Audrey Liza – Chapter 5
Man with a Plan
The Audrey Liza looked enormous, on the slip. Yet somehow forlorn, Jamie thought. Like a whale, dragged from the water and mounted on a steel cradle.
Her hull below the waterline had been pressure-washed and scraped to remove the worst of the marine growth – barnacles, mussels and weed – that had accumulated as the antifoul had slowly flaked away over the two years she’d sat on her mooring.
To Jamie’s eyes, it was looking pretty ordinary.
Above the waterline – the topsides, he was learning to call them – it was looking only slightly better. The light blue paint was coming off in great leaves.
No matter. It all had to come off anyway, back to bare wood.
He was sitting at a scarred and paint-ringed old kitchen table just inside the open double doors of the boat shed, opposite him Doc and his foreman, Stan. Mugs of tea and a packet of Tim Tams between them. Outside, a fine drizzle rained down on the Audrey Liza. Around them, the shed rang with the clatter of mallets on caulking irons, the swift and regular rip of a hand-plane and the rasp of sandpaper, punctuated by the occasional whine of a circular saw.
The usual sounds of a working day at the yard.
There were three boats in the shed already: a pretty thirty-four-foot carvel-planked motor cruiser, a twenty-six foot open couta boat and a brand-new clinker whaleboat for the Port Huon Rowing Club. When the Audrey Liza joined them, the shed would be at capacity.
The air was fragrant with Stockholm tar, linseed putty and wood shavings. Jamie could already distinguish the light, almost citrusy aroma of Huon pine from the toasty smell of eucalypt hardwoods.
Stan was a dour little man, with a bald, suntanned head that tended to lead where the body was to follow. He had a loping, seaman’s walk, rowing with his shoulders like a much bigger bloke.
He slurped tea from his chipped mug through pursed lips. Staring at the table top as if to decipher the secrets of its many markings.
A mouth like a chook’s clacker, Jamie thought.
‘You’ve already met Stan,’ said Doc over the din. ‘I’ve asked him to sit in, so he’s in the picture. Once we’ve agreed the outline of the project, he’ll draw up a schedule of work.’
Stan nodded, said nothing.
‘Right, down to business.’ Doc rubbed his big, blunt hands.
‘Your boat’s fundamentally sound, you’ll be pleased to hear. You could have done a hell of a lot worse. Some planks need refastening to the frames. A couple are split near the bow – probably an old collision with a dock – they need new sections scarfing in and maybe new ribs for strength. No biggie. The deck leaks like the proverbial sieve. That’s normal on an old working boat. It can be fixed.
‘We’ll probably put you on stripping back the deck, in fact. It’s hard graft but not skilled work, if you’ll forgive me for putting it that way.’
‘Sure. Fair enough.’ Jamie entertained no illusions about his lack of relevant skills.
‘The keel, stem and sternpost are all sound … There’s the famous wet well to deal with. So we’ve got a hundred and eighty two-and-a-half inch holes through the hull midships. From the waterline down to the first strake – that’s the third plank up from the keel.’
‘So do we have to replace all those planks? Scarf in new sections?’
‘No, we don’t. Waste of labour and good, sound timber. We’ll plug them with round Dutchmen, epoxied in, then sawn off and faired to make a seamless repair. So hand-planed, then get the old torture board onto it.’
‘Torture board?’
‘Long, flexible board covered in coarse-grit sandpaper. Yeah, you’ll find out why it’s called that, ’cause we’ll get you to do that, too. You can’t just power-sand a wooden hull. Not if you want her to look all schmick when you’ve finished. You’ll end up with bumps and hollows and she’ll look shite and she’ll sail worse.’
‘Fine.’
‘That’s not all we need to do about the wet well, though.’ Doc leaned in.
‘Ah?’
‘A traditional wet well like this is very gentle on the boat, see. Not like a steel live well at all. It’s not keeping the water in or out, remember – the sea just washes through as it pleases, with the motion of the vessel. So you don’t need a whole lot of structure there, just watertight bulkheads fore and aft.’
The shipwright sketched the outline of a hull on a sheet of paper with a pencil stub. Drew in the wet well.
‘When we fill those holes, we’re replacing water with air, so we’re changing the buoyancy. We can correct that with fixed ballast – and I’ll come to that.
‘But we’re also making the boat’s structure work a lot harder. She’s got to keep the water out now, and we want a nice new dry saloon and cosy berths where the crayfish lounge used to be. She’s going to need to be more rigid. We can achieve that with sister ribs and floors.’
Sister ribs? Floors?
Doc must have seen his incomprehension.
‘Sister ribs are ribs that double-up the existing ribs of the boat, strengthening and stiffening them. Floors are transverse lengths of timber, shaped to the cross section of the hull, that attach to the keel with bloody great bolts. Think of them a bit like floor joists, if it helps, but their primary function isn’t to hold floorboards up, it’s to keep the whole structure stiff, hold the hull planking out.
