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November 1, 2001 Issue


November 15, 2001 Issue



November 1, 2001

Good Old Catboat

By Stuart Hopkins
Proprietor, Dabbler Sails

At an age when many sailors retire, sell the house, move aboard, and go cruising, my wife, Dee, and I built a house, sold the boat, moved ashore for the first time in 25 years, and started a business. But we didn't walk inland with an oar over our shoulder; we "retired" on the shores of the Chesapeake, just to keep our options open. And while we learned about hammers and saws, we were each privately thinking about all that Chesapeake water. When we started talking about it, we discovered we knew exactly what kind of "retirement" boat we wanted:

Unfortunately, we knew of no such boat. But we had recollections of encounters with a couple of little catboats, Marshall 18 catboats, called Sanderlings, that impressed us with their abilities and possibilities. We saw one in the Gulf Stream, in reefing weather, making no more fuss than our deepwater ketch. We knew one in the Bahamas that could explore wherever we could take our sailing dinghy. In magazines, we found photos of Sanderlings and defaced them with sketches and doodles. Encouraged by the ease with which a pencil transforined the little daysailer/overnighter into our idea of a comfortable, handy pocket cruiser, we decided we could work the same transmogrification on a real Sanderfing, substituting a Sawsall, epoxy, and plywood for the pencil.

All we needed was a lonely, battered, decrepit (cheap!) edition of the design to operate on. Since Sanderlings have been in continuous production since the early 1960s, this would surely be possible. Right off the bat, we found her. The voice on the other end of the phone in Florida said, "Hull and deck sound ... otherwise not too good." No trailer. No equipment. No motor. Suspicious sponginess in plywood components like cockpit and bulkheads. Old sail. Built in 1966. Cheap. Just our meat.

A terrifying round trip on 1-95 landed this econo-prize in our driveway.

Dee (a woman used to Brixham trawlers, Gloucester schooners, and deep-water yachts) stifled her reaction when she discovered we couldn't even sit upright below! Instead, she went to her studio and began some serious sketching and doodling. I (a sailmaker) rigged the boat where she lay on her trailer, and backed off a few yards to imagine how she would look as a yawl.


While mulling over several schemes, we took a mattock and removed almost 200 pounds of bad plywood cockpit seats, sole, and waterlogged foam, right down to a naked hull from the companionway aft. This made it easy to plan for an engine installation, tankage, storage, and comfort. The finished job included a lucky bargain, a 10-horse Kermath that had lain for many years, mothballed, in a local boatbuilding shop. We had no interest in sharing an 18-footer with a diesel. This smooth, quiet antique went in without problems.

A cutout in the solid glass "deadwood" ahead of the rudder (Sawsall job) accommodated the stem bearing and prop. We measured for the beds by suspending the little engine in place from the boom. With an I I -gallon aluminum tank, blower, and electrics, we were beginning to look forward to poking up rivers and creeks in style.

We replaced the original benches with a U-shaped cockpit surrounding the engine box and introduced a bridge deck with big lockers and more lockers aft. We dropped the sole several inches for more leg room. Under the seats, outboard, was space for bins and sail bags held in place with removable fiddles.

Our more comfortable and useful cockpit (worked up out of CDX and epoxy) weighed about what we chopped out. A few pigs of lead ballast were removed to compensate for the motor.

We launched the Dabbler (named after the mallards that dabble in our local creek) for some cruising with a local club. The inboard and new cockpit were a great success, but otherwise the experience confirmed our opinion that we wanted to replace the single big sail with a divided rig. And, after a few nights cramped below, we could hardly wait to haul her out, grab the Sawsall, and take the lid off the sardine can.

Doghouse cum main saloon

Some of our bold, even arrogant, sketches evolved from a doodle for a dodger. Why not make the didger rigid and cut away the aft part of the cabin top so the hardtop effectively encloses a greatly enlarged cabin? Why not provide standing headroom for the mate (5'5"), with a little "galley" on the new bridge deck? Why not have full sitting headroom on comfortable chairs aft of the bunks? Why not fit removable windows and screens? Why not extend the roof far enough aft to provide shade and spray protection for the helmsman?

A mockup in cheap 1/8" luan ply (which later served as templates and as a building mold for the final construction) proved there was no reason why not.

