CVG

If you have a sail for your boat you will not get very far if you do not also have a mast from which to fly your sail.
Back in the day I rowed out to Valino Island in South Slough by where we lived and I chopped down a little Port Orford Cedar. Bad girl, yes, but fuck you it was a long time ago. And actually I did not chop it down, I used a hand saw. The thing was maybe ten or twelve feet tall and three inches in diameter. After I got all the bark off, and let me say the Port Orford Cedar smells like the better neighborhoods in heaven, and sanded it down a couple coats of boiled linseed oil made a wonderful soft smooth stick of wood for my  spritsail I made fron Kmart nylon.
Unfortunately Hayden Island does not have any Cedar Trees, only stupid mcrooked-ass cottonwoods. Which also smell wonderful when they are in leaf, but the wood is lousy for making shit.
And as defiant as I might think myself, I'm really pretty tame and I wasn't, in the end, attracted to the pirate logger solution. even though there is a Red Cedar grove alongside Hwy 30 between St Helens and Rainier.
Last Sunday my pal Maggi and I ran around North Portland to look at salvaged lumber at a couple of places and Lo and Behold there was, at the Salvage Center where Harvey Hardcock used to work, a pair of clear vertical grain old-growth Douglas Fir 3x4 sixteen feet, or as close as makes no difference, perfectly knot-free straight grain perfectly cured and dry for perhaps a hundred years.

There's 20 grains to the inch.Those are nail marks near the layout lines, after all , this beam held up somebody's beaverboard front porch ceiling for many years. You can fill them with  a splinter and some glue and call it a dowel and feel quite properly bloated with your skills.

This is an amazing thing to find. This shit takes a thousand years to grow, and there just isn't any more of it being cut.
And nobody in their right mind made 3x4, even though that is exactly what you need to make a proper pair of oars unless you want a glue joint down the middle. And there is a mast in the other piece as well.
These mugs at the Salvage Center, cleaning and warehousing building material donated for recycling by all kinds of cool leftwing Portlanders, aren't in this for the money, because they only asked for a dollar a lineal foot. I would have paid five, and you would pay 7 or 8 if you could find it new in a specialty yard like Crosscuts or Woodcrafters.

In my infinite vanity I imagine myself capable of makeing a mast and pair of oars using only hand tools!
The mast, 11 feet long, round in cross-section, 2 3/4 inches in diameter at the partners tapering to 1 3/4 at the tip and butt, will require approximately 48 feet of ripsawing with an ordinary carpenter's handsaw/
Last night I laid out the first two full-lengh side cuts, and later on I got out my new old handsaw and I went to work. Unfortunately my rate of cut is about one foot an hour.

I will be looking for a saw-sharpening service quite soon. There used to be an old retired logger or two in every town in Oregon with a little sign on his garage who amused himself with an excuse to put on his hickory shirt and stagged-off tin pants and dip snoose and spit in the garage all day. There don't seem to be many of those guys left.

And that's not even counting the work with the jack plane to make it round, and, please, shut up about the oars.
 It's going to be a long winter.

PS EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide strip of the walnut dyed canvas, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later. (Actually this was on the 29th Oct)

EDIT2: Nov 15th There's little black spots of mildew on the untreated piece of canvas on the windowsill. I can't tell if the other one, the treated sample, the walnut dye-job, has any or not because of the color. I willl give it a few more days and then break the seal and really try to make a determination.

EDIT 3: Nov 24th I took the dyed brown strip out of its bag today and it looks like it is finally getting a bit of mildew started. I dont think it was there on the 22 when last I looked.
The undyed strip has a lot more mildew spots now but it used up all the moisture. I think my point is proven, that the dye inhibits frungal growth, but it doesn't stop it completely...more later...

Treatment

Mixture for rope treatment

In a 4 qt copper-bottom saucepan floating in a big pan of water on medium heat.

Commode wax 47 grams

50 cc kerosene

50 cc turpentine

30 cc pine tar mixture.