‘I suggest we don’t plan the saloon in detail until we’ve got the basic structural stuff done. Plug and fair the hull, strengthen it internally as I’ve described to you, and decide where we’re going to add ballast.
‘We can use lead ingots. Then we have to make sure they can’t shift – not even in a knockdown. If a boat’s ballast shifts in a heavy sea, basically she’s fucked, pardon my French.
‘Or we can add a steel shoe to the bottom of the keel. A heavy steel plate under the boat, running the length of the keel, bolted through. That means the centre of gravity is kept low, which is what we want for stability.’
Doc added the shoe to his sketch.
If you ever want to put a full sailing rig on her, you’d be glad you’d gone for the shoe. You’d then need to add more ballast internally, see, to counter the leverage aloft.’
‘Why would I ever want to do that?’
‘She was originally designed as a sailing ketch with an auxiliary motor. That’s why she’s got a slim little canoe stern. Cute as a button. The mizzen mast, not as tall as the main mast, would have been forward of the rudder, with its boom over the wheelhouse.’
Doc sketched in the two masts.
‘With that in mind, she’s a bit over-engined with that Gardner, to be honest, and just a tad by the stern, but, well, it’s a lovely old thing, that diesel, a work of art as well as engineering, and you’re not a sailor, not yet anyway. You’ve got enough to worry about. So I suggest you live with the Gardner, at least for a few years, while you get to know the boat.
‘The mast you’ve got is fine for a steadying headsail. That’s nice to have, when the wind’s anywhere aft of the beam. Saves a bit of fuel and is easy to handle, specially with a furler.
‘As far as the saloon and berths are concerned, let’s just say we’ll make sure you don’t keep bumping your head, all right? You’re six two, in old money? We’ll design a raised roof for the saloon, with a nice vaulted ceiling and opening portlights down both sides to give you lots of light and ventilation. Deck vents for the forepeak and the pilot berth too.
‘We’ll also look at the anchor winch and chain locker and check that’s all adequate for your needs. I suspect you’re going to want bigger ground tackle and more chain if you’re going to be lying at anchor much – and you’ll be doing that, if you’re serious about the round-Australia project. Bigger fuel, drinking water and black water tanks as well.
‘For the galley, a woodburner always looks the part on a heritage boat, but gas is more practical for cooking, and a diesel hydronic air-and-water-heater will save you running the Gardner all the time. I’ll leave that up to you. Ditto batteries, refrigeration and all things electrical – that’s your department. I can advise you on instruments. What’s on board is basic at the moment, obsolete and geared to fishing, not leisure sailing.
‘How’s that sound? Any questions?’
‘Is there a ballpark figure I should be bearing in mind?’
‘It depends how much you’re willing to do yourself, Jamie.’
‘As much as I can. Time and skill level permitting.’
‘If I were you, then, I’d be aiming to get the hull repairs and making good – the fairing, caulking, paying, priming and painting – done over this winter, in our shed. That’s an ambitious programme for, oh, let’s say, six months’ work, if you go at it full time. Obviously we’ll need to charge you rent. Also labour and materials as required. Stan’ll keep track of that and let you know where you stand, month by month.
‘Once she’s back in the water, and has taken up – the timbers have swelled to the point where she’s stopped leaking – you can work alongside the wharf and it’ll be a lot cheaper. We’d get the deck done over summer. We’ll train you up to do the deck caulking and stopping yourself. Proper spun cotton caulking and linseed oil putty, none of your Sikaflex bollocks on that beautiful Huon pine. Or at any rate, it will be beautiful when you’ve stripped all that non-skid deck paint off, ha!
‘We’ll sort something out for wharfage. Mates’ rates. Next winter, we’ll tackle the new saloon, the furniture, the fitting out.
‘A ballpark figure you wanted, though …’
Doc puffed out his cheeks in the manner common to contractors everywhere. He might as well have said, ‘It’s gonna cost yer …’
‘You’re not going to get any change out of a hundred and fifty grand. Let’s put it that way. That’s to a very basic live-aboard standard, no fancy cabinetry or extras. And no nasty surprises. ’bout right, Stan?’
Stan grimaced, waggled his head. Didn’t break his silence.
‘If we were doing all the work to your spec, at least two hundred. So you’re only going to save about fifty by getting hands-on. It might make better sense financially for you to go back to the mines and leave it to us.
‘But from what you’ve told me, I understand that doing the work yourself, as far as you can, is the point, yeah?’
‘Yeah. Very much so.’
Jamie walked away from that conversation feeling slightly sick. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars, at least, and eighteen months’ work. Holy shit, what had he taken on here?
Well, you’re committed now, mate.
Coming up:
This Friday in The Last Orchard: Leigh makes some exciting discoveries in the orchard, after a run-in with a local apex predator. (Paid subscription.)
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Doc decides Jamie needs a lesson or two about boat handling.