Reinforcements Arrive

Wednesday, 1/24/07

0630 Charlie Deroko, no lie-a-bed he, calls with his punch list of steel to repair. He tells me he’s taken almost 300 audio gauge readings on the boat between last year and this. He knows the bottom.

0930 smoke emerges from a forward vent. This is interior paint smoldering from heat on the exterior of the hull. Freddy, a very conscientious burner, is removing the snaggletooth remains of bow fenders long gone. “Weldments” Ernie calls these steel chunks, which always reminds me of a potential Altoids slogan.

0940 Joe Smallarz, a supervisor in Dry Dock #6 shows up, eager to see the Whalen. He provides the name of someone who may have parts for the Whalen’s cannibalized engine. I continue to hope some retired engineer will show up and adopt parts-hunting as a project.

Joe Eckhardt, the chief estimator, arrives for a walk through of the proposed steel work. I love Joe. He’s been working this harbor a long time, knows his stuff, and is a taut, old school man of few words but I think an appreciation of this endeavor shines through. Joe even knows what those weird long wasted bands of steel near the stern are. “An old way of attaching zincs.” How old? “Forty years or more.” Amazing that they survived this long.

1100 I have a chat with Guillermo, a compact, formal Mexican knicknamed “Machine” because he never stops moving. All the other workers have taken off for lunch, but he’s still tidying up the dock. He’s proud of his progress picking up the place, and well he should be. The last shipyard tenant here, known by some in port as Eastern Testicle, left it a mess. Despite the dock’s landmark status, the last occupant blasted dents in the granite, welded fence to a gantry rail, broke the top of the gantry crane and more. Machine is clearly all about work. He has lived here 14 years, and lives in Sunset Park, but has never heard of the Mexican funfest in Red Hook where the Mexican baseball league, and Latin American soccer teams and food vendors make Bay Street hum on weekends.

1200 reinforcements arrive. Karen Dryland, whose father Alf Dyrland, was captain from the late 50’s to the late 70’s, and her husband John Weaver are coming to help clean up. Sooo welcome. The accommodations are a mess. The sandblast dust pushed its way into the boat, some of it shot up the galley sink pipes before I put saucepans over the drains. A weekend of slush has carried the larger grit through the cabins. Dried mud is everywhere. I’ve been too busy to finish washing dishes, a slow process that requires boiling water in the unheated galley, and a sink full of dishes sits covered in frozen suds. Karen will tackle the galley, and John will shopvac the cabins.

Despite the mess, I feel things coming together. I’ve bounced back. I was so exhausted the day we arrived. I’ve re-mastered my firebuilding skills and carved out some domesticity in a world of no plumbing or central heating. I now know how much steel work there is to do, and there’s money to cover it. I can breathe. And in that space I can reflect on how GMD is doing.

Things feel good. The senior staff like the boat, and seem to like the effort to save her. They are impressed with her condition “we’ve seen worse in working boats.” They are allowing us to penny pinch and bring in our own steel, and they’re willing to take the time to give me estimates as we go along so I can match work to funds. The Hispanic crew clearly likes my being able to discuss the work in Spanish. Ernie, the dock supervisor, is really on top of things and totally supportive, and a kicker to work with. And this historic dry dock is a grand, handsome place to be. It wows all the visitors. I appreciate all this tremendously, especially given the brush we had with another yard, a lower bidder, who didn’t do right by us in the end.

We lost five months waiting for them to book us. I agonized during the wait but am now hugely relieved that they’re not doing the work. Everything feels right here. Actually, in retrospect, the wait served us well, thanks to the generosity of the free berth and support at American Stevedoring. What felt like a hiatus then I now see was time to get more in tune with the boat, to pull off some large proposals, and to give some very popular tours of the tanker in the Red Hook Container Port during openhousenewyork weekend. Right now, I could wish for warmer weather, but otherwise wouldn’t change a thing here.

1330 smoke curls up through the fidley grating. Freddy must be burning off those weird long steel pieces. A firewatch is set up. Power cords and water hose snake through the fidley. Blowers blast air down the cowl vents to push the smoke out. More mess and racket.

