Kai O'hana

07/03/07 - Spars

-A word from Captain Bach

A spar is any pole that acts, as in our case, as a main or mizzen mast, their respective topmasts, a bowsprit, booms and gaffs. I had originally intended to buy treated southern yellow pine poles from the deep south to fit the bill, and succeeded mostly (I acquired all the smaller poles this way), but apparently all the large “straight” poles that I needed for the masts were being used for the reconstruction of the south after Katrina’s wrath.

So my only other option was to “lay up” the masts – glue long pieces of dimensional lumber together in such a way as to make a long, strong, straight pole – one like a tree trunk. The logic goes like this (as pointed out to me by one of the more creative “Seawall Superintendents”): You take a perfectly good tree, cut it down, take the trunk and cut into long (relatively) thin pieces of wood that you then glue back together to make a tree trunk. However grossly wasteful this may sound, the saving grace, and the major difference, is the glued tree trunk is considerably stronger than the natural one – so the theory and justification goes.

As with any large project (actually every project), the most important step is the first one – the planning and preparation step. I had no idea how long building the masts would take, and no one in the boatyard had ever seen it done (including the “yardbirds”), but I knew if I didn’t start this massive project on the right foot, I would suffer all the way to the end.

So I bought a bundle of twisted 2x3’s on “damaged discount” in the lumber yard and made a couple of dozen reinforced stands out of them. Then I arranged them in two straight lines, leveling them with a string line, a pick and a shovel in the crane-compacted sand/clay/rock dredged lagoon bottom – I thought I’d left gardening for good back on the farm, but I guess you never really leave something you enjoy.

Once the stands were set and ready to go, I took some of the initial material I had bought for the masts (my Nissan pickup could not carry the full load required to build both masts) and made four 60-foot long planks for the main mast’s interior box or chase (48-foot for the mizzen) out of sixteen-foot boards by scarfing their ends [cutting them at very shallow angles (6:1) and gluing them together to make a strong contiguous plank]. Then I fastened the eight planks together to make perfectly straight boxes for the two masts and then called for a lumber drop.

After it arrived, the project ended up being just another time-consuming, in-the-hot-sun, monotonous job of gluing, clamping and screwing one layer of scarfed boards onto one side, flipping it over and doing the same on the other, then turning it on its side, (and after planing the surface completely flat) gluing, clamping and screwing another layer on, then flipping it over and doing it again until all the layers were laid-up and two big, heavy and ugly square columns lay on two sets of stands. The nice thing was that whenever I felt the project was dragging, which after the first two weeks was just about everyday, I’d recruit Preston off of another project and beg him to help me mix glue or clamp and screw down the boards.

Speaking of help, boatyards are funny places. Because it is such a strange mix of people of different nationalities and cultures who live in and/or work on their boats in the yards doing their “dream” with the means they have (from dismal to opulent), there can be some very interesting dynamics. But regardless of class, personalities, ethics, morals, conflicts, friendships and special interests, one thing always happens, if someone needs a hand, you stop what you are doing and help them out. This “help” is never unconditional, however, it most often costs beer (“CBC” – “Caribbean Boatyard Currency”) or an exchange of favors, tools or materials, but one thing is sure, everyone needs an extra hand in a boatyard at some point, even if you have a crew of six and a shop as well equipped as the Home Despot. So our requirement to call an “act of boatyard congress” was flipping the ever-growing masts on the stands. I had to get them round so that I could roll and slide them as soon as possible – it was costing me a fortune in Heinekens.

The first step in making them round was to make octagons out of my long square poles. Though I saved a lot of time in not having to plane off the corners, my expense was burning up one of my skill saws while ripping a total of 800+ lineal feet of 45-degree angles. Then I had to figure out a way to make them round and look good at the same time. The easy part was that they could not be tapered – gaff rigs that use hoops have un-tapered masts; however, all the rest of the spars are tapered.

So I attached a string-line the full length of the masts 1.5 inches off the top side and cut a template out of a thin piece of plywood of half the diameter I wanted with a 1.5 inch notch out of the top for the string to act as a guide (this prevented me from going too deep with the planer). About every seven feet (I had a seven-foot straight edge) I would carve out about a three-foot section of the template’s perfect half diameter. Once I worked down the mast planing these three-foot sections, I planed the parts in between by eye, feel, and of course, the seven-foot straight edge.

I don’t remember how many days I toiled with planing, but I was glad I had two of them. The growing pile of shavings on the ground and the number of blades I destroyed was a testament to the many days of waking up, planing all day, and going to bed just to get up and do it again day after day. It was almost a pleasure to start the “long-boarding” process (sanding the roughed-out masts with a “sanding block” 5 inches wide by three feet long with 60 grit paper) – that is, until day four when it became more strenuous, tedious and monotonous than planing.