10 minutes warm to touch, wax beginning to dissolve

20 minutes quite hot wax dissolved with vigorous stirring

heat off

I dipped the 6 strand round sinnet halyard/laceline which absorbed readily the hot mixture. I squeezed the rope through my gloved fingers, draining the excess back into the pan.

I likewise dipped the snotter and mangled off the excess.

The last thing was the twin fox nettles on the big pully block.

There was approx 30-50 cc of mixture remaining, which I put back into the small pine-tar can.

I put the treated lines in a cardboard tray and set it on the toilet with the exhaust fan left running. Cleanup was with paper towels which I put out in the dumpster.

I put the canvas rags in a double ziploc in with the rest of the stinky stuff to offgas the volatiles.

This stuff had stink like a tar-baby, eye-watering pine smell, like that time at computer school where the substitute had a germ phobia and scrubbed all the keyboards with pine-sol. I shut the batrroom door and ran the exhaust fan all day while I was out.

Then I broke out that wax commode ring, what was left of it anyway.

See the way I did the braided ropes by separating the yarns it made all the fibers stick out from the rope all fuzzy, and dipping it in the pine-tar solution did not help. All the pine tar went into the body of the braid nice and dark but the fuzz was still there. So I gooped up some of the ring-wax, which is soft and sticky, and smeared the wax into that fuzzy looking sinnet and guess what it worked just fine and lathered the fuzz down just right and it made it look like some kind of industrial leather substitute. I was a bit worried that it would rub off on my hands and clothes and stuff but it is just fine. 

I hereby declare this process a success.

Then last night I had a dream that I was in Donald Trump's apartment and he had let loose a gorilla to get me, a big old silverback, and I was scared as shit, but just then this big kangaroo got the gorilla from behind in a headlock, a rear naked choke, and the gorilla passed right out, collapsed out cold or dead even maybe, I didn't stick around to find out.

Dye Happy

We have been having some  fun over at my house..
Issue being that canvas and hemp rope are both notoriously susceptible to mildew and rot. Ideal culture medium, really. So over the years the people who dealt with it daily developed strategies to cope with its shortcomings and avoid some of the worst of the damage.
They generally used rope infused with pine tar during the spinning process although that reduces the strength of the rope by about 20%. It keeps the moisture out of the fibers and also inhibits the fungi somewhat from growing in the fibers. So as long as they didn't get stupid, and they allowed the ropes to dry out as much as possible before closing it away for storage, the rope lasted a reasonably long time. And used worn out rope was also a valuable commodity. Virtually all paper was made from old rope until some Canadian asshole figured out how to get fiber for paper out of wood chips. Our old friend Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, took the process to industrial scale and then cornered the market in wood pulp for his English newspapers but I digress.

The canvas is a different story, they couldn't do the tar process because of the added weight and the smaller coastal and fishing vessels developed a tanning process that turns the canvas a nice reddish brown, I'm sure you have all seen the sentimentalist pictures  in magazines.
Me, I'm wondering if that actually works, so yesterday I did an experiment. I didn't have any tanbark handy, so I went over to Lincoln High School and picked up a couple baggies full of green walnuts with husks still on. A bit awkward, me in my giant orange hazmat gloves, kids everywhere, but nobody seemed to mind me scurrying around the lawn gathering shit up.

Frozen husks from a dozen nut-balls. Need I say more?

 I did take the actual nuts out, a nasty business, there is so much tannin in the husks that they color everything it touches and I did remember to wear my hazmat gloves and I got away without much damage.
I did a bit of prep, washing the squares of canvas samples with Joy detergent, and dried them in the oven, and then boiled them an hour in an alum/baking soda pre-mordant fixative. Then dried again in the oven on low.

What a mess! Every time I checked the canvas sample the shit went all over the stove. I had a painters strainer bag left overt from when me and Terry were making hashish

Crowning achievement was a three hour boil with a screen-bag of husks, and when I was tired and absolutely bored I declared science satisfied and drained, rinsed and dried the sample.

I'm not perfectly satisfied with the colorIt is nice and brown, though. More mordant might help. Thanksgiving I'm going down to Mel and Jims in the Siskyou Mts and they say there's lots of oak trees and I can chop off some bark.I don't care so much about the color, as the effect on mildew.