Karen plugs on behind the closed galley door. She calls me in excitedly about an ashtray. “It’s Norsk tin! Maybe my father brought it… well, maybe not. There were lots of squareheads (Norwegians) aboard then.” Her father emigrated from Norway; she explains the patterns to me,. I’ve made it a rule to not discard things on the boat (except the girlie calendar in the kindling bucket) until I know what they are or might mean. I’d admired the ashtray but had no idea the provenance. Karen and John are great to have around-- not only because they are helpful and fun-- they have such personal associations with the boat and are eager to share them. Alf died in the late 90s, but they have all his papers and have begun pulling them out so PortSide can compile some history of the boat, her crew, and her service. John has been emailing me excerpts. I now recognize Alf’s foreign handwriting in some moldy logbooks I found hidden under the drawers of the captain’s bunk.

1500 Freddy knocks off the hotwork and the day crew begins to pull out.

1625 Karen and John leave and I rush to tidy up and leave. Painting will start tonight, and I’m keen to avoid that smell. Another night off the boat.

Soapstone Diary

Tuesday, 1/23/07

0550 The alarm goes off. I fire up the potbelly, starting it with pages from a girlie calendar Scott found last night. Could this work like a mariner’s carbon dating system? Will it pinpoint when the Whalen went out of service? The calendar is a 1993, folded open to August. Future research will tell.

0735 Steve Gronda, the chemist arrives, fully two hours before Ernie expected him. He is tailed by Ivan, in yellow hard hat, one of GMD’s safety officers. Steve’s job is to certify the boat for hotwork, meaning he’ll measure all the compartments for the presence of gas that could lead to fire or explosions during welding or burning. This process has to be done every time a boat moves or a compartment is sealed and re-opened. The local marine industry is a small world; Steve tested the Whalen last spring before I bought her. He is a precise man who moves rapidly through the compartments with little chatter, squeezing himself into the smallest spaces including the narrow fuel tank/coffer dam just forward of the house.

Upon entering the engine room, he commands “turn the light off! Yes, you have a leak.” He’s spotted daylight around a through-hull pipe high on the starboard side. With that my eyes scan the space, I spot a larger chunk of daylight on the port side. I never noticed them before, likely because lights were always on and, with the boat in the water, less daylight hit the hull at that point. Both openings are so high above the waterline, we won’t fix them in the shipyard. We’ll do that back in Red Hook on our own to cut costs.

We chat briefly in the galley, and he mutters, as he did last year, about the city rezoning the waterfront. The marine industry is squeezed for space.

0820 He’s done measuring all sixteen spaces and adjourns to his car to write up the report. All clear. We’re free to do hotwork except near the fuel tank/coffer dam that still carries fuel. Even the fuel tank under the galley, black with dessicated fuel and exhaling stale diesel when open, is OK for hotwork. After a slow weekend of waiting and pumping, things are moving along!

0900 Celia Cacace, the straight-talking mother hen of Carroll Gardens, calls to report that the Daily News has done a full page on our trip to the Navy Yard. I hope that helps us find more ex-crew for the Mary Whalen Alumni Association, volunteers, and please, some investors and donors.

Thanks to last night’s blasting, the state of the steel will be clear to see. Boyfriend and Steelmeister John Gladsky is back to study it, and surveyor Charlie Deroko arrives at 1100 to return to areas with suspected problems to audio gauge. Both scour the boat, me in tow asking questions and learning. Hours are spent staring up at the bottom and marking the hull with soapstone.

I knew John was serious about me when he gave me my first soapstone “keep this in your mouse pocket.” He wanted his woman to be able to assess steel, and sometimes this haulout feels like a long awaited chance for him to teach me his steelcraft. I’ve gone out with a number of men who thought they wanted a strong woman, but it wasn’t until John, a craggy old salt, that a found a fellow who really likes and accepts my workaholic tomboy self, “a tough chick and a marinized one,” as he often puts it. But back to the steel.

Boats are unlike houses; the ship’s skin has to be completely tight and perfect. A ship can be undermined by an aperture the diameter of a pencil. We scan all 172 feet of the Whalen looking for the smallest cracks and failures in the steel. Old welds are inspected to make sure they are holding. If they have little bubbles, like an Aero chocolate bar, that’s electrolytic damage that calls for re-welding.

