Toxic Tension

Saturday, 1/20/07

0720 the first call comes in. The industrial marine biz in this port hits the phones right after 0700, seven days a week. No sleeping in for this birthday girl. It’s John of Amorica, Paint. He’s returning my call about the lead paint issue. I tell him I’m thinking of calling the dockmaster from H&R who docked the Whalen in 1991 and asking him about what paint was used. I’m not liking losing a whole weekend of good weather waiting for the lead paint testers. H&R is long gone, but I know where the guy works now, a new dry dock outfit on Richmond Terrace, but I don’t know his name. With that John says “I’m sorry, I should have thought of that yesterday. When was her last haul out? 1991 at H&R? I would have done that job… I’ve done every boat around here for 20 years… they weren’t using lead paint then.”

I experience a flood of relief. I’ve had no time to organize a birthday party but the no-lead paint news is the best present I could receive. I call Ernie, yard supervisor of Dry Dock #1, right away. Ernie, ever on-duty and ever-amiable about it, says “great… Blasting will start tomorrow night.” Charlie Deroko calls soon thereafter and says he can start surveying tomorrow at 0730. The weekend WILL show some progress after all. I begin to unwind.

Birthday calls roll in throughout the morning. My boatbuilder uncle Ross Gannon is particularly interested in what’s going on. I tell him about “the tulip,” the wickedly deformed prop. He asks if that could explain how the drive shaft was damaged, could it have been a grounding that nailed them both? I realize I don’t yet have the story as to why the Whalen went out of service.

The fallout from the Exxon Valdez ultimately would have put her out of work. That accident lead to the OPA90 (the Oil Pollution Act of 1990) and one of it’s many mandates is that “single-skin” vessels would be phased out of the fuel-moving business and be replaced by boats with double hulls. The idea being that if they were hit, only the outer skin would breach and the inner skin would prevent an oil spill. That rule has retired many noble old tankers around here, whereupon they go to the scrap pile, get sunk as artificial reefs or get spirited away to Latin American where the rivers are many and the regulations few.

I argue with Outlook some more and try every form of workaround to get the laptop version to work or get the data from the desktop up into Earthlink’s cyberspace mailbox. No go. Clearly, I will work in splendid isolation while in Dry Dock #1.

I finish my first post and realize I’m too tuckered out to swing more. I reassess the Lulu plan. She was almost named Limpet for her proclivity to stick herself to me. It’s endearing when she plays parrot and sits on my shoulder while I’m typing; it’s a molestation when I’m trying to sleep and she’s wrapped around my head like a tight, fidgety hat. She hadn’t been bothering my sleep for weeks, but I realize that’s cuz she’s been stuck to John’s dog Sophie. Lulu is infatuated with Sophie. I need my sleep on the Whalen. I think Lulu may not make the trip back with me…

Mussel Men

Friday, 1/19/07. The Victorians are winning; Bill Gates is not. Friday, day two, I try to activate my mobile office on the Whalen, but Outlook 2000, age 6, wont work. Neither will my Nikon D1X, about the same age. The pump on the graving dock, age 156, works fine, so does the WWII-era gantry crane, and the 1938 Whalen is holding up pretty well. Enough said, but that’s why posts are running late, I can't get data in to get posts up, and this seasoned photojournalist is reduced to making photos with a cellphone.

Back to ship issues. A shipyard experience is about expecting the unexpected, the uncertainty is only of degree, “how bad will the news be?” I hold my breath. PortSide hasn’t done any fundraising to pay for the boat yet, so we are limited in what we can do now.

Friday, I begin to deal with the revelations of Day One. Thursday afternoon, Ernie, the yard supervisor for Dry Dock 1, had phoned “hey, you have a hole in your forepeak right above the hawsepipe!” I go to the bow. Sure enough, the ballast water is shooting out of the boat. How had I missed that hole before? Clearly, the anchor had once pressed into the steel as if it were Play-Doh. The old girl won’t be going coastal for a while, I think to myself, so a hole that high up isn’t the worst. We’ll fix that ourselves out of the yard where rates are cheaper. Next!

Boyfriend John Gladsky, marine salvor and Steel Archeologist, is scowling around the bottom and dubs the prop “a tulip.” That would be an over-ripe tulip; each of the three flukes is bent back. Well, she’s currently dead ship, and the engine, if repairable, is not an immediate priority… I figure we can be towed when we visit other communities… next!

