Metamorphosis
“Another one come here to die” grumbled Arthur, surveying the battered hull that had just been delivered to his boatyard in Maldon. “There’s the last one that came in looking like that”. He pointed at a hulk lying behind my boat, a forlorn carcass of weathered timber with nettles creeping through the planking. It was clear that she would never feel salt water foaming under her keel again. “And that was another one.” He nodded across the yard at a heap of firewood. It was quality firewood, larch and oak. On close inspection it had once been clinker built and copper fastened. “Well, I know what will happen in the end – she’ll keep me warm for another winter.”
I wasn’t quite sure what to say. “Um, actually I was thinking of taking her to the Baltic in a couple of months”. He didn’t reply to this – merely grunted, gave Teal another searching glance up and down to assess her calorific value, and walked off down the yard dreaming of crumpets and tea before a roaring open fire on a cold winters evening.
I had just given up a comfortable job as a scientist, and as the lorry driver who had brought Teal up from Portland harbour inched his careful way back down the narrow lane, I looked at my boat and wondered what madness had entered me to start me on this project.
Ever since I was young a fascination for the Baltic had grown in me, sown as I read Arthur Ransomes account of his voyage through the Estonian islands in his yacht Racundra, and nurtured in the romance of books like 'The Riddle of the Sands', and E F Knights 'The Falcon on the Baltic'. Over the years it seems that the lure of the Baltic has drawn many from the comfort of an easy life to test their mettle against the grey North Sea, pass round or though Denmark as it stands sentinel at the mouth of the sea and spend a season or two exploring the fractured, intricate coasts that lie beyond. Not just Ransome, Erskine Childers, and Knight, but many since - Douglas Dixon, John Seymour, Peter Pye.... Their trips were made before the days of powerful engines, marine radio and satellite navigation, and I was curious to see if it could still be done in a simple old engineless boat. Not that plenty of people don't still head over every year – but I reckoned it wouldn't be half as fun in a modern, plastic yacht with all the bells on. In any case, I couldn't afford one.I had been lucky to find Teal. The trouble with planning to be a luddite is that there are not many of us about, and while pretty gaff rigged wooden boats were two-a-penny for the adventurers of the last century, there are less and less of them remaining as the years pass. Most that do remain have engines now, and GPS, and radar, and all the other gizmos that I planned to dispense with.
I had drawn up a list of my requirements. My ideal boat was wooden and gaff rigged. She had to be big enough to face the North Sea with a reasonable chance of making the other side – yet she also had to be small enough to handle under oars, as without an engine I wanted some means of manouvering at close quarters. She had to be pretty cheap, and this almost certainly meant a boat that needed some work done. Yet half the joy of owning a boat is working on her, so I looked forward to the challenge of a modest restoration. On the other hand, she couldn’t be too decrepit or I wouldn’t get away early enough to get any sailing in that year
Although I had seen an advert for Teal on the internet a long while before, I initially didn’t think her worth looking at, In any case, she was lying in Alderney, and wasn’t at all easy to get to. I thought her just a fraction too small for the North Sea, and besides she did have an engine, or so the advert said. After a couple weeks of looking though, there seemed to be nothing else in the country of the right size and in the right state of dilapidation, and hence at the right price. Also, Teal was a Falmouth quay punt, famed for their seaworthy qualities. If there was one type of boat most appropriate for the task, it would be a quay punt, and there are not many left to choose from. I decided to fly out to Alderney and take a look.
The tiny ‘Islander’ airplane, a taxi with a couple of wings from an Airfix kit glued nonchalantly on, juddered and lurched through the turbulence above the channel. We were soon descending on Alderney's tiny grassy airstrip, and the owner of Teal, who ran a jeweller's shop on the island, drove up to meet us and take us down to the boat.
I had brought a friend, Brandon, who had trained as a boatbuilder and who I thought ought to be a little more clued-up than me when it came to surveying 90-year-old abandoned hulks. We stood in front of her and eyed her up. Well, her lines were certainly sweet and weatherly: her stem just a fraction off plumb, sweeping down beneath the waterline to a long, deep keel. The slight rake of the shapely transom stern complemented the lines of the bow. Above deck a simple low coachroof had been spoilt by the addition of a raised section above the companion way, but that could go. However, even from a distance we could see she was in a dreadful state of repair. Cracked, peeling paint was falling off in enormous flakes, leaving large patches of bare wood to the mercy of wind and sun. Above decks (which were carpeted in a luxurious growth of moss) the bright-work was even worse. There wasn’t a scrap of varnish left on the coachroof.
Brandon and I spent a happy day exploring every nook and cranny, making a very long list of the work we thought would need to be done. It would be hard work to get her going again. Yet the fundamental parts of her – the keel, frames, planks and structural timbers – were remarkably sound despite the neglect. It wouldn’t be impossible. In the evening we went down to the yacht club and had a few beers, and that night we slept on board. She was certainly cosy. In the morning when we awoke... well, she just felt right. I knew she was the boat for me.