John and I discuss two hollows on her starboard quarter (right back end) that look as if huge potatoes were pressed into the hull. That’s where she must have run up onto some rocks. A sharp V in one potato indicates a course running up on the rocks and then reversing to get off. Is this how her propeller became “the tulip?” Is this how the drive shaft was scored? No repairs were done here and the scrape marks are still sharp, so this is likely relatively recent damage.

The bow steel caves in around the vertical frames, pressure from pushing through ice I theorize. Near the starboard bow, John and I follow two parallel indentations. This is where she hit something steel-- clang, clang, clang -- with sharp edges, and she, or it, bounced down the hull a good 20 feet. A buoy? There is even the vestige of a zinc or two, after 16 years. Amazing! They should be replaced every 5 years.

We can see two forms of repairs “inserts” and “doublers” the former more expensive to do. A row of little nubbins perpendicular to a weld line shows where wedges held up a replacement piece of plate. Pockmocks mean it is older steel, smoother means newer. One can literally read the bottom and assemble a history of wear, damage, and replacement.

On the ride to the Navy Yard, former Mate Bill McGee told me that Eklof put a lot of steel on the bottom in one of her last haul outs, they almost didn’t do it, it was so much steel. That was maybe 1988. This saved her. We can see it all along the port side near the turn of the bilge, and along the keel. This is what gave Charlie such good audiogauge readings last year. He was wondering how the 1938 steel had wasted so little. Older steel is better quality he knew, but the answer was that the bottom was hardly 1938 steel. Rick Falcinelli, at K-SEA (the successor company to Eklof) used to be a Mate on the Whalen when she delivered fuel up the Gowanus Canal. He told me that they were aground most of the time there. The Whalen essentially dredged the Gowanus. No wonder the steel up forward and along the keel was worn thin!

We find some things that even steel wizards like Gladsky and Charlie can’t explain. What are those very wasted long steel straps near the stern? Why are there bolt-on zincs toward the stern and weldable zincs everywhere else?

Charlie, ever concerned with accuracy, takes a moment to correct one of my blog posts. No, K-Y was not being used when he took readings. “That will do in a pinch, but that’s not what I’m using.” I’d seen K-Y in the rented audiogauge kit last year, and thought it was the standard goop. Oops.

The race is on to study the bottom; uncoated steel rusts speedily and if rusted, won’t hold the paint. GMD paints and sandblast, at night, because the neighboring tenants in the Navy Yard don’t like their cars getting dirtied. It’s not the Navy Yard of old where it was all about shipbuilding. The primer smell will be powerful and wretched, and I don’t want to sleep in fumes. I decamp again to the apartment of our museum designer Tim Ventimiglia. There, the internet connection really works, and I’m able to upload a few blog posts. I bang away at the keyboard til after midnight.

The Day of Reckoning

Monday, 1/22/07

This morning I should get the verdict on lead paint, the issue that has weighed on me over the weekend.

1130 I spot water rushing into the dry dock. Ernie is on it. The “sausage,” the plastic sock full of plastic and sand that plugs a vertical gap between caisson and granite wall, has failed. A crew of Hispanic laborers will fiddle with this most of the day.

1140 Ernie tells me the lead guy will be late; he has problems with the testing gun. Will the lead suspense never end? Poof goes my hope for a morning verdict, and then an afternoon out of here to get some much needed stuff, a new digital happy snap camera, potable water, a trip to the bank. I ask Ernie to call me when he comes.

1240 Ernie says the lead guy came, he was in a rush due to the delay so they didn’t call me. The guy took nine shots, and the Whalen passed! “Seal up the hatches, Ernie says, “blasting starts in a few minutes.” After so much waiting, now a rush.

1250 I hear a different clomping on deck. I go investigate. Here’s a new team of small men, mummies really, their heads wrapped in t-shirts and cloths tied down with straps. One unplugs my shore power. I ask what’s going on. Silence. I ask again. I get an eruption in some Asian language. These must be the Koreans I heard were coming. They must really know what they are doing because after a few attempts I realize there won’t be much way to communicate with them in English.