I check the pump room engine room that shares a bulkhead with the forepeak. Aha, another surprise: there’s piddling from a valve near the deck, an old crack from freezing damage. Thanks to the interim potbelly heating system, I’ve got lots of wood aboard and I shave off slivers, add some toothpicks to my quiver of repair tools and head forward. The wood will swell up nicely once wet. I hammer it in, add a cap of weatherstripping and bind it all with duct tape. It’s dry in 20. Lovely

Below the boat, a crew of ten sheathed in duct tape and rubber clothing is removing the mussel beard. The blue crust comes off too easily in places—a crustacean peel with the weight of the mussels pulling off a sheet of steel scale. I wince. We need that steel.

The workers are all Hispanic. As often happens these days, I’m glad my father was from Spain. I can converse with the work crew better than the supervisors who use broken Spanish and hand signals. Amongst themselves, the workers communicate in high speed Spanish or a series of whistles. The dock rings with whistling all day. Jorge, supervisor of the mussel crew, points out another leak. Water is coming down out of the forepeak! Ouch. This ballast water is proving a useful diagnostic tool.

The state of the steel will get assessed in waves; and money, or relative lack thereof, shapes the work plan. Charlie Deroko, the marine surveyor and I will work around GMD’s schedule. If we make them stop work, we pay a lay day fee for the day. Blam $750! If we time our work for a weekend when they are not working, then no fee. Stage one, Charlie Deroko will give the boat another round of audio gauging, basically a sonogram of the boat, and, yes K-Y jelly is used. A touch of the grinder to clean off the rust, a smoodge of jelly, and then the sensor is applied. Charlie spent two days surveying her last January, and concluded that the boat was not about to become swiss cheese. If she had been, I wouldn’t have bought her. She’s to serve PortSide, not the other way around.

Stage two, sandblasting will reveal other flaws once the blistered steel and loose coatings fall away. Done with a heavy and slow hand, sandblasting can also churn a new hole in the boat, so I’ll be watching the crew.

Charlie has illness in the family and cancels survey work for Saturday. Soon after that Ernie stops by to say that he has to check for lead paint, that’s done on every boat now, DEC regs, he says, and the lead testing team can’t make it until Monday. My friend Debby Romano is there to loan me a point n shoot digital camera. She asks all the questions which net long answers about tonnage of blast grit and costs of hazmat disposal; I just hold my breath. The yard won’t blast the boat and risk dispersing old lead paint until they know what’s on the hull, so GMD is doing nothing on the Whalen this weekend.

Debby leaves. I call John Tretout of Amorica, the go-to man for marine paint in New York. “Ah, don’t worry,” he says, “if there’s lead we’ll just encapsulate… give her a wash and then extra coats of paint.” I don’t like this. Her scabrious, neglected waterline needs more than a wash. She’ll look like dreadful without a blast, and the coatings won't hold as well

With that, and given that Saturday is my birthday, I decide to get off the boat. Also, I’m tired thanks to my rusty stove-tending skills. I haven’t used them much since the oil crisis of the 70s (I was a teen). Then, Mum, newly divorced, struggled to make ends meet, so we skimped on heating oil. A Franklin stove, a coal-burning potbelly. We didn’t need Carter to tell us to lower the thermostat. Well, that was long ago. I smothered ­the fire after banking it Thursday night, and woke at 0230 with cold rasping my nostrils. I spent an hour and a half rebuilding a bed of coals and arguing with Outlook. Enough to wipe out a girl on Friday. Saturday is gonna be a day off…

The Big Day

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Original post published 1/20/07:

Thursday 1/18/07. The Whalen will finally go into dry dock. Perversely, balmy January ends the night before our trip to the

Brooklyn Navy Yard. Nonetheless, there’s a happy hubbub amongst the dozen or so guests aboard. It’s emotional day for many. The guests do meet n greet while I fuss over a recalcitrant generator that should go on as shore power is disconnected. Kitty Lulu, to her frustration, is locked into my cabin so she doesn’t leap back ashore – she figured out gangways weeks ago. Sal Catucci, CEO of American Stevedoring, who has generously provided us a free berth, shore power and stevedoring for months, tops it all off by driving out of the terminal to get some lost guests.

K-SEA is providing a free tow. I called them cuz they’re great people and good boathandlers, and because they, under their prior business name of Eklof, were the last company to run the Whalen as a tanker. Many of their people remember the boat, and fondly too. The tug Labrador Sea comes alongside around 0730 and the captain steps out of the wheelhouse and says “my father was the captain of that boat!” He’s recognized by Bill McGee, an Eklof retiree and former Mate on the Whalen, who is back aboard for the first time since she, and he, retired. It’s a big day for Bill, and I’m thrilled to meet him. He’s the man I knew was out there, the guy who loved the boat and saved her plans when Eklof/K-SEA shut her down, stripped parts off the boat, and pitched her records.

