Zen and the Five-year-old

When we left for the boat many, many things got left behind. In addition to ditching cars, motorcycles, jobs, income, and flying, my little workshop out in the garage was disassembled and sold off piece by piece. Most of my hand tools came along, but there is no room for things like belt sanders and table saws. Any joinery work needed on the boat now gets done the hard way. Most cuts are with a saber saw, a versatile little cutter not famous for leaving straight, clean edges in its wake. Anything that needs to look even half way finished will require much filing and sanding. Quick work in even a modest shop, slow work sitting on a bench with a sanding block and a sheaf of 80 grit.

Such labor intensity is anathema in the USA today. Anyone trying to squeeze a living out of a skilled trade needs maximum billing for minimum time spent. Even then most of the money will go to managers, insurers, and investors who don't actually make, move, design, or fix anything. But I'm not trying to earn a living. I'm just working on my old boat. The goal is to make it as safe and livable as a modest budget, and what skill I can conjure out of these old hands, will allow.

So I get to do a thing no one in the USA gets to do anymore, take a seat in the shade and run my fingers over an edge needing care. Then shave the rough stuff away with a rhythmic scraping that doesn't disturb the ducks or raise an eyebrow among the neighbors. The song flows through the fingers, whispers ideas to the mind, and settles in the heart with a sigh. Boats flow past on the river, clouds come and go, and occasional insect buzzes by but rarely bothers. Maybe its the thin, hovering veil of dust they don't like? In any case not many people have the time to spare to spend afternoons gently pushing wood into a needed shape.

Is it machine perfect when I am done? Of course not. But it looks okay to my eye and becomes a part of my home that no one knows as well as I do. It also becomes a part of my life, an afternoon spent in quiet motion making something that didn't exist before. And, in this case, came with an added bonus. My grandson sat next to me getting his first coating of wood dust along with his first lesson in the Zen of the sanding block. I don't think he caught much of the Zen part. Five-year-olds wake up every morning with more energy than they can burn in just one day. But he did a pretty good job for all that.

No modern society can exist on goods made this way. I make no claim that slow and labor intensive is somehow better. It clearly isn't. In almost every way - quality, quantity, cost of production, close tolerances to standards - the most modern, machine intensive way is far superior to the efforts of the lone craftsman. But that isn't to say nothing was lost when the machines came of age.

I rediscovered a hint of it today in a simple piece of wood. A piece that went directly from my hands to making our life just a tiny bit easier.

Let it be ... not

Sometimes you fix things. Sometimes you change things. And some things you just let be. It does not appear I am much good at that last one; a trait that appears common among cruising sailors. Maybe I'll fit in after all?

A Tartan 42 is a Tartan 42, and that means an interior with a fold up table running down the middle of the cabin. Not a bad use of space but it results in a very narrow isle between the galley / nav station at one end of the cabin and the V-berth / head in the other end. If I am sitting on the starboard side lacing up my boots Deb can't get by. No big deal. We don't mind dancing around one another once in a while. (One can't sit on the port side and lace up one's boots as the table, even folded down, is in the way.) But whenever we do do our passing dance I am reminded of

little Nomad and the space provided by folding up the table in her modest interior.

As mentioned before, we got a look at the Blue Jacket yacht last week in Chicago, a thoroughly modern boat with a fold up table, and were quite taken with the whole idea. Why can't a Tartan 42 have a fold up table? All that needs done is designing, building, fitting and installing said table, getting the old fittings out of the deck, moving some stuff off the bulkhead where the table needs to fit, and making sure there is enough backing in the mounting that the table actually stays mounted to the bulkhead should the going get bouncy. What could possibly go wrong?

Cardboard mockup of cabinet area - shelves TBD

So today, after getting Deb's storage area under the pilot berth finished and returning to the boat late last evening after the day trip to places east, I moved a new table to the top of my "do it next" list. Deb thinks we should be doing the aft cabin first, but she knows "project fever" when she sees it. Being wise in the ways of living with a demented mechanic she chose to work on her own "make it better" project and left me to have at it. Cardboard, scrap bits of insulation board, duct tape, scissors; by afternoon a mocked up table was stuck to the bulkhead while I figured out hinge points and clearances. It looks like it will work so ordering wood comes next.

This may still end up something I should have let be. After all Kintala has been ours for more than two years now and we have lived in her just fine with the factory table. As far as I know every Tartan 42 ever built has a fixed table in the middle so it isn't like this is some major flaw in the design. And there is always the possibility of some "show stopper" lurking out there somewhere that makes the whole idea just too silly to actually work. (With all due respect to Gene Kranz, Flight Director of Apollo 13 fame - failure is always an option.)

On the other hand the new table will make the inside of the boat a lot more "living friendly". It is cold and snowy in these parts so inside jobs are the jobs of choice - and this is a good inside job. Besides, why have a boat at all if you can't do things like this to it?