the sunny weather we're having now is predicted to disappear by the weekend, but we'll muddle through somehow.

I was appointed Performance Fleet Captain last Friday, meaning that I'll be in charge of maintaining the club's high-performance dinghies. The Double-Handed Fleet Captaincy was already spoken for, so the club's commodore dragooned me into being the filling the vacant Performance Fleet position. It's supposed to be a rather big deal, but I can't help but be wary of a job that absolutely no one else seems to want to do. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, as they say.

The Camp Parsons work party is still two weeks away, and I have lots of graduate school work to do between now and then, but I nevertheless catch myself constantly thinking about the Camp Parsons sailboats.  This is mostly because I keep learning so many new things about fiberglass and sail repair at the weekly WYC volunteer work parties, and I can't wait to apply them to the camp's boats, some of which are badly in need of a fixing up.

The sailing class I'm helping to teach is hobbling along. The weather has been uncooperative, to say the least.  It has vacillated between being either way too strong for beginners or completely nonexistent altogether.  Also, because sailing involves so much complex detail, I'm tempted to try to explain it all at once, but I try not to skirt the edge of pedantry. It's much better to let them figure out the nitty-gritty fine points on their own. It'll all come to them in the fulness of time, if they're committed enough to learn, but at this early stage, it's just too much to process. In any event, I hope this will all be good experience for teaching sailing at Camp Parsons.  A Boy Scout, I find, is smarter than your average college student, so it should be easier going.