1410 Sandblasting starts. Music to my ears.

1500 I’m talking to Our Anonymous Engineer about what we’ve learned about changing the trim of the ship (angle from bow to stern) thanks to the forepeak water and cement blocks on the foredeck. The cellphone battery dies. My digital universe remains a struggle.

1600 I call Jim at Smith & McCrorken in Red Hook. They’re major suppliers of marine zincs in this port. I got a nice price from them late last year for zincs and buying them direct will save me $750 over GMD’s price; however, someone building a dry dock has just called and got the last of their 22 pound bolt-on zincs. Bummer.

The zincs are necessary to protect the steel that is vulnerable to electrolytic action in salt water. Zinc is a softer metal than the steel of the hull, or the bronze of the propeller, and as a result is consumed first by the electrolytic action. I’d worried a lot about the hull since the Whalen has not been hauled since 1991, and there were likely no zincs left. We’ve decided to go with bolt-on zincs after talking to paint guru John Tretout of Amorica, rather than the more typical weldable zincs. That’s because today’s modern coatings could last up to 10 years on the Whalen as she won’t be underway very much (moving through the water increases electrolytic action). The zincs aren’t likely to last that long and would need replacing. Divers can go down and bolt zincs on and off, but the weldable ones can only be changed by hauling out the boat which costs thousands of dollars.

At dusk, photographer Stephan Falke arrives to shoot the sandblasting. Soon thereafter, friend and computer geek Scott Baker arrives. He informs me that the fluttering sound coming out of the laptop suggests the hard drive is about to crash. Another digital headache. I begin to like tending to steel issues more than this IT (Intermittent Technology) stuff.

I monitor the sandblasting crew for an hour or two. I want to make sure they keep the blast moving so they don’t make thin spots in the hull. They work on a gangway dangling off the gantry crane. The two blasters are in dark hoods and look through thick, dark metal framed rectangles much like welder’s goggles. One mummified worker holds the end of their gangway to spin them along the hull’s curves near the stern. Even 30 feet away, the backsplatter of grit is startling. I’m afraid for the camera lenses and don’t take many pictures. As night deepens and they reach the bow where one can get further from the ship, more photography is possible. The sand haze rising off the hull refracts the worklights in an eerie fog. At moments, the scene looks as it if were underwater. I watch the contours of the Whalen emerge as crusty rust and dangling and discolored paint disappear.

Stefan and Scott want rides out, and I head into Red Hook to Gary Baum’s and Amy Sisti’s for a shower. Indoor plumbing is my new favorite thing. I return to Dry Dock #1 with a coffee and cookies for Ernie who tells me “we’ll finish blasting tonight; I want to bang it out.” Normally a light sleeper, I don’t care about noise tonight. I’m bushed and the blasting is a happy reminder that we’re past the lead hurdle. They are working right under my cabin so I tuck into my bunk wearing engineer’s earmuffs.

Sometime after midnight I wake up, probably for the silence. The blasting is done. In the morning, we’ll finally really be able to see the condition of the hull.

Annoying Spaghetti

Sunday 1/21/07

0530 I wake up with a bad thought – it’s really cold… the forepeak water, did they pump it out? If not, I could have more valves crack like the one I patched with wood slivers…

0800 I arrive at DD#1 and find Charlie already there, I’m to be his scribe recording the audio gauge soundings. I tell him I want to get a fire going in the potbelly and check the forepeak and then I’ll be right along. Yup, there’s water in the forepeak.

0830 I call the very can-do Ernie, who has always said, “call me if you need anything, I can be here in 20 minutes,” to tell him the forepeak water has to go.

0900 Ernie arrives, a tad disgruntled and in new suede shoes. Oops; I shouldn’t have taken him at his word on a Sunday… We begin wrassling with pumps. The box on their power cord comes apart. He gets another. Next their pump won’t work; it can’t push through the frozen fire hose. My idea is to wet the hose to see if that will thaw it enough. I squeeze down the forepeak hatch, to protect Ernie’s shoes, and start soaking the hose. Pump no can do. Next, we try the pump I have aboard, a heavy bronze one with an air compressor hose attached. We lower it down, it won’t move. The impeller must be jammed with rust. By this time, there’s a snarl of pump hoses, ropes attached to pumps, and power cords dangling into the rusty wedge of the forepeak. An annoying spaghetti. It’s a two-man job -- one on deck, one in the hole – to get things out of there because everything fouls on its way up, on the ladder, the internal keel coolers, or steel bracketing. This is a bugger of a job, but the company is good. Ernie and I chat.

