The forecast changed abruptly on Sunday morning, and did a 180. A broad storm front was now approaching from the Midwest. So heading for the Bay was definitely out.
But there was still time to get to a local reservoir. Probably all for the best: It’s been so long since I’ve sailed these boats, so much chaos and mayhem in the intervening years, I need to step out slowly.
How long? Looks like four and a half years. Based on photos and posts here on this blog, the last time I sailed one of my own boats was MASCF in October of 2018. That’s incredible.
Got gear collected and did a dry run in the yard. Lights on the trailer work, tires not flat – check. Blocks corroded, but serviceable – check. Lines and spars intact – check.
We left home in sunshine and arrived thirty minutes later at Beaver Creek under grey skies, darkening to the west over the mountains.
How do you do this again?
Backing a trailer, turns out, is a little like riding a bike. It’s a part of your brain you don’t use for anything else; so once you find where that is and open the lid, it’s still there, right where you left it. Confusing and wobbly at first, but it comes back. Same with the sailing part. In a few minutes, everything feels familiar again. Fortunately, boats don’t hold a grudge. All this time ignored, and Aeon was just happy to be out on the water again. Light puffy wind, nothing too ambitious. Tacking and jibing, reading wind signs on the water and in the trees on shore.
After an hour the Blue Ridge to the west disappeared. We turned back. Got to the ramp and mostly loaded before the sky opened up and dumped rain on us.
Looking at these photos, we realize how much older and grayer we are now. It’s been a tough five years, for all of us.
Got one of the boats out of the shed after a long winter nap. Washed off all the dust and mouse nests, gathered up the scattered bits, and tried to remember how all this stuff works again.
These boats have held up amazingly well. They were first launched over ten years ago, and I’ve only had to refresh with a single coat of varnish five years ago. Just one minor repair after a boneheaded collision with a channel marker in St. Michaels (now I know to sail first, take pictures second).
Was hoping to get out on some big water near the Bay tomorrow. Now the forecast says it will be gusty, pushing the bounds of my comfort zone, which seems more narrow than it once was. If so, we may still do a little refresher cruise on a local lake, where things should be more placid.
So much has transpired since we held the boat birthing party in this backyard. Kind of wild to look back on it all now.
Locals report that a black bear has wandered down from the ridge, with the knowledge of doorknobs and handles. Hungry from winter hibernation, at night it enters cars and houses looking for food. Our hosts have shooed it away from the front door, only to find it pawing in through French doors in back moments later.
It is believed the bear learned this skill from the ski resort above the valley, where transients from the city leave garbage cans full of tasty treats outdoors, and empty cabins are easy pickings after a weekend of parties. Now that the snow is gone and ski season has passed, the bear has gone on walkabout for new people to party with.
Met friends for brunch out in Nelson County. Lots of rain the past few days, really making all the green things pop off. Mountainsides are green patchwork quilts, and streams are full.
The tiny Wool Sower Wasp stings a fresh young stem and deposits her eggs. The developing eggs use chemicals like hormones to stimulate the tree to produce a very specific growth structure that encases and protects the larvae. This growth is not a normal shape or color or texture of the tree – the growing parasites within the stem tell the tree to do this, and how to do it.
If you open the gall, the larvae look like seeds packed side by side with fuzzy tails. The whole cycle takes two years to complete. Though strangely parasitic, it doesn’t hurt the trees.
Though the gall protects the young larvae from predators, and even pesticides, there are other parasitic wasps that have evolved special ovipositors that allow them to pierce the gall and deposit wasp eggs on the wasp larvae.
The axe handle console table is done. I may add a coat of varnish when the epoxy cures; but probably not necessary.
It’s a fun art project, with a story.
The Slab Story
Long ago, a friend had an ancient beloved tulip poplar on his land, which had to be taken down. Hundreds of years old, it was easing slowly into the afterlife. He would have let nature take its course, but the old tree towered over their house. So he and a buddy had to cut it down. It fell with a crash that shook the whole house like thunder. They limbed and lopped the hulking leviathan until they tired of it, then hauled off what they could with a farm tractor, leaving behind the massive column of the main trunk.
He, like me, was a porch sitter. The big log laid in view from said porch. Time passed. Thrifty by nature, he realized it was a shame to waste such an impressive piece of wood. And he was sentimentally attached to it. Besides, it was too big to move, even with a tractor.
Many evenings he pondered what one might do with such a fine piece of wood, that big old log laying out in the yard.
John and I worked together then. We often egged each other on in various ill-advised endeavors. So, inevitably, he thought of me. I said I wasn’t interested, had a boat building project already. But every couple of months he’d bring it up again, with fresh enthusiasm and some new idea of what I might make with it. He convinced himself that no one in the world could make anything worthy of this old tree but me, and he spent a couple of years gently trying to convince me of the same. And eventually did. I was renovating the kitchen, and needed an interesting piece of wood for a bar top. This might do.