Next is to fuck with the tar and the rope. Pine tar is quite stinky and so is turpentine, so I am a little  bit leery
of doing very much of this shit in my apartment, and then it has to dry and off-gas for a while so the tar gets dried out and wont get all over everything it touches, but I am notorious for, in the end, not really giving a shit about the niceties when science is to be served. I might be a queer but I'm no sissy...
We shall see.

EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide satrip of this sample, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later.

A Funny Thing--Details

MY hair is falling out like a bastard maniac. It is everywhere, on my clothing , the furniture, the floor. The little rivets on my purse are perfect little hair harvesters, every time the sunlight catches it there is a silver penumbra of strands hovering about.
The Interferon is out of my system, but the effects are more lasting. I'm not really complaining, it is a fine thing to be free of the disgusting consequences of my young stupid innocence.

But that is not the funny thing itself.

 I got some bullshit fake manila from China/Ebay,  probably not even real Manila which is supposed to be made from Abaca Banana leaves, it smells stinky like creosote and it is rough as a cob, and I didn't want to use it for a bolt-rope, and why should I when I have learned myself how to make the real thing.

After all the processes were processed and the jacks were all back in their boxes I could see why the old-timers could spend hours and days and lifetimes handling hemp rope and the scraps and shreds of yarns. The stuff is beautiful.

This here hempen rope project is moving right along and reaching a stage of confidence and completion.
Hemp is a natural fiber, the European variety producing longer strands, which is what I have been using, but they start and stop throughout the length of the yarns, and when you look close the effect is a bit shaggy.

I am thoroughly hooked on the process as well as the product, but the closer you look, the drinker you smoke, and the player you get. Or something. I had to make myself stop and go to bed last night at one AM.

So last night I was putting the finishing touches on my new bolt-rope and terribly satisfied with the product, inordinately proud of myself,  when the light caught it just right and I saw where the hemp had, over the several days of working with the jig and the spacer in my apartment and dragging back and forth across the tile floor, the fibers of the rope had pretty effectively swept up about a metric dick-load of cast-off hairs and the entire length of hemp had a halo of silver hair radiating like accompanying angels.

This stuff feels like it is alive in your hand, soft and strong and cunning. A pass through a flame and it will be just right. Stinky, although I cannot recall a more agreeable stench.

But I have read the literature.

What the authorities say to do, if your rope has shaggy bits, is to singe them off like you do when you pluck the Christmas Goose. So that is what I did. Now my apartment stinks of burning hair, which is fine, I am overwhelmed with the stuff and you can't get rid of it so it might as well burn it, and burning hair does stink. .  And so does burning hemp.

1968, when this was taken, was one thing, but the following summer there was no pot to be had in San Francisco. I remember in particular one night out at Morningstar Ranch in upper outer Marin County stripping stems and smashing seeds and not getting high, not really, even though we thought we might, and we said we did,  a little anyway. I woke up with a very sore throat but I dropped acid anyway.

And Oh Lord that pungent smell takes me back. To the summer of '69, the great reefer drought, smoking the stems, when we all sat around and dug out the rolling box, and stripped all the skin off the stems left over, and the entire west coast stunk to  high heaven of burning marijuana sticks limbs and branches, the stink of it now in my apartment and I associate that sharp sour smell with panhandling for  gallon jugs of Red Mountain wine, and with the soul mystery of patchouli oil, and my god that was half a century ago. A peculiar smell will do that,  take you right back to the day, as if time had stood still..I had such hope then...I was so very young.

This is actually the waiting room at the free clinic but it reminds me of every crash pad in the Haight.

Looks Easy

This shit is hard. Making hemp rope.
I get all sweaty and OCD driven and when I am out there past the very edge of what I know how to do out in the shit I have thought about and think I have the idea but have never actually done. It is a terrifying and lonely place. And then somehow it starts to resemble something I recognize and I start to have hope once again. Which alternates with despair until the thing is over and done with.
I used to think it was the crank that made me like that but I am just the same at 12 years clean. Utterly absorbed, concentrating to the point where I actually start to drool and I have to remember to close my mouth and swallow.