He called me a few days after Christmas, his son had found us while trolling the internet, and Bill said he had plans of the ship and that he would give them to us. “The plans should go with the boat.” I’m in tears after the call. The lack of plans complicated finding a shipyard during an 8 month effort; some yards didn’t want to lift her without the structural info contained in those plans. Once aboard, Bill swings right back into running the boat, tending lines in silent tandem with Tom Kerr, a recent transplant to Red Hook who came following the trail of his estranged merchant mariner father. Tom is writing a novel with maritime themes and writes poems about shipyards. He did a stint in the Navy and has helped get some things aboard the Whalen more shipshape.

Karen Dyrland and her husband John Weaver are up in the wheelhouse. Karen’s father Alf was captain from the late 50s until he retired in the late 70s. He was so attached to the boat that when he died 20 years later, his funeral program carried an image of him at the helm of the Whalen. Halfway to the Navy Yard, John tells me “the captain is back aboard.” Later I find that in the wheelhouse they’ve hung the photo used in Alf’s funeral program. I wonder what he would think of all this. They tell me that shortly before he died, he muttered “get the women off the boat, the Coast Guard is coming” and now there are lots of women aboard, and it’s a woman, me, who has decided to rescue his beloved Whalen.

0830 and we’re at the Navy Yard. A cluster of hard hats awaits us. The dock is flooded and the caisson (door) is open. A dinky block of wood floating on a slim line across the head of the dock indicates the centerpoint to align with the Whalen’s bow. The opening is too narrow for the tug to keep us on the hip, so the tug lands us on a fuel barge just outside the caisson, and moves to our stern to push us in. The Delaware’s tankerman helps out with lines even though he’s still in his slippers and it looks like we woke him. We slide in and the gantry crane soon swings over a man basket and lifts the guests away. My adrenaline wicks away rapidly. I’m beat. Wednesday night was a sleepless one due to the cold. I turned in too late to build a coal fire in the potbelly stove hooked up by John Weaver, and the little gas electric radiator didn’t beat the 20 degree temperature til nearly dawn. Fortunately, my boyfriend and firemeister John Gladsky arrives and builds a roaring fire. The rest of day will be about pumping out the graving dock.

The water drops rapidly, a testament to 19th century technology. The dock was completed in 1851 and still uses its original pumps, now electrified. Actually, it is using only one of the two pumps as one of the two water tunnels is clogged. GMD Shipyard now operates this dock, and all the other ones in the Navy Yard, as well as the one in Bayonne where the Intrepid will be repaired this spring. Their dockmaster pumps with care and stops whenthe dock is about half full. If the Whalen lands wrong, she could roll or be torqued out of shape. She’s down at the stern (heavy in the bum) as she’s basically three stories high there, and that weight is not offset by any cargo up forward in the tanks underneath that long deck. She has got to land evenly (both front to back and side to side). The crew pumps water into the forepeak (a vertical void at the bow of the boat) and when that’s not enough to get her bow down, the crane operator somehow fits two huge cement blocks between the railings and vents on the foredeck. That fixes the trim. A diver from Randive plunges in to see how she setting on the blocks. He reports that she’s not evenly down on them so the dockmaster dispatches the diver to slip planks between the hull and the blocks. He slowly works around the vessel, reporting regularly to the dockmaster at the top of the dock. It’s careful work and it shows how vulnerable a large steel thing can be.

Once she’s down on the blocks, I feel I can leave. I race off to Brooklyn Borough Hall where the Mayor’s office has called a meeting to discuss the new city plans for a sustainable future PLANYC 2030. To my puzzlement, neither this presentation, nor the powerpoint, nor their website make any mention of the waterways as a potential solution to our traffic and air pollution problems. In an archipelago, moving more people, vehicles, and cargo by water would be a green solution and a decongesting one; but it doesn’t seem to be on the radar. After a day outside, I wilt in the heat of the meeting room; so I slink off before the meeting is over to get a shower and a sandwich at a friend’s house. I drive back to the Whalen with the intention of writing a blog post but am wiped out. I crash into my bunk at 2200.

Photo 1: Stefan Falke

Photos 2 + 3: Carolina Salguero