Hellfire in blue and gold

Once upon a time I wrote a book that featured a lean and rakish ship called the Hellfire. She was based on the nineteenth-century pilot schooners featured in Chapelle's The Search for Speed Under Sail and, more recently, embodied by the Pride of Baltimore II, Lynx, and others.

Just look at that photo of Lynx in a thundering reach on their homepage!

I put a ship called Hellfire in the book because I always wanted to name a ship that, I've always loved the look of these old schooners, and because I needed a dangerous and unmistakable vessel.

So when I got a chance to join Steve Earley for a sail this past weekend, I bundled up against the cold. Just after dawn we tacked up and down along the Chestertown waterfront, where the tall ships had gathered for Downrigging Weekend.


Steve's boat Spartina is the same Pathfinder design I'm building, and it's always inspiring to see that familiar shape in a completed boat. And even better to sail in a fresh breeze! OK, we had to tuck in a reef. And by "we" I mean "Steve."

As a clear sunrise warmed the frosty air, we slipped past Pride II and I shot a stream of photos.

Inspiration for the Hellfire:

Now I have a fly swatter. Ho ho ho.

The trouble with hitting, or trying to hit, cave crickets with scraps of wood is that I get worried about banging up the boat. And if I end up damaging the boat while attempting to dissuade cave crickets from whatever it is that they do, my rage will be Biblical.

So I picked up a fly swatter. Fly swatters are kind of hard to find. Maybe the Internet has made them obsolete; for all I know there's some kind of e-swatter everybody's downloaded. But I was able to find an archaic "real" fly swatter.

I'm not sure it will be able to withstand the crispy, horned carapace of a cave cricket, but I'm willing to give it a try.

Except that, now that I've hung the fly swatter in the shop, no cave crickets have shown themselves. Which means that either I've found the right deterrent ... or they are planning something.

Meanwhile, Steve and Bruce, in Steve's boat (the same Pathfinder design I'm building), are rocketing across the Bay in Small Craft Warning conditions. Like I said to a friend once: Small Craft Warnings just mean there's finally going to be some good wind!

I forgot that it didn't happen

I've been carefully following the recent sailing trip of Steve and Bruce in Steve's Pathfinder, the same boat design I'm building. Reading about their adventures and daydreaming continues to be both a distraction and an inspiration.

Today they updated the blog with Day 2 of their eight-day trip through the marshes and bays of coastal North Carolina. (Dang it Steve! I will be there someday too, if I ever get this boat finished!). In one of the pictures a very sleepy Bruce is taking it easy as the boat thrashes to windward, and I thought: that looks familiar. Have I done that? Has someone napped while I sailed?

Then I remembered: it didn't actually happen, it was a scene in my first book: after working feverishly to rebuild an old sailboat in time for an all-day race, Grandpa and Alton are finally on the water. Grandpa dozes off, leaving Alton in charge.

I must have imagined that scene -- really seen it, tasted the air and heard the slap of waves -- so intently that it's nearly as strong as a real memory. Strange. And a little alarming. Maybe when I was young I didn't drop a torpedo into a two-meter hole on the Death Star, after all.

Completed boat

No, not MY completed boat, but Steve Earley's. I met Steve at the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival this weekend and finally got to see a finished, working version of the boat I'm building. Very exciting!

Steve did a great job building Spartina, and, after cruising over 500 sea miles in her, knows more than a little about what works and what doesn't. He even took my mom and me out for a gentle sail in light airs while I hopped around probing into hatches and asking about bungs and plywood joints and mast step drains.

Without further ado, here is my inspiration, the completed boat:


You have to kind of slide into it, and it tends to sail fastest backwards, but....

No, only joking. Here is Steve's boat:

Note spooky disembodied hands; I wasn't taking pictures of people, but rather hatch, sheeting, and coaming details. And here's mine from the same angle:


As you can see I have a little ways to go in the waterproofing department.

Two more: Spartina from above (beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, love the grey) and my frames from above, similar angle.

Steve, thanks for answering my endless questions and taking us out for a sail. Someday I'll return the favor!

Small Craft Warning

Got a call this morning from Steve Earley -- he and his friend Bruce made it to Rock Hall, MD after several days of small craft warnings coming up the Chesapeake Bay.

I sit here in my office and watch the trees fluttering and swaying under a bright blue sky.