A few minutes of surgery liberated about 90 pounds of cabin top and bulkhead. Immediately, we could test with our bodies the thesis expressed on paper, Proof we could sit upright, surveying some lovely, lonely anchorage from the comfort within, spurred the work. The house was designed to join the existing structure across the cabin top a few inches forward of the original hatch opening with an epoxy filet; outside the cabin sides and cockpit coamings, with a 2" overlap, epoxied and throughbolted.

We turned our backs on the local lumberyard for the deckhouse project and ordered expensive 3min okoume marine ply to be laminated in place over the mockup to lock in the heavily cambered top and curved front and create the eyebrows that trap the removable polycarbonate windows. All the construction was done in a corner of my small sail loft between sailmaking jobs. We barely got it out the 8' wide doors! It dropped in place as neat as a cap on a pickup. Final weight was less than what had been removed with the Sawsall.

The new effective interior includes the bunks (as original), our "easy chairs" (cheap but comfortable plastic swivel-bottom fishermen's seats) port and starboard, the bridge deck, comprising "galley" with gimbaled kero stove to starboard, solid-fuel cast iron Pet to port, and the forward half of the cockpit. At anchor, if desired, the fitted Sunbrella aft closure snaps in place. enlarging the "interior" to include practically the whole boat. In cold or wet (and on the mooring) the large screened opening in this closure is covered with a vinyl window. Otherwise, the screen liberates the breeze that comes in the forehatch and opened doghouse windows.

Eventually, controls for the main and roller furling jib were brought into the house to jam cleats on the shelf formed by the little bit of cabin top inside. Raising, dousing, and reefing the main are all done from "below" standing up! Ditto deploying and furling the jib. What joy! Which brings us to:

The rig

There is no novelty in the cat yawl rig. The aim is to easily have more sail area when you want it and less when you want it in order to balance the boat under almost any condition. We have about 25 percent more sail area in the three working sails than the original cat rig. From the comfort of the cockpit, we can set a mizzen stays'l and be flying 375 square feet. In races, we have been able to astonish the locals with five sails.

The new rig satisfied all our expectations. Sails can be adjusted to tame weather helm (a notorious fault of catboats) or dropped (instead of reefing, notoriously difficult in catboats) to suit the breeze. In gradually increasing wind, the mizzen might come down to lighten the helm. In a squall, we drop the main and stay in comfortable control under jib and jigger. Under this rig, she will go to windward in 15 or 20 knots with just a little weather helm, broad reach with almost neutral helm, and self steer indefinitely downwind with the mizzen broad off and the jib flattened in.

An unexpected but welcome bonus is that when anchored by her long snout, the windage in the house and mizzenmast makes her lie to the wind like an arrow, whereas catboats are known to wander restlessly at anchor.

Engineering was fairly straightforward. The main boom was raised (to clear the housetop) and shortened (to clear the mizzen). Sawsall holes accommodate the mizzenmast, bowsprit, and bumpkin. The latter can be removed for trailering, and the 'sprit just clears the towing vehicle. But we would make it retractable, if we had it to do over.

The now spars are Schedule 10 aluminum pipe, fitted with tapered Douglas fir inserts to complete the finished lengths and help fool the eye, while providing meat for sheaves, eyebolts, anchor rollers, and so on. The mizzen steps easily by hand. It can be temporarily relocated to a special hole in the foredeck (which doubles as the anchor rode deck pipe) where it serves as a ginpole for stepping the main.

Finally, the sailmaker gets into the act. Since my business is making traditional sails, the suit for the new rig presented no unusual difficulties. We chose Egyptian Dacron for a good color scheme, and because it has a nice, moderately soft hand. The full battens may look modem, but Nat Herreshoff used them on a little cat yawl of his own way back when. They help flatten and control the very-low-aspect main and make it stack neatly in the lazyjacks. This is also ideal for the mizzen, which must be kept very flat when sailing and when left standing at anchor. A half-wishbone sprit boom controls mizzen shape on all points of sail. The jib furls on its own braided Dacron luff rope, which acts as a forestay.

Would we do it again? It was exciting work making dramatic changes, spiced with moments of delicious anticipation and delicious satisfaction when we got what we hoped for. The final product is a great, very small cruising machine, in which we have prowled both shores and many tributaries of the bay, sailing in comfort and safety, holding our own with bigger boats in fair weather and foul (we take shortcuts), yet coming to anchor in the marshes while the bigger boats tough it out with the crowds.

In between all the fun, we had the grubwork of any restoration: things like removing 25 years of bottom paint; repairing centerboards and rudders, coamings and rubrails; cleaning, sanding, and refinishing everything; rebedding everything.

