Kai O'hana
07/13/07 - Standing Rig
-A word from Captain Bach
In October ’06, I traveled to Houston, Texas to acquire poles for the spars. While there, the lumberyard offered to consolidate a container for me – that is, I’d have other items shipped to their location, they would store them for me, and when I was ready for them, they would pack the spars that I bought from them and the materials I had shipped to them in a container, and have it shipped to me. Well, if you’d said to me it sounds too good to be true, you’d have been right, which was confirmed when Chad visited them in December to make a delivery for the container.
Chad went back to Texas to spend Christmas with his family and while there he collected numerous items for our family (tools, electronics, books, CD’s, DVDs, materials, the kids Christmas list, etc.) that was on our “wish list” to add to all the items Chad and I had shipped to them previously (3.6 kilometers of rope, 1 kilometer of galvanized wire rope, a water maker, numerous tools, battery chargers, inverters, etc.). Chad confirmed my growing uneasiness from my conversations over the phone with the yard; they were not handling our materials in a professional manner.
When the container arrived (and still sealed), I was actually surprised to see everything there and in pretty good shape, until I realized the rope was missing. Apparently a guy in the lumberyard who signed the delivery ticket for the rope when it was delivered took it. Even though he “had just been fired” he hadn’t sold it by the time I had gotten the container and the lumberyard recovered it, but it took over a month of my getting extremely exasperated to convince them that they were the ones who were responsible, and they needed to pay for the additional shipping to get the rope to me in St. Martin.
Regardless, the container arrived with the galvanized wire rope so we had some standing rigging to fabricate. Chad and I measured out the 35 pieces according to the spreadsheet I had compiled while I was laying up the masts, and we sent it to a local rigging shop to hydraulically “nicopress” loops, thimbles or deadeyes on the ends. I fully intended to seize the ends in the traditional manner, but I could not find any stainless steel braided seizing wire anywhere in the world, even from yards that specialize in this sort of thing.
Once the ends were fastened on, it was time to “cure” them. Traditionally these wire ropes were boiled in a concoction of various oils that are hard to obtain in the Caribbean, so I consulted an old salt living in the lagoon on a fleet of old rusting tugs that had miles of galvanized cable on them. “Just boil’em in road tar,” he says, adding “You’ll have to thin it down with diesel to penetrate the strands, but it’ll do just what you want it to.” Judging by the shape of his cables, he should have boiled his boats in road tar. The cables were the only things on board that weren’t rusted.
So after searching all over the island, Lauren and I found ourselves in the KOOP (the giant international Dutch construction company) construction yard at the new airport for a bucket of road tar. Luckily they had just fired up the kiln for a day of laying down the parking lot and were more than happy to part with 5 gallons for a couple of beers (once we overcame the communication gap, my Dutch isn’t too good). They looked pleased when I put a case of Heinekens ($15.50) on the trunk of their car.
Being the quintessential do-it-yourselfer that I am (again, one who starts a job, but never finishes it, according to our wives), I helped Chad and Preston arrange all the components of the tar boil and got it started with their help. We heated the five gallons of thick tar and transferred it to a 20-gallon container where we thinned it down with about 3 gallons of diesel. Then we slowly inserted the first piece and watched the surface of the brew until the wire stopped bubbling. Very slowly we pulled it out, wiping it off with rags as we laid it on the row of pallets. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I had more pressing matters elsewhere. I left Chad and Preston to this most dangerous and nasty business, but was always available if they needed a hand (or needed to put out a massive boatyard inferno).
Not only did the wire rope pieces have to be initially wiped down of all the excess tar, they had to be wiped down over and over again with lacquer thinner to get them to the point where you could handle them without getting tar all over you. Everyone ended up getting involved in the cleaning at one point, and I can say with confidence that this became their least favorite part of this whole boatbuilding affair.
I, on the other hand, had numerous least favorite experiences. The sail loft presented me with probably my biggest challenge during the whole project. When the sails arrived, we laid them out and determined that all the perimeter measurements were accurate. Yet later on I started getting this funny feeling in my gut. According to my plan, the tack had to have an angle of 85 degrees or the boom would take the roof off the salon in a tack or jibe. I re-rolled out the main and the mizzen sail with Preston one Sunday morning in a vacant parking lot and determined that in fact they truly had not studied the plans and sent me sails that had an angle of the tack at 90 degrees (this is when I also discovered the additional eyes in the luff). It took months to convince the sail makers that they were the ones who made the mistake, and that they needed to replace the main and mizzen sails – though they eventually acquiesced (yet still didn’t get the mizzen right), it remains one of the very few dark clouds over the project.
But I digress, that very important job that so conveniently pulled me away from the tarring project was designing all the stainless steel fasteners that either attached all the spars to each other, or attached the standing rigging to the spars and then to the boat. Daniel was in the dungeon (the back of the shop) fabricating projects as fast as I could draw them. The way stainless steel works is that in the total amount of time it takes to make a fitting, one-fifth of it is actually cutting out the material and welding it together, and four-fifths of it is polishing. Well it didn’t take Daniel long to get bogged down in polishing to the point of getting behind schedule, so we hired a teenage Czech guy to assist him.
Well, he ended up being more interested in girls and staying up all night partying than pursuing a career in stainless polishing (I just don’t understand young people these days), so it wasn’t at all surprising when he quit only after a few days. Of course, the incident where he inadvertently let go of a ten-inch grinder while operating it, which chased him around the shop causing him to fall and almost breaking his arm, might have had something to do with it as well.
So then we thought we’d try someone a little more mature. The perfect candidate proved to be an interesting and very educated and proper Norwegian/English man who was about my age, yet decades more mature. His professional claim to fame was that he was a HAM radio operator/guru (which actually wasn’t that interesting at all). However, the riveting part of this guy’s story was his unofficial claim to fame: he is the only person any of us in the St. Martin sailing community have ever known whose little sailboat (while he was in it, presumably on the radio) was run over and sunk by a tanker in the middle of the Atlantic and survived to tell the story. The most surprising part, he can’t swim. Well, this gentleman pulled us out of a schedule scrape of which we were most indebted.
While Daniel and his assistant were finishing the rigging components, Sara (primarily, but with the help of Preston and Alexis who were also doing other projects) was finishing the spars. The schedule couldn’t have worked better if I’d applied a critical path to it (after over a year in the Caribbean, I couldn’t be bothered with such scientific scheduling, or any scheduling for that matter – this place had definitely left its indelible mark on me). By the time the spars were completely finished, all the stainless pieces lay in neat rows upon shelves ready to be assembled, and the wire rope had sufficiently cured as well. So it was time to put half the puzzle together, and pray that I got all the wire rope dimensions correct so that the other half of the puzzle went together according to plan as it went on the boat.