Steve's sailing a Pathfinder, the same boat I'm building, so when I head up to the Mid Atlantic Small Craft Festival this weekend, I plan on taking loads of pictures and -- even better -- seeing a completed boat! A far cry from the dusty skeleton in my garage, but still very, very inspiring. Can't wait.

I've sailed in small craft warning conditions before -- that's the meteorologist's code for "awesome sailing conditions" and the boat pounds through glittering waves, swaying and tilting. You're going so fast that when you trail your hand in the water it feels hard, like you're slapping a wall. Everything is wet and breathless and happening very fast.

Wait a second, that sounds like ... something else.

I'm beginning to think that my other hobbies and loves are simply lesser replacements for sailing fast in a good boat. Running brings me into the outdoors; biking adds the element of speed. When a thunderstorm cracks open the sky and I stare at the churning clouds, it's sailing I'm thinking of. When I visit the beach I stare out to sea, thinking, watching the waves.

And days like this I sit inside, gnashing my teeth and savoring the strange little boatbuilding cuts on my fingertips. (Did you know the back of a saw can cut you?)

Flotsam

Unrelated detritus:

1) Horse puppets!!! The fact that a generation ago we had Cookie Monster and now we have war horses is an interesting comment on the evolution "debate," since humans created both puppets.* In any case, this is unbelievable ... precisely because it's SO believable. Did I just blow your mind? Yeah, mine too:

NY Times article
YouTube video
YouTube video

2) Today I heard the following story. During a near-shore sailing race off the coast of France last year, a squall thundered in, strong enough that blowing sand stung like fire and drove people off the beach. At sea, the race continued, as races tend to do. The boats were Dragon class sloops, long, narrow, full-keeled needles that go fast and hard.

One was running downwind when it was overtaken by a breaking wave. The tumbling water knocked the helmsman aside, filled the boat with water, and the momentum of wave plus gale-force wind on the towering sail slewed the boat sideways and over in a fatal maneuver called broaching.

It sank. Fast. Everyone got off except a crewman whose leg was tangled in a long line attached to the sail. Down the boat went. Down he went. His water-activated life vest inflated as he dropped into the darkness, tethered to the plunging boat.

He struggled. Got free. And exploded to the surface "like an Exocet missile," said my storyteller.

This is one reason I always carry a knife when sailing!

3) Why do the professions that provide the least to society pay the highest salaries? And why do those that do the most good pay the least? Okay, there may be exceptions but this seems to be the general rule. People in expensive and flashy clothes arguing and caring and worrying over all the wrong things. Or maybe I'm just imagining things, filled with vexed thoughts as I watch a beautiful day through a window.



*The quotes are the limit of my editorializing on this.

It IS Possible

Steve Earley, who built a boat to the same design I am building (a John Welsford Pathfinder), recently returned from a week-long cruise with his friend Bruce.

Now, I visit their blog regularly because it's great to see pictures of a completed boat. And a little surreal, since mine is only half-framed in the garage and looks like a dinosaur skeleton. But now that Steve and Bruce are posting photos and commentary from their cruise along the shallow bays of coastal North Carolina, I am more inspired than ever!

This is exactly what these boats were designed for. Click on over and you may be as entranced as I am. Great stuff, guys.

There's a lot of building left to do but Steve's photos make it all seem possible.

But wait, there's more! Perry Burton is nearly done with his Pathfinder after less than a year. I am embarrassed to say how long I've been building mine. He has great photos and building tips, as well as helpful how-he-did-it details that I've gratefully used in some of the trickier moments of boatbuilding. I wish I knew more about sailing around Newfoundland, but other than seagulls and Great Big Sea, I am sadly ignorant.

Presumably one solution, once I've done with my boat, is to trailer it up there and find out for myself. Or sail it.

Doubling

My work-in-progress passed 80,000 words this morning. What in the world? It was just last month that it was half that length. I'm not so much telling the story as writing down the story that's telling itself. And I tend to write more than is necessary ... so that, six weeks after I seal the first draft into a box (cord, duct tape, closet shelf) I can descend on it with a long thin boning knife and remove the fat.

Flense.

So it has doubled in size in not quite two months. But it also feels like it's rounded a turn, and that even if the end is not quite in sight, I can at least envision the last push. The last third.