We might have been spared much of this work if we started with a younger, well-maintained hull. But who would take a Sawsall to a Bristol-condition late-model boat, even if they could afford it'? Much better to do surgery in good conscience when the patient is already teetering on the brink.

Would we do it again" Well, ah ... actually, we are doing it again. It's the fault of a friend who had a Marshall 22 catboat (twice the displacement of the 18-footer, but only 6" more draft). He had an epiphany of some kind and all at once wanted to move to the mountains. His house sold out from under him before he had a chance to advertise the boat. Would we ... as a favor ... at a distress price...?

"She's 30 years old," he said, "but basically sound, except for a few little things..." She's got that solid old pre-blister hull, but rot in the cockpit and splits in the rail. Corroded throughhulls and rusted up steering system. Busted hatches. Tired sail. And, believe it or not, you can't sit upright below'. Just our meat. No reason why not to take a Sawsall to the poor old dear and trans mogrify her a little.


November 15, 2001

Navigation Instruments Through the Ages

By Robb White

This is not going to go all the way back to the astrolabe butjust through the ages I have been na\,i,,atin,, in. When I was a little boy, my father, an old Naval Academy officer (class of '29, resigned his commission right after graduation, ran off to the Caribbean, begged his way back in in '41, and was the oldest Ensign in the Navy during the war) thought that it was his duty to teach me celestial navigation. Jesus, what a misery. We didn't even have the wonderful Mary Bluet book from which I finally actually figured it out. I don't remember anything at all about his lessons, or what the bell all those enormous books were, or anything but how the sextant smelled (terrible, sort of a combination of brass. urine, and vomit), and to this day I have a strong aversion to figuring out exactly where I am.

Don't get me wrong now, I'm a navigator and can go anyplace I want to go in a boat, but itjust ain't an exact thing with me like it is with these sextant bearing yachtsmen who, after a little bout of the blind-staggers and a lot of page flipping and pencil work will make a declarative statement and put a mark on the chart that don't make any sense at all to a man who has been watching the progress of the boat.

I don't like to be mean, but you know, that little bit of narcissism with the sextant is just as obsolete as the display of a 2' long, belt-mount slide rule by engineering students. Now any fool can buy a calculator for $4.95 and tell you the cosine of the sales tax on any object in the Super Wal-Mart, and whip out the $99.95 GPS from its belt-mount camouflage case and tell you exactly where you are, accurate to 20' any place on the planet and, I guess, outer space if they have any longitudes and latitudes out there. I don't want to be a skeptic, but I wonder why the difference in price, a GPS looksjust like a calculator inside and out, just doesn't have as many buttons is al1.

The whole advancing of civilization stupifies me. I guess we just have to have it all, a cell phone ringing in every pocketbook and a beeper vibrating on every belt (makes a man act the same way as if he just got bit by a tick), and the whole world fit up by strobe lights. I remember when they invented Zebco-style, backlash-proof fishing reels. My father was aghast, "Goddammit," he said "now any fool can throw a plug just as well as me." Now with the GPS, any fool can go anywhere in a boat, if he can keep it running and on top of the water. Of course, they already could do that, what with these cursed, heavily insured, bare-boat charter outfits. You don't need anything but credit card skills to be sipping on the toddy in the cockpit in Bora Bora, captain in charge, of somebody else's boat.

I got all that disgruntlement out of the way so I can get to the cheerful part of navigation through the ages. My first high-tech navigation instrument was a Heathkit radio direction finder that I put together when I was in the Navy. Wow, what a gratifying thing.

I soldered all those little doo-dads together according to the wonderfully clear instructions, put all eight of those C cells into the battery box, switched on a few of the switches, and immediately got the melodious, crooning, sing-song, excessively aspirant and sibilant bleat of the preacher on one of those extremely powerful, 24-hour radio stations that these big deal missionary Baptist churches back in the states patronizingly sponsor in heathen Catholic lands like Puerto Rico. It was a religious experience for me. I turned the little knob that rotated the stylish antenna on top and found out just exactly in which direction that preacher lay (might have been a lay preacher). I have taken that old radio many miles with me in many boats through the ages, and it has never failed to lead me down the true path of some radio station.