It wasn’t until I arrived, with nothing but a trailer and a come-along, fully intending to bring the log home, that John mentioned it was too too heavy to move with a tractor. He was known to leave out such practical details. In the intervening years it had settled into the ground. It wouldn’t budge. At all. No way. And furthermore, after all those years of John’s pondering, the wood had continued to decay, getting punky and worm eaten. But there it lay, and here I was.
I suggested the only option was to cut out a couple of big slabs with a chainsaw, and maybe take those. His face fell, but he conceded to the new plan. I went back for the saw. After a couple of hours of chaining, ankle deep in sawdust, sweating and dirty, I had one big slab of poplar – 8 feet long, over 3 feet wide, and 8 inches thick. Even that was too heavy for the two of us to lift, we had to drag it onto the trailer. I got it home, wrestled it into the shed, and left it.
Years later, when we started the kitchen remodel, I divided the slab again into two 4 inch smaller slabs. The widest one, from the center, was split in two and became a countertop and bar, which turned out nice.
That left the narrower outside piece, still in the shed. Where it stayed for 20 years.
Original bar top slab
The Table Project
I got tired of moving that slab around the shed, but couldn’t bear tossing it out after all it took to get there. Next to it was a spare axe handle. Moving them both yet again, I noticed the handle shared a similar elegant S shape with the legs of a table T inherited from her grandmother.
Hmm. We could use a new table. Axes and timber go together.
I went to our local hardware store and got three more handles.
The challenge was to cut clean mortises for the tenons, the head of the axe handles. Axe head holes and handles for them are oblong egg-shapes. This means for a mortise you can’t just bore nice neat round holes. And worse, for the legs to set snug, you have to create a slight hip in the hole like this:
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When you drive in a wedge to spread the tenon, this hip gives it something to bite on, holding the leg tight.
So I had to trace the shape of the handles, bore out most of it with a drill press, then clean up the rest with a jigsaw and rasp files, and hope it would be close enough that any gaps would fill when glued.
Test mortise fit for handle tenon.
This last piece of slab was the least desirable section. It had splits in both ends that widened as the old log dried out, and deep gouges left by the chainsaw from when I just eyeballed the original cuts. I trimmed a limb stub off one end and that made the whole piece just narrow enough to run through a planer. Nothing to do about the worst chainsaw cuts, but one side came out clean.
Next challenge is the cracks. These are big splits, with daylight showing all the way through the slab, running much of the length. Bowtie keys (dovetail keys, dutchman keys) would stabilize the cracks and can be sort of decorative on a fanciful art piece.
Paper templates over cracks.
I had a plate of solid copper in the shop. It was the embossing plate from the cover of a literary collection we edited years ago, with the engraving of the original design. It was thick enough to cut into keys and be inset across the cracks. The butterfly shape has the same practical effect as hip-shaped mortises – they lock parts in place so they can’t separate.
Cutting and polishing the bowtie cleatsCutting insets for the cleats
Parts cut and shaped, holes drilled, inlays inset, the last step is to glue everything together and hammer the wedges home. There is only one shot at doing the legs. Once you drive in the wedges, there’s no getting them back out. All you can do is apply the glue before you start and hope for the best. I opted to use epoxy to give me a little more work time, and is better at filling gaps. Epoxy would be used for filling the splits anyway, so using it everywhere prevents weird shifts in the final finish.
I did the keys first so I could hammer those in tight. Then took a deep breath and did the legs. They worked out well, with only one or two places that needed filling with a paste of sawdust and epoxy.
Bowtie cleats glued, legs glued with wedges driven into handle tenons
A week later, I added a backsplash lip of poplar just to keep things from rolling off the back. This was screwed and pegged. Then I could clean up the residue from glue-up and apply the finish coats.
To fill the cracks, tape is applied to the top side, sealed tight, and while the table is inverted the cracks filled with epoxy, which flows down and flat against the tape. Bottoms and legs are just brushed on. A few days later, the assembly can be flipped over and the tape removed.
For the top, I used a trick I learned building the boats. You first spread a thin coat of epoxy with a squeegee, then roll out a sheet of mylar film and squeegee out the air bubbles.
A day later, the mylar lifts off clean. This makes a thin, smooth layer of epoxy, perfectly flat. In fact, too flat and glossy for this rough project. So the last step is to buff the surface with 0000 steel wool for a more matte finish.
Overall it came out well. Looks like a greyhound on spindly legs. Weird enough to be fun.