Bob came up last week and we made some railroad sinnet, a simple two-strand affair made out of spun yarn, hemp in this case. It was not as easy as it looked in the diagram, and I had to make some adjustments and tighten shit up quite a bit but we got a 40 foot chunk of usable material.

They call it railroad sinnett because it is two yarns paralell but twisted. That's the scrap of it with green tape on the end. You make baggywrinkle out of it by tucking bits of chopped off rope yarn scrap between the strands.

Thursday I made another one by myself, which is harder in a way, but also easier because I didn't have to explain anything or verbalize anything I could just work with my hands hardwired to my imagination. Nice. Later on Friday I got some cedar scraps out of the junkbin at Parr Lumber and I made a new jig with some improvements, which was actually slightly easier to use. I have to be careful, a lot of times it's not the machine, it's the operator.

This jig is bigger than  the first one, separating the hooks and thus the strands a bit more so they dont get all up in each others shizzness. You can see the elements still hooked over the spinner hooks.

So today I finally got my nuts up and I went downstairs to the yard behind our building where there is sufficient room to spread this shit out and I hooked it all up and started to try and actually make some rope, and once again Iwas out there past all familiar landscape and into the agony of facing whether or not I am full of delusional bullshit, a not unknown outcome, and it is only the fact that it was really threatening to rain that I had to break off and come inside, project begun. Project far from completion, though.

At first the yarns want to be like they always do, it's a habit of shape, and it takes a minute for the fibers to wake up and realize things have changed and then to relax into the new shape.I know how they feel. This is the glob of interrupted project I am left to try and not fuck with until I get a chance to spread it out again outside.

 The spun yarn is left-hand laid, the twist is anti-clockwise. So when you twist it into sinnet it comes out right-laid. Fine. Then when you twist the 3 elements of sinnet together it come out in what they call left-laid cable, which is rope made out of twisted elements of more than one strand. So I have a bit of left-laid 3-strand Hungarian hemp cable-laid rope for the edges of my spritsail.

This here is what it is supposed to look like and I for one think it looks the real old-time article and will be a fine thing to have on the boat. I will get more mileage bragging about how I did it than I will out of the sail itself.

I think it will work OK in the end, its big enough around and feels quite strong but I will tell you this one thing, it is a lot harder than I thought it would be and it does not come together by itself. At first it was like "Oh fuck me this ain't working"and it just kind of lays there in a kind of unhealthy-looking gob  but when I started to fuck with it in that particular desperate kind of "don't do this to me" way lo and behold, it actually began to look like rope, and then, miracle, to actually BE actual rope.
We were very happy.

So What?

The word for the work one does with a needle, thread and cloth does not look like a comfortable thing to say or do. Sew. It always threw me when I was a kid and to this day when I am reading to myself I pronounce it like the past tense of flight. Sew.

Everything wants to separate and run amok despite a lot of tape and some pins. After this side is done, about 11 feet down the road, you have to turn the whole affair upside down and do it again. There was a guy on every sailing ship who sat on a bench and did this shit 14 hours a day every day of every very long and bouncy voyage.

But already I am bored with the part of the river  to which I have access and the parts farther downriver, with all the wild islands and salt marshes and sandy beaches seem like they would be worth the effort of going  down there in the dory. In 1992 I did just that, rowed my similar sized skiff down to Astoria. I had a wonderful time but I said to myself never again. I wound up with the most amazing strawberry blisters on the cheeks of the part I sit down on that took months to heal.
But I do love camping out in the wild places on the river.

One thing I know now that I was ignorant of back then is the extent of the flood current on the Lower Columbia once the rains stop and the dammers quit messing with reservoir levels. The flood current flows quite usefully strong for many hours each and every tide.
So if a person got down to the fun parts of the river around, say,  Tensillahe Island or the Prairie Channel and wanted to come home she might just be able to do that with patience and a careful reading of the tide tables. But it would be easier considerably if she had a little sprit sail rigged up to take advantage of the inevitable and