There are all sorts of instructions about how to triangulate and navigate with an RDF, but to me the best way is to find a regular AM radio station and follow the beam until you get to something you recognize. AM radio stations are getting scarce nowadays, WPAX in Thomasville, Georgia, since 1922 is still around and available all over the world at www.wpax.com. Of course, WPAX hardly beams outside the county, and they haven't got it so you can navigate on the Internet quite yet, but while you are punching in the WPTs and the LMs and trying to figure out how to eliminate all the erroneous entries into the ROUTE, you can listen to WPAX on the computer.

They have a real live disc jockey and newsman most of the time, but the best thing is the Jack Wingate Show at ten minutes 'til seven AM. Jack is an old, retired fishing guide on Lake Seminole and is kind of like me, knows a lot and don't mind letting it out. To follow the beam, you are supposed to hunt the position of the antenna that makes the signal the weakest ("null"), and I did that every now and then just to check my compass course but usually, if the station is a good one, I let it play and listen. I have spent many a tranquil night in the wheelhouse of a tug all by myself listening to such a variety of songs as would boggle the mind.

One of my favorites is, "The World is a Bad Place... A Sad Place... A Terrible Place To Live... But I Don't Want To Die." One time, coming back from the Bahamas (which you don't need any navigation aid but common sense to do that) in my old, raggedy sailboat, I listened all night long to the G. Gordon Liddy talk show. What a jerk. Just shows to go you what a little fame can do to a man. I am going to start being careful. I have to let you in on something. Now, I don't use anything to navigate with but a compass. Of course I don't make too many transoceanic voyages. I know that it is interesting to know how far you have gone and what your ETA and CNIG is and all, but really, if you eyeball what is happening to you and adjust to suit, you will get somewhere after a while. The boats I cross the big water with now are easy money compared to a tow of barges behind a tug which sometimes sits for days and hammers on the same piece of water and drifts no-telling-where during a mean norther.

All the seagoing tugs I have been on always navigate with nothing but a compass, and radar which, in my opinion, is the best navigation instrument ever put on a boat. Of course, the little Frisbee-style Furuno up on the twitching mast of a sailboat or 15' off the water on the flying bridge of the sport's fisherman ain't actually all that useful compared to that 5' wide sweeping antenna of the big old vacuum-tube Raytheon that will make the hair stand up on your head when you are up on top of the wheelhouse changing light bulbs. The tugs that cross the Gulf of Mexico from the refineries in Texas and the Delta to feed the insatiable gas appetite of the peninsula of Florida all steer by the compass and try to keep track of what is happening and adjust the course until they see what they are looking for on the radar. After about 10,000 trips it sort of comes natural. Of course, when you are pulling 100,000 barrels of diesel fuel and have enough water to keep the salt rinsed off the boat, a dedicated cook, and plenty of porno magazines, a little extra time wandering around en route ain't all that significant.

I wonder about these Liberian and Panamanian super tankers. I bet anything that, when they clear the Cape of Good Hope, they set the auto pilot on about 3200 and go down to the rec room and look at the naked ladies for a couple of weeks until it is time to come up and check on the radar for the Gulf of Mexico. Probably get crossed up all the time too.

"That don't look like Cuba to me," the first mate might say to the second mate. "You ever been to New Jersey?"

"Naw, better go try to sober up Captain Hazelwood."

I always took my RDF to sea, if for nothing else, just for the company.

It is not in my nature to brag too much, but I must have done a pretty good soldering job way back in 1960 because I still have the old Heathkit RDF. I keep it over at the coast house all the time now, and Jane and I make a ritual of listening to the Prairie Home Companion every Saturday night (have to keep retuning FM stations, AFC, automatic frequency control, hadn't been invented when that thing was made). Boy, that's living large ain't it'? The old radio still plays and will point out just where what you are listening to (if it is AM) is coming from, too. I even try to tune up the little dit-dit-daaa-daaa-daaa Morse code from almost extinct radio beacons every now and then just for old-times sake, but YVWL in New Orleans has gone to hell in a hand basket.

The other day, we were wheeling down to the coast in my old Mercedes with the skiff coming along behind when we passed a Yard Sale sign at one of the retirement communities along the way. One time, at one of those things, I bought an electric fired, hot water heater element style, cast iron, water radiator that has been most satisfactory as the only heat at all in the bedroom of our otherwise unbeatable coast house, so I keep my eyes open because we have two bedrooms. Guess what, I found an antique, complete, obsolete Heathkit radio direction finder just like mine, unassembled, "new in the box." Dang. I walked off and left it. I already got me a good working RDF.



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