We had passed the jeweller's shop, and reckoned if he was selling many of the jewelled dog bowls he had in the window for three figures (nearly four) he probably didn't need much for Teal, and he would be glad if we just took her off his hands. After all, she had been up for sale for six years, and wooden boats in that state are not really worth anything – the work that needs to go into them if charged at boatyard rates is always far more than they are worth at the end of the restoration. But he didn't see it that way, and I ended up paying considerably more than she was probably worth. What the heck, I had a boat now - at least on paper, for it then took a month to finalise the deal, to arrange for her to be shipped as deck cargo on a freighter to Portland Harbour, to sort out the customs paperwork and the VAT (an unfortunate consequence of buying her in the Channel Islands) and for her to be carried by lorry from Portland to the East Coast.
The lorry arrived at Maldon in the early hours of the morning, and before I arrived at the yard Teal had already been unloaded and Arthur had jacked her cradle level on the steeply sloping ground. The lorry departed, Arthur trotted off down the yard, and I was left alone with my little ship. With some trepidation I clamboured up the cradle and onto the mossy decks, trying to imagine her at sea. I opened the hatch and made my way down the companionway. There was a soggy splintering sound and the companionway steps disappeared into the bilges straight through the rotten sole boards. Ah well, my first job anyway was to take out all the rotten wood so it didn’t really matter. I set to work with a hammer, chisel and saw.
I gradually found all the bits of rot that Brandon and I had missed in Alderney. There were many. Not only had the sole boards in the cabin gone, but you could poke your finger through the wooden bulkhead separating the cabin from the cockpit. The rot had spread from the bulkhead into the cockpit bearers and some of the other framing round the cockpit. The decks were far worse than we had initially thought, and the stem and sternpost were also in poor shape and would need new wood scarphed in.
I stopped tearing out rotten wood when the pile of kindling surrounding the boat had grown to startling proportions – there seemed to be as much wood on the yard bonfire as was left in the boat. It began to dawn on me that this restoration I’d taken on might be quite a big task! In fact, about the only part of the boat that didn’t have some rot somewhere was the raised doghouse that some previous owner had built on the low coachroof to give standing headroom below. But that was ugly, so I'd chopped it off anyway. I was never one to sacrifice aesthetics to mere practical considerations. ‘If one wishes to assume an erect position, one can always go on deck’, as that worthy sailor E F Knight pointed out when he took his own small boat across the North Sea.
With half the cabin roof off, no floor to stand on below and most of the cockpit bulkhead missing it was time to start putting the boat back together. I rang round and begged for help from every friend I had, and slowly things began to look more orderly again. I wasn’t interested in making Teal immaculate, I merely wanted a strong, seaworthy craft for a couple of seasons sailing. Buying her and transporting her to Maldon had already consumed most of my limited budget and taken longer than I had hoped, so the plan now was to get her sailing as quickly as possible. It was already late April by the time I started, and I was hoping to leave in early June – it didn’t leave long.
Peter was one of the more useful friends I could call on – and even better, he owed me some boat-mending favours. He had once owned a quay punt himself. Juanita was slightly larger than Teal, and she had also needed a fair bit of work when Peter bought her. I had gone along on occasion to help him replace some of the worst frames and planks. So I reckoned Peter was good for a few odd jobs in return if I asked nicely. Not that he ever needs much encouraging to do woodwork: he's never happier than when he has a chisel in his hand. With a family to look after he had reluctantly given up Juanita, and taken to making recorders in his garden shed instead - but I suspected he could be persuaded to turn his hand to slightly more rough and ready boat-building tasks.
I wasn't disappointed. The first time he came to look at Teal he took away the mizzen mast, mizzen boom and bumpkin to work on in his shed. Brandon and I had carefully inspected all the spars in Alderney, except one spot – the heel of the mizzen mast, which was still stepped. It turned out to be thoroughly rotten, probably because the mast step had been steeped in rainwater for the last six years. So it needed a length of new wood scarphed into it, and in the pile of firewood that lay across the other side of the yard we found some old roofing joists of clear and close grained pine which did the job beautifully. The mizzen boom and bumpkin were so badly cracked and weathered that Peter thought it easier to make new ones. Again the discarded joinery pine was used, with ash for the boom jaws from a tree that had once grown in his mother-in-law's garden. The jaws were fitted with copper bolts riveted over copper penny washers – although he was very retiring about how he came across the washers. There was a mutter of ‘start with a centre punch just behind Her Majesty's right ear, and give it a smart tap with a hammer’. Still, whatever they were made from, they looked rather beautiful when finished.
I had already noted a small chip in the heel of the main mast that I planned to repair with a small graving piece. Not so easy. On cleaning it up to glue the new wood in, a small patch of rot revealed itself. I planed a little further to remove the rot, and revealed a bigger patch of soft wood. I kept going, but by the time I was back to sound wood I hadn't just cleaned off a matchbox-sized piece of wood - I had hacked the bottom eighteen inches off the mast.
