Kai O'hana
03/15/07 - Settee
-A word from Captain Bach
While the crew continued to work on sealing the decks and to make the interior more habitable (we still had a considerable amount of “roof leaks”, which made living in an unfinished boat while negotiating numerous partially filled pails, pans and pots of water untenable to say the least), I focused on designing and building the area on the boat that would be used more than any other (aside from the galley), that is the “outdoor” living area or the aft settee.
The aft deck in the boat’s previous life, in my opinion, was a complete waste of space. This was as a result of the previous rig I’m sure; that being of a modern staysail schooner. With a schooner rig as opposed to say a ketch rig, the massive mainsail and boom have to be operated from a relatively clear aft deck. As a result, all that was back there was the helm with no chair or bench, an inadequate wind/spray screen, a large teak double hatch over the captain’s cabin (that I would have loved to salvage, but couldn’t), a rusted steel yoke to shoulder the mainsail boom, a couple of winches, and a teak perimeter rail whose height came only to an adult’s knees – a feature that terrified all the mothers in our world.
I sat in a stool over the deck and designed some seating options using the following parameters: first and foremost, whatever I built had to look like it had always been there, and it had to be really strong, yet light as possible; there still had to be some kind of hatch in the captain’s cabin; there had to be a pilot’s chair at the helm for 2; the settee had to seat 8 comfortably (10 in a pinch); the roof had to be solid (to be able to walk on to manage the mizzen sail); there had to be wiring for 12 volt and 110 volt for overhead lighting, speakers and future solar panels; there had to be plumbing for rain water collection and a solar water collector; and the whole thing had to be surrounded by a waist-high rail (to appease all the moms out there) – no small order to be sure.
Once I had the basic design in mind, I drew it on the newly-fiber glassed and primed deck using different colored permanent markers for each component: the roof section over helm, the aft roof section over the settee itself, the hatch, the pilot’s chair location, the actual settee seats or benches, and the table. To the layperson (pretty much everyone who looked at the overlapping colored lines), four different projects on three different planes all drawn on the deck was far from comprehensible, but eventually the crew got it as the parts slowly went together.
The first step in the construction sequence was to work from the top down starting with the portion of the roof over the helm. Because I wanted to retain the same curved shape and slope of the deck, I laid up the beams by laminating strips of teak directly on it (actually over clear sheets of plastic so I wouldn’t accidentally glue the beams to the deck) that when pulled off the deck would actually retain the curved shape of the deck that resembled those beams in the salon roof. Once the beams of the roof that would be over the helm were glued and dry, I screwed them to the deck and attached a beam down the center of the roof (as a spine) and laminated two layers of teak to the outside perimeter to hold it all together.
After the assembled helm section of the roof dried, I removed it from the deck and then assembled the frame for the aft portion of the deck in the same manner as I did the roof over the helm. Once both were dry, I put them together in the yard on four sawhorses and sheeted the whole thing with two layers of 9mm marine plywood.
I recruited Preston and Alexis to finish the roof, while I started on the seats according to, yet again, another color-coded drawing on the deck. Daniel, on the other hand, welded and polished the two table stands and the six supports for the roof (each, as mentioned before, having a purpose other than the obvious – the two forward pipes for rain water collection for both the settee and the salon roof; the two middle pipes to get electric to the roof; and the two aft pipes to take cold water to, and hot water from, the solar water collector on the roof that Daniel also fabricated.)
Building the seats or benches was an easy affair; the only challenging part was bending the marine ply on the frames, and trying to ignore the Seawall Superintendents asking, “Why are you using plywood when your boat’s built of teak?” They’re patience in watching a project through to completion only exceeded their brilliance in such matters. Dividing the inside of the seats into compartments was also a bit of a challenge as there is not a 90-degree angle or a flat surface in a boat, and as a result it takes twice as long as the same project would in a conventional home, but with Sara’s help, it went relatively quickly and without a glitch.
Once the basic frame was in place, I added the very expensive teak ply and border on the outside of the benches to give it the appearance of being on the boat forever (except that the new South American teak looked a bit different than the 50-year-old African teak). Not only did this satisfy the Seawall Superintendents, it set the crew up to finish the hardest part -- the finishing. I was lucky that I could rely on them to spend countless hours making everything I put together look beautiful, and they didn’t let me down on this project, as with the roof.
As good as they were, however, they would occasionally surprise me with total lapses of cognizant brain function; they are teenagers by the way. As an example, our good friend and mechanic/electric guru, Lindsay, brought along a captain’s chair he had removed from a Lagoon 57 catamaran. I was so excited, I jumped into his small dinghy and proceeded to heft it onto the seawall. He laughed at me and said, “You’re going to need some help with that one, it’s really heavy.” I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding. It doesn’t look that heavy.”
So while Lindsay let go of the seawall to swing his body in the opposite direction to say hello to Lauren, I jerked it out of the dinghy and up toward the same wall he’d just released. Instantly realizing I should have listened to him (I didn’t know at the time the bottom of the chair was ¼ inch thick rusting plate steel – the reason the previous owners had replaced it), it was too late, I had to throw it on the wall or contract a double hernia trying to gently rest it back in his dinghy without damaging either. By the time the chair hit the wall (half of it on the wall and the other half teetering over the edge), my crew started arriving (I thought to help), yet they were apparently too busy having a gay old time chatting Lindsay up as the dinghy was briskly making its way to open water.
I looked up in total disbelief that no one was even offering a hand of assistance and blurted out as many a seasoned sailor’s menagerie of expletives I could muster in the time it took me to follow the chair into the lagoon. Now had the chair done what I thought it was going to do, it would have penetrated the surface without even a hint of hesitation and sunk to the bottom. I reckoned I would just follow it down as far as I wanted then come up for air and a bow or two for the audience, but it didn’t quite work that way.
Even though the chair weighed upwards of 80 pounds (we eventually replaced the sheet steel with plywood), when it hit the water, it stopped immediately causing my head, which was following at a respectable clip, to flatten on impact, then bouncing off with surprising speed, sent the rest of my body following the half back flip my head had apparently initiated of its own free will. I ended up sprawled in a splat on top of the water, limbs pointing to the cardinal directions, slowly sinking into the lagoon in complete hysterics.
I can honestly say, there’s not a soul that doesn’t derive supreme pleasure in witnessing someone of higher stature (a client, a father, a boss, a captain, etc.) fall so ungracefully from their perch. I have never heard any group of people laugh so loud or so long as my guru, my still-unforgiven crew and the Seawall Superintendents present for the spectacle. As long as no one gets hurt, it’s a good thing that the unexpected happens on occasion, otherwise life in a boatyard would be awfully tedious and boring.