When captains brought their ships around a long point of land, hooking like a claw into the grey seas of high latitudes ("South of 40 there is no law; south of 50 there is no God") they referred to a successful rounding of the corner as "doubling." As in:

19th Oct 1796
Sighted Cabo de Hornos six bells forenoon watch. Wind fair SE b E backing to ENE by two bells. Offwatch set to work chipping ice from rigging and deck. Stood off tho' kept land within sight. Doubled Cabo de Hornos by five bells graveyard watch; turned north. Extra ration grog for all hands. Sighted ice mountain three bells, steered due S, wind increasing with nightfall.

When you doubled a point of land, you crossed the "horizontal" (on a map) latitude line that marked the beginning of the peninsula. And I have finally doubled my story, in both senses.

This is more like it

Here comes Hanna. The forecast of gusty wind and rain bodes for an interesting Saturday morning run. But then I get to say I ran in a hurricane. I know it won't be a hurricane anymore but everyone knows I tell lies anyway. Wait until I describe the possums and crow's wings and oil drums tumbling past me.

But this is why I labor in the garage with iron-hard locust lumber. Because it's thick and dense and will not rot, and if I put in the hours and sweat to make that wood part of my boat, the boat will, maybe, better withstand weather like this.

And this is more like it. 35 gusting to 40! Apart from the high likelihood of catastrophic structural failure on my poor old boat (not the one under construction), that is the sort of weather I should be sailing in. Or very much the sort I should not be sailing in, if you listen to my mother.

 ANZ531>533-052230-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM POOLES ISLAND TO SANDY POINT-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM SANDY POINT TO NORTH BEACH-
CHESAPEAKE BAY FROM NORTH BEACH TO DRUM POINT-
 626 AM EDT FRI SEP 5 2008

 TROPICAL STORM WATCH IN EFFECT

 TONIGHT
E WINDS 20 TO 25 KT. GUSTS UP TO 35 KT AFTER MIDNIGHT.
WAVES 2 TO 3 FT. SHOWERS.

 SAT
E WINDS 30 TO 35 KT WITH GUSTS UP TO 45 KT. WAVES 2 TO 4 FT.
SHOWERS.

This is why thoughtfulness and care in building -- writing too, for that matter -- is so critical: the world is dangerous. Bad things happen. Has anyone ever been lulled into a real sense of complacency? No! It's always a false sense of complacency.

Let's build our boats strong for they may be in danger someday. Our stories may be read in a world very different from the one we live in. Imagine the books published on December 6, 1941. Or September 10, 2001.

Write strong!

Wind Freshens

Well, after five days away from the blog and home, I'm back. The best part is that I accidentally didn't think much about my manuscript at all during those five days! I don't think that's happened since I started writing it!

I did many great things on my vacation, not the least of which involved sailing a screaming reach twelve miles down the Chester River as dusk fell and the wind rose. I had no idea my little boat could go that fast, and I'm now reconsidering plans to give it away to make room for the new boat. Can't I keep them both in the garage? Where would the plywood go? Where would my tools go? Where would I go? Etc.

I'm serious, this was like doing a wheelie on a bike. Downhill.

At any rate, this accidental holiday from the book means that I've started to forget all the little dips and bumps and can think more broadly about the overall shape of the story. It's not there yet, but it's close. So I've found, to my delight, that the freshening wind provided an unforgettable couple hours of sailing and the distance I've so badly needed to look at the book critically.

And now, even as I wonder if I can take a few more days away from it, I remember the sound of the boat running up onto the sand in the twilight rain, how warm the water was, the shaky-leg feeling when we walked up the hill to the yacht club bar. Part of me is still there.

Conditions improve on the Chesapeake

From this morning's NOAA forecast:

 SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 4 PM EDT THIS
 AFTERNOON THROUGH LATE TONIGHT

 THIS AFTERNOON
S WINDS 15 KT. WAVES 1 TO 2 FT.

 TONIGHT
S WINDS 15 TO 20 KT...BECOMING SW 10 TO 15 KT LATE.
WAVES 2 TO 3 FT...SUBSIDING TO 1 TO 2 FT.

I do TOO have a day job!

Few phrases make my heart jump more than "Small craft warning." Or "advisory," in this case. They save the "warning" for even stronger conditions.

I have on my desk at work a stainless steel bolt with a pronounced arc to it. This 1/4-inch thick piece was stressed and bent solely from the pressure of the wind on the sail of my small boat. Partly that means that even a small boat in a fresh breeze can generate surprisingly high stresses.