Ernie tells me two thought-provoking things, that the lead paint test IS still needed – “it’s procedure now;” and the dock is haunted, “footsteps sometimes follow me up the gangway at night”. If anywhere were to be haunted, the Brooklyn Navy Yard would be it. Thousands have died here: During the Revolution, the British kept prison ships that were really floating death chambers. Some 11,000 died in them, and their bodies were dumped overboard or in mass graves. Bones washed up on the beaches of Wallabout Bay well into the 19^th century and caused such distress that they were re-interred in what is now Fort Greene Park where a tower memorializes their suffering. The Mafioso Joey Bonanno reputedly made people disappear here in the 20s. My boyfriend John says the King of Samoa is buried under the dock, because slave labor was used to build the dock and the Samoans would not work without their king… Truth or rumor, I don’t know, and I hope to find time to call the Navy Yard archivist Daniella Romano to ask about the dark side.

Ernie offers to unfoul the bronze pump, and I go to assist Charlie who has, as is his way, methodically chugged on with the soundings even though he hasn’t had the right ladder, me as scribe, or friendly weather. I meet him at the bow, where frozen stalactites reveal more forepeak leaks. Good thing none of that steel gave way while the Whalen was afloat!

Hearing my report of forepeak pumping frustrations, Charlie takes a hammer and smashes a hole in the bottom near the icicles. I’m ready to smash more holes if the bottom steel needs replacing; because what’s become clear is that most of the forepeak water migrated aft to the next space, the pump room engine room, and has flooded over the deck (floor) that separates a watertight compartment and the engine room itself. The limberholes in that watertight space are clogged with rust-mud, so pumping will not be easy.

Ernie fixes the bronze pump and resumes his Sunday by 1125. As I consider the frustration that pulling the spaghetti alone will be, I spot a mustached fellow in very clean Carhartts on the pier, “Are you the K-Sea barge guy?” “Yes” is the echo back. I ask for help.

Tankerman Rick is willing, he’s got time to burn. He’s into his second winter of “standing by” here, another weirdness of the weird Navy Yard that is a world unto itself. The Navy Yard has a co-generation plant. It runs on LNG, but Rick says that if there’s a cold snap down south, the LNG spigot is turned off so the South gets heat. Since the Navy Yard doesn’t want to risk not finding a local fuel barge available if there’s an LGN problem, they keep this loaded barge sitting at the ready all winter. As last winter was a mild winter, they never needed its fuel, so the tankermen never came and went nor did anything besides stand watch on the boat at its isolated dock. He’s eager to talk, “I read two books a week and go for long walks” and wants a quick tour of the Whalen. He, like everyone else who’s seen the Whalen since she arrived, really admires the boat. For me, it’s been a great boost and validation to feel that appreciation by all the staff and visitors at GMD.

Rick and I start pumping the flooded forward engine room. The hose doesn’t reach the rail (edge) of the boat; but given how much he’s prowled around, he knows where there is some ratty PVC pipe. We lay that down on the deck so we can shoot the water past the spudwell hole in the deck, down the starboard side. He leaves to get tend his generator, and I help Charlie until visitors arrive. Boyfriend John Gladsky arrives with more kindling and enthusiasm. Nathan Kensiger comes to photograph. Then Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer, arrives with Elaina Ganim, his wife, and their beagle Mila. Tim is utterly taken with the Whalen out of water. The grand sweep of her lines is more visible framed by the dock. It will be Tim’s job, among others, to come up with a plan for how to turn the eight cargo tanks, 2,800 square feet, into exhibition space and shape what those exhibits will be. I spend a little time with everyone, with the result that Charlie really gets the shaft and spends most of the day working alone.

Tim & Elaina invite me and John to dinner. We spend a lot of time discussing the revived lead paint issue. I decide to stay the night with them and blog. High time; transforming notes into blog posts has proved challenging after long work days. John heads back to Oyster Bay. The lead testing team is due between 8 and 12 on Monday, so tomorrow will define all that follows.

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