One thing was sure, I had no trouble falling asleep after a day of planning or longboarding. Unfortunately, this was never in the cards because as soon as the sun went down and we were driven into the relative protection of the boat by the hoards of bloodthirsty no-see-ums and mosquitoes, it was time to design the standing rig. The schedule demanded it, so there was no option other than to grin and bear it.

The standing rig is that which holds up the masts. Not only do these lines (galvanized steel wire rope in my case) have to be sized for the loads (the force of the wind that pushes on the sails that pushes the 50 ton boat forward), but also sized to fit between all the spars and/or the boat. Since the masts were on the ground and there was no way to take any physical measurements, the only way to calculate the lengths were to take the measurements off my very precise scaled drawings. I can tell you, this created a significant amount of anxiety in me and forced me to check and recheck my drawings and calculations to the point that I never wanted to see them again.

While I was working on the masts and the rig, Daniel and Preston spent most of their time building and installing the chainwales and the chain plates. Now it is true that Daniel was our Czech welder, but he is also a sailor and boat owner, and like most of us, he can do absolutely anything on a boat in a pinch, including woodwork. Chainwales are those shelf-like things that extend the shrouds out away from the hull of the boat. The reason why the boat was in such terrible shape in the first place was the chain plates ran up the outside of the bulwarks, which squeezed the boat frames in and caused the stanchions to break letting fresh water in through the deck – a wood boat’s worst enemy.

So Daniel focused on building the chainwales and then fitting the stainless steel chain plates to them and the hull, which turned out to be more of a challenge than anyone could have imagined because of having to install them on the water. Luckily we did have our 30-year-old trusty and stable 17-foot Boston Whaler that facilitated this kind of work immensely. Otherwise drilling through the three-inch by seven-inch, rock-hard, oak frames at the water line to bolt on the chain plates would have been virtually impossible. As it was I spent a fortune in 13/16” drill bits and had to replace a heavy-duty drill to boot, not to mention Preston’s numerous diving expeditions to recover untold treasures (my dropped tools). But Daniel and Preston, being a team of two of the most tenacious people I know, made working at the water line while bouncing in the never-ending boat wakes look effortless.

And if all that was going on wasn’t enough, we had to squeeze some time in to make the hoops. Most modern sailboats have tracks (or in-mast furling, which is a whole other matter) that go up the back side of the mast where these little “cars” that attach to the sail can run up and down relatively freely. Well, a traditional “gaffer” has hoops (sometimes they just use rope, which is what I’ll probably revert to once my hoops die) that go around the mast and are attached to the sail that also run up and down the mast. Certainly more difficult than cars, hoops have to be manufactured on site because you just can’t stroll down to the local chandlery and order up a couple of dozen hoops. Nope, they have to be painstakingly made of strips of wood that are soaked in a trough of some kind, bent over a frame to dry, and then glued together three deep.

Once dry, you have to router the inside edge, sand them smooth, stain them, varnish them, then leather the part that meets the mast so they run up and down it smoothly. Well, I learned early on in this project (as actually with all others) that with the large crew that I had, I never had to finish anything – a do-it-yourselfer’s-dream-come-true (since, according to our wives, we never finish any projects anyway). So I chose Sara to be my “hoop assistant”, that is to be the one who takes over after the glue dries. We had all the hoops whipped out in no time, that is until the sails came. As we will learn later on, the sail loft apparently decided not to read the plans and added several more eyes to the luff of the sail than I had specified so Chad, Sara and I had to bust out several more hoops in a very short amount of time to make the mast-stepping deadline (you cant put a hoop on a mast after its been stepped).

So other than the sails, the other troublesome flies in the soup were the ever-present “Seawall Superintendents”. It seemed like every day some owner of a “less antiquated sailboat” would come up and either question my design, my processes, my materials, my ability, my knowledge of such ancient boat building techniques, or most times just my sanity for taking on such a large project. But it was when they got to the kids that it really bothered me. After being cajoled by some boatyard miscreant, one of the kids might innocently ask me, “Why are we doing such and such?” I’d reply, “Well there are nine books at my drafting table in the boat on the topic. You can go in there anytime and pull one of them off the shelf and learn everything we are doing.” I didn’t blame them for not taking me up on the offer. After all, they pretty much worked from sunup to sundown everyday – I wouldn’t want to waste my precious free time on such boring material at 16 either. But when they came to me and said, “Well, ol’ Joe over there says you’re a bloody lunatic” (or something a little less direct with the same meaning), I’d lose it, but always in vain. After years in the construction business, I learned that every passer-by with an opinion has ten times the knowledge about what I’m doing than I do. You just get used to it and ignore it, or you don’t and live with high blood pressure. Ah, life in the boatyard…