I want to share a delightful piece by Rod Scher (pictured above), teacher and journalist, from a 2007 column in the magazine Smart Computing, which he edited for many years. The Lady Mick was our vessel and wonderful home for more than 15 years.
I love boats, and as luck would have it, I recently got to spend two weeks cruising the San Juan Islands in a venerable, creaky wooden boat with my venerable, creaky (but not at all wooden) in-laws.
The boat is a classic 1957 Richardson sedan, 46 feet in length, broad and beamy, with an extended pilothouse and helm above-decks and aft staterooms, forward vee-berths, and light, airy salon below. When the boat creaks, it’s the honest sound of wood flexing. It’s the way a boat is supposed to sound. (On some boats, what you hear instead is the sound of fiberglass panels slowly delaminating.) When you walk the decks of the Lady Mick, you feel teak underfoot, not plastic. This is as it should be.
There’s something warmly old-fashioned, almost primal, about sailing in an old, wooden boat. You’re afloat in a vessel made of oak and cedar and mahogany, with water lapping against planks that have been hewn and steamed and bent around rows of wooden ribs in a process not unlike that used to build the Spray, a 37-foot sloop in which 51-year-old Joshua Slocum single-handedly sailed around the world in 1895-98. The Lady Mick was built (in North Tonawanda, N.Y.) using plank-on-frame construction, by a factory that had been established back in 1909. Well cared for, a boat built like that will last 100 years. About how many modern contrivances can you say that?
Such boats are built not by corporations, but by craftsmen, and they have been made in almost this exact fashion for centuries. It’s an expensive, time-consuming process, but this is what it means to build a boat, rather than to extrude one.
And so, there I was, happily bobbing along, keeping an eye out for “obstacles to navigation”, when it occurred to me: This boating thing seems like a primitive, traditional undertaking, but it’s really not.
Consider that the elderly, much-loved Richardson carried, along with its warm, low-tech patina of teak and mahogany and history, the following devices: GPS, Loran-C, a digital fathometer, two laptop computers, one desktop computer, radar, an AIS (Automatic Identification System) transponder, three VHS radios (two bulkhead-mounted, one handheld), a flat-screen TV, two FM walkie-talkies, and charting software with digital charts that apparently covered the entire planet, most of Betelgeuse, and portions of Tolkien’s Middleearth. (The boat also boasts a computerized, automated foghorn, but we can’t figure out how to adjust the pitch, which remains curiously high. It’s a very effeminate foghorn, come to think of it, sounding oddly like Barbra Streisand screeching her way through the first few bars of “Memory.”)
In the end, it begins to feel somewhat counterfeit to rhapsodize about the supposedly low-tech, traditional allure of an old boat such as this. After all, as old as she is, the Lady Mick does boast a fairly impressive array of high-tech devices. (Foghorn excepted, of course.) And, given the ease with which an unaided sailor can get lost or beached or worse—and especially since so many idiots in high-priced plastic boats tend simply to run over slower vessels—that’s a good thing; today’s boater needs all the help he can get, technological or otherwise.
Really, living on board was kind of like pretending to go low-tech. You know, something like when you go camping and try to explain to people how you were out there “roughing it” in the wilderness with your cot and foam pad, propane stove, frozen steaks, solar-powered blender, rip-stop nylon tent, MP3 player, Bluetooth-equipped cell phone, and USB-enabled Swiss Army knife. Explorers—and mariners—of old would have just laughed at us. Slocum, who sailed 46,000 miles all alone in a boat he built largely by hand (a boat whose most prominent example of high technology was a tin wind-up clock with a smashed face), would have been insulted by the idea that my two weeks in the Lady Mick constituted sailing at all.
Still, it’s the closest I can come these days to seeing what life must’ve been like for Slocum and his fellow boatmen. So if you’re out there zooming around in your plastic Bayliner super-yacht, please be careful. Don’t hit the Lady Mick, because—old and creaky though she might be—we love her. Just save the beer for after you dock, keep your eyes open, and listen for Barbra.
(Reprinted with permission from Smart Computing.)
Rod Scher, a longtime boating enthusiast, former software developer and a recovering English teacher, is currently VP of Technology for Class.com, where he spends much of his time developing educational software while plotting ways to get back out on the water. He is author of The Annotated Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocam's classic sailing tale, to be published next month. Rod is also my son-in-law and lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
No comments:
Post a Comment