Like a Drunk in a Midnight Choir

I was going to clean the fridge.

I was going to dig back into its formidable recesses and toss forgotten margarine tubs of spaghetti sauce and God forsaken mustard pickles into the garbage can’s gaping maw.

Then I was going to scrub every damn inch of the thing with bleach.

And then…

Well then I was going to go for a long walk and camp out beside a largely derelict rail bed in Cape Breton and watch it all fall down, one crisp leaf at a time.

But I didn’t do any of that last week.

Despite having off work what was perhaps the most beautiful week of fall we’ve had in recent years.

Instead I spent it crawling around on my hands and knees wearing out seven pencils along with the erasers of twenty more.

“She’s humongous!” declared Sawyer, 5, when I brought him and Gus into the shed on Sunday morning – first requesting they remove their shoes.

And she is, relatively humongous.

There’s been a change of plan.

I dropped Iain Oughtred’s lovely Rhoan Mhor for Paul Gartside’s ‘Longshot’.

It was about being honest with myself.

Firstly, I’m greedy.

With the extension I had room for a bigger boat. Longshot is 29 feet long by 11 wide.

Secondly, I am not a sailor.

The Rhoan Mhor has the elegant lines of a perfect sailor.

But I want to explore the Gulf of St. Lawrence with my boys and my friends.

A motor sailor, designed for coastal ‘gunkholing’ with a closed in cabin, is a better fit for our purposes.

So I spent my non-boy duty days lofting her out full size on the shed floor.

In Newfoundland Skipper Ray taught me to build boats by eye. You layed the keel, cut the stem from the grown timbers you had to a curve that suited your purposes and created your midship bend and transom from experience. Then you ran battens from stem to stern along one side, pushing and pulling till some part of your mind told you she was right for the water she’d face.

The top imagine, along with structural lines for each member of ‘Long Shot’s’ backbone is what is drawn on the shed’s floor from which I now must make molds and templates.

Now Ray also knew how to loft out a boat according to the plans of a marine architect – he’d done it many times building longliners to fish the Labrador.

But we didn’t cover that in my apprenticeship in his shop on a hill overlooking St. Anthony’s harbor.

Hence the box of erasers worn down and swept up on my shed floor.

“Yes b’y, go for it,” he said during one of our many late night phone calls to support the bigger boat.

I’m not sure if it’s that after 85 years you do a lot more of looking back at life’s missed chances than the one’s taken, but he’s in full support of a return to Labrador too.

The new design will require more lumber. But I’ve got permission to cut 14 Tamarack (Juniper to Newfoundlanders and larch to Americans) left in a clear cut and a friend with a Gator offering to help haul them out. Forest grown with few knots, they’ll make good plank. The black locusts Addie Doucette let me cut and Archie Mackenzie milled should handle the keel and ribs. I still have all that black spruce too.

After a week’s drawing lines around battens I think I’ve got the giant game of paint by numbers that is lofting about right.

I can thank Bud McIntosh’s ‘How to Build a Wooden Boat’ along with a few calls to skipper Ray for that.

With her eight foot bowsprit, big stem, bulwarks and gaff rig, ‘Long shot’ is a hell of a dream.

She’s about running with or along the wind.

And when’s it’s on your nose, you fire up the diesel and steam into it.

Paul Gartside designed her for an inmate jailed in Carson City who wanted to savor his pending freedom by exploring the coast of Maine and up into Nova Scotia.

Apparently marine architects frequently get letters written in pencil on lined loose-leaf paper from inmates dreaming of freedom.

Of course they do.

I’ve been pondering that thought while crawling around with pencil and batten this week.

How when the bars are extended to metaphor, so many of the oddities of human behavior can be explained if not completely understood.

Which raised questions for myself.

But nowhere could I find that I feel behinds bars.

I just like building stuff.

And I’d like a few adventures along the way.

“And by the time she’s done I’ll be able to drive her,” was Sawyer’s second sentence after seeing ‘Long shot’ lofted out.

“Sounds about right,” was my response.

It’s hard to see the pencil lines from this angle, but she’s there.