But it also reminds me of the real world outside the office, where wind bends steel and bats flutter and herons stalk the shallows. Is it any wonder my characters often end up in boats? That's me bleeding through into the story.

S Winds 10 to 15 Kt. Waves 2 Ft.

That's from the NOAA coastal marine forecast for the lower Chesapeake Bay. 10-15 knots is a handful of wind, enough to feel and hear on your ears. It's about what you'd feel while riding a bike; enough to swirl leaves along the road; enough to press behind a small boat with sails outstretched like the broad wings of a gull, water foaming alongside all the way north.

"There come thoughts now..." This imaginary voyage isn't that of fog and icebergs and the "whale's path" I mentioned earlier. No, it's a Chesapeake Bay trip in a smaller, one nimble enough to shove off a sandbar when you run aground, but large enough to carry a stove and some supplies and a sleeping bag.

Luckily, I'm building that very boat! (Pictures here; scroll down.) It's a daily ritual of cutting plywood, calculating numbers, the acrid stickiness of epoxy, the scrape of a plane. But someday it will be a boat and I will pray for days like this with good strong winds out of the south.

The idea, you see, is to circumnavigate the Eastern Shore of the Bay, encompassing portions of Maryland, Virginia, and Delaware. Why not? There is no better way to see that low watery landscape than from a small boat, and wind is free and inherently better than puttering along with an outboard. There are miles and miles of marshy inlets to explore, blue crabs and herons and the sweet smell of mud, and miles and miles of open Bay to sail across.

Starting at charts is what sailors do in the off-season. Or when their boat is still just a pile of parts in the garage that hasn't been assembled yet.

Though I have to admit: as idyllic as S winds 10-15 sound, this sets me afire:

WITHIN 180 NM NE OF A LINE FROM 55N59W TO 50N51W TO 44N44W
WINDS 25 TO 35 KT. SEAS TO 12 FT.

Now that is a handful of wind. And it gets much stronger than that.

There come thoughts now

...knocking at my heart
Of the high waves, clashing salt crests I am to cross.
Mind-lust maddens, moves as I set out, soul to seek a far folk-land flood-beyond.

This is a fragment of an anonymous Old English elegy called The Seafarer, transcribed from my imperfect memory. This is more, much more: showers of frost and biting cold, and the far scream of a sea eagle echoing on dark wave-washed cliffs, the groan and rattle of the sea up the cold shingle.

It is possible to sail from Toronto to the Chesapeake Bay not via the inland canal route, but thus: through the Great Lakes, up the Saint Lawrence Seaway past Ottawa and Quebec City, out to where it widens and the whales come in from the North Atlantic, around into Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island -- Anne of Green Gables country -- around south past Halifax, across the Bay of Fundy with its twenty-foot tides, into the States at Maine, down through the islands and reaches that pepper the New England coast like edge of a curled maple leaf, Bristol, Martha's Vineyard and the boatwrights at Gannnon and Benjamin, Long Island, New Jersey, Delaware Bay, and into the warm soft Chesapeake, quiet with wading herons and the far cry of geese. In my mind it is fall.

That northern route, full of fog and whales and icebergs -- icebergs! -- exerts a powerful polar pull on me. Yes, it's possible. Yes, it's dangerous. But with the right boat...

There come thoughts now, knocking at my heart....

Rain good

I like rain. I don't like being in it, but watching through a window from inside feels like wearing a wool sweater or dozing under a down comforter. It's a good, build-a-fire, flop-in-an-armchair, read-a-book feeling. Snow is even better for the same reason, but this being Virginia, it's wisest to pin my coziness hopes to rain.

I'd like to live in a house of wood and stained glass and bookshelves. A church of stories. It would have sunny spots for the cats (they need little else) and walls and walls of shelves for books and other items (pictures, skeins of wool, little glass bowls of foreign money, dust, errant bookmarks, empty coffee mugs, decorative sticks, small books that don't fit on the shelf with the others and therefore stand in front of the main group).

If it's a strong storm, that's even better. Let's have some trees swaying, trash cans rolling through the street, leaves plastered to the windows. This "sailor's simpleminded delight in bad weather" may be a weakness, as both my books feature violent storms.

Sailing in a storm may be the only way to get some wind. Small Craft Warnings are when the excitement really begins; otherwise you drift around and swear. And huddling under a scrap of nylon on a backpacking trip while the rain beats down is also pretty hard to beat. But walking in it, running in it, carrying groceries through it? No thanks.