--Everything Was Broken
One day, soon after we bought Affinity, I sat next to the wobbly dinette table and watched the late-winter rain through the crazed acrylic windows ringed with yellowed silicone. I watched the rainwater running down the maybe-original standing rigging, down the pitted chromed-bronze turnbuckles, onto the chainplates and past the globs of silicone into the cabin, dripping off the rotten chainplate knee and disappearing into two layers of moldy outdoor carpeting to soak into the waterlogged plywood shelf below.
I had wanted an older project boat for some reason.
Well, we definitely got one.
The leak was not the only problem. It was barely entitled to its own line on the list.
One of the more noticeable problems with the boat was the toilet. The odd arrangement of toilet on the port side, holding tank on the starboard side, hand pump in the center, and aging hoses running through all the V-berth lockers made the forward part of the boat smell a lot like the wastewater treatment plants I visit as part of one of my jobs.
The seacocks were a nice bright green and solidly frozen open. The water tank leaked. The hand-pump faucet did not pump.
The electrical system was composed of several eras of wire, connectors, and vintage electronics. Wires ran conveniently over the quarter berth. Two batteries sat loosely in two separate storage lockers in the small cabin. Three VHF antennas were mounted on the boat, making it look like the waterborne version of a volunteer fire chief’s pickup truck.
The floor was soft in places. The bulkheads needed repair. The chainplate knees were rotten. The rudder was wobbly. The standing rigging was original to 1970. The windows leaked. The windows were crazed. The windows, lifeline stanchions, chainplates, and nearly everything else screwed or bolted to the boat had a nice ring of yellowed silicone sealant.
Any one of these problems would’ve been manageable.
The problem was that they were all there at the same time.
Everywhere I looked, something needed to be removed, repaired, replaced, cleaned, redesigned, or at least regarded with suspicion. Affinity did not seem to contain individual problems. It seemed to be one large problem shaped vaguely like a sailboat.
Project boats are often advertised as needing “a little work,” or “a little TLC.” This can mean almost anything. It might mean the cushions are faded and the teak needs oil. It might also mean the boat has spent forty years slowly dissolving beneath a series of cosmetic repairs and temporary fixes, and the seller has decided this process should now become someone else’s hobby.
Affinity still looked like a boat. It had cushions, curtains, a galley, a dinette and a little forward berth. There were lockers and shelves and lights. According to the old brochure, the Bristol 26 belonged to the “space age” and offered a spacious interior. It was spacious, much more so than the Bristol 27s and Tartan 27s we looked at. And it came with a lot of cool stuff, like one decent VHF, a furling jib, good sails, and some dinghy davits designed to mount on a powerboat.
It was all very nice, provided one did not look behind anything, or smell anything in the cabin forward of the mast.
Removing the carpeting revealed soft and moldy plywood. Removing trim exposed old leaks. Removing the chainplates exposed rotten structure. Opening electrical panels revealed wires that wandered off toward destinations unknown. Even assessing a repair seemed to require dismantling three unrelated things first.
Progress often looked exactly like destruction.
There were days when I left Affinity with more pieces removed than repaired. The cabin would be full of tools, scraps of wood, wire clippings, sanding dust and hardware placed somewhere “safe” that would later become impossible to find. I could spend hours working and still step back to find that the boat looked noticeably worse.
That is a difficult stage of any large project. The original version is gone, but the repaired version does not exist yet. There is only the middle, where everything is open and nothing is finished. And everywhere I looked, I saw broken or leaky or malfunctioning or moldy or rotten or flickering or dripping things.
It’s easy to understand why so many old boats sit half-disassembled under tarps.
Taking something apart is quick. It feels productive. I remember the early days of those projects. A few screws come out, a panel comes free, a piece of carpet is dropped over the side and hits the gravel of the boatyard.
Underneath, there is more damage, more rot.
Are those little bugs?
Yes, they are.
I’m glad my wife isn’t here for this.
A saw or a prybar turns a rotten shelf into soggy splinters. Then, on to the slower part: measuring, planning, learning, staring, thinking, buying materials, changing the plan, returning the wrong materials, making templates, staring at the templates, cutting something slightly too large and then gradually sanding it down while wondering whether it would have been easier to take up golf or video games.
The chainplate repair had nothing to do with the toilet. The toilet had nothing to do with the rudder. The rudder had nothing to do with the water tank. Yet my mind was perfectly capable of assembling all of them into one enormous thought.
Affinity was a basketcase.
Removing the toilet was the first thing I did. I never even checked whether the poor thing worked. It was connected to the old hoses and the terrible holding bag that occupied nearly all the storage beneath the V-berth. Whether or not the toilet itself was at fault, it was part of the group.
It had to go.
I still remember tossing the “still dripping” toilet and holding tank and hoses into the boatyard dumpster. That hollow sound the toilet made when it hit the bottom. I replaced it with a portable toilet I bought from Amazon at a “damaged box” discount. Simple, cheap, and easy to winterize.
We brought Affinity from New Bedford to its new home in Groton after I replaced the seacocks and evicted the toilet and its gang. The 9.9 Suzuki outboard brought us the entire way—I didn’t trust the sailing part of our sailboat after taking a close look at those waterlogged chainplate knees. That would be my first project back in Groton, and I’d get pretty good at ferrying supplies and tools back and forth through the mooring field by rowboat.
I started with the worst side of the boat: the loose chainplate knee and the rotten shelf on the dinette side that was currently a better bug habitat than a sailboat structure. It even had a faint earthy smell that reminded me of a cool, shady brook in the summer.
I spent many days loading tools, plywood, cleaners and templates into the trunk, unloading them into the dinghy, rowing out to Affinity, cutting, sanding, drilling, cutting fiberglass cloth, soaking it with epoxy, drilling again, going to the store to buy stuff, and waiting for things to dry. After a few weeks of these trips, it started to look more like something that would work as a boat rather than a habitat for wayward inland forest insects that happened to find themselves at sea and needed a place to stay.
They weren’t particularly long work sessions—a few hours here, a trip to the boat after work, some cutting and shaping plywood at home. Because I chose to work on one side of the boat at a time, there was a lot of “lay a coat of fiberglass and epoxy, then wait until dry.” And, since the boat was on the mooring, I could take a few minutes to sit in the cockpit, where there was less visibly wrong with our boat, and I could look out over the bay in the summer evening and remember what I really liked about being on the water. There’s something motivating about working on a floating boat vs. one in a dusty parking lot or the back row of a marina. It just seems closer to completion, even if it would never be sailed that year.
I finished that chainplate knee and rebuilt shelf. I would have to replace the bulkhead section right in front of it in a year or so, but the sturdy shelf and support made for a good place to attach the bulkhead repair to when the time came.
After the epoxy barrier coat made that part of the cabin a stark, bluish white, I bought some Sherwin Williams exterior house paint mixed up to match the rest of the cabin. I painted the V-berth lockers that used to hold the toilet plumbing with the leftover epoxy barrier coat, and they went from dark voids in the bow to clean and bright storage spaces.
Of course, Affinity still had problems. But now I could row out around sunset, open the cabin, switch on the lights, and stand in the cockpit looking down at the dinette. The shelf was solid and dry. The off-white paint was bright and inviting. The varnished trim caught the light above the old, clean cushions.
For the first time, I could look at part of her and see something finished. Something that worked. Something I would not have to do again.
I have documented a lot of our projects on Affinity–they’re posted on my other website, overthereef.com.
Click on the logo below to visit!