Another friend turned up to help out with this – Julian, an unemployed computer programmer I had sailed with a couple of times. He was unemployed entirely out of choice, I hasten to add. He had simply had enough of working and had chucked in his job to take life at a slower, more enjoyable pace for a while – not that I would describe the frenetic pace of the refit on Teal at that time as being entirely laid-back. However, he seemed happy to come down for a few days at a time and wield a chisel or a plane, and I was delighted to have his help. I set him to work on preparing the scarph on the main mast for gluing, for it was exactly the sort of careful, methodical work he was good at, and I wasn't. In replacing the bottom of a mast you can't just lop off the bottom few inches and glue a new lump of tree on in its place. A glue line that went straight across the mast would be extremely weak, and would almost certainly give way in the first strong blow you were in. To get a strong join the mast has to be cut at a rather acute angle – about 10 times as long as the mast is wide. That way the glue is in nearly the same plane as the fibres in the wood, where it is more effective, and the glued surface is also much bigger. But the surfaces to be glued also have to be very, very flat, and match all over to tolerances of much less than a millimetre. It takes very careful work with a finely set plane, a long straight edge held against the wood , and a critical eye until you can be sure that the surfaces to be glued are dead, dead true.
Julian spent the whole of a sunny day doing this. I would never have had the patience. But when we clamped on the new wood (a lovely piece of Douglas Fir which Jim in the boatyard had unearthed from underneath a huge pile of sawdust and charged me a few quid for), and planed it down to a round again, the glue line was absolutely immaculate.
Julian also rebuilt the corroded innards of Teal's dinky little brass navigation lights with high powered LEDs, and patiently and quietly did a hundred and one other little jobs.
Many other friends came down too when they could. My brother flew down from Scotland for a few days, and together we patched up the worst of the rot in the decks and reluctantly laid down a couple of layers of fibreglass to keep them weatherproof and strong. It would have been nice to keep to using traditional materials, but it would have been several months of work to re-lay the deck with new wood.
Hamish, until recently a colleague from the British Antarctic Survey, came round. So did many old crewmates from other sailing trips: Rachel, Catherine, Jamie and Carrie all came for a few days here and there; Luke and Jenny, who lived nearby, came along at the weekends. Richard drove up for a couple of evenings. Julian even press-ganged his parents into popping up one day to help paint and varnish. Oli flew back from Majorca when I rang and offered him a trip across the North Sea, and was put straight to work. One day I realised with astonishment that no less than seven of us were busy getting in each other's way as we scraped and painted everything in sight. The Maldon fish and chip shop saw its takings soar.
Between us we scarphed new timber into both the stem and sternpost, and replaced the very bottom of the transom. We replaced the sole boards. We sold the heavy lump of rust that was once an engine to a chap who happened to pass by one day and carelessly expressed an interest in it, and found a couple of oars instead; lovely lightweight wooden sculls from the boathouse of a Cambridge college. We made some new deck beams and re-roofed over the cabin top where the doghouse had been.
The chainplates, although rusty, looked like they had enough metal remaining to hold the mast up, so I did not plan to touch them. But on giving one a bit of a wiggle while working round it I was disturbed to find it moved. Closer inspection revealed that while the lower part of the plates were fastened with solid galvanised bolts, the fastening through the deck beam was of copper. The two metals had reacted together, and around the copper the wood was soft and the chainplate wasted to a fraction of its original thickness. There was nothing for it but to make new ones, which I decided to fasten on the outside of the hull in workboat-like fashion rather than in the trim yacht fashion on the inside of the planking.
I found a rusty discarded length of quarter inch thick steel plate lying just above the high tide mark and marked out the new chainplates on it. Attempting to cut them out we wore through all the angle grinder discs and jigsaw blades I possessed, until back at Peter's workshop we found that a bog standard hacksaw and a lot of elbow grease was by far the most effective method. The grinder however came into its own for rounding the corners until the new chainplates would have passed at a distance for forged iron. I decided that coach bolts would be the most elegant means of fastening, each bolt leaving only a gentle rounded dome on the outside. We had just drilled holes for each bolt when Peter’s Irish friend Martin dropped by and was drafted in to help. Coach bolts have square shafts to prevent them from turning. “So, you want these square pegs to fit these round holes?” asked Martin. “Yup”. “Begorrah” said he, and set to work with a small square file. Several hours (and a great deal of sweat) later, all 12 bolts fitted neatly in their holes.
Gradually the remaining jobs got done. We made new spreaders, new running and standing rigging, rebuilt the galley, removed a large number of steel fittings and sent them to be galvanised, replaced the loo with a posh old one bought at a boat jumble, built a pin rail around the main mast and a quarterberth under the port cockpit locker, and fitted a solar panel to provide power now there was no engine. It was time this little duck returned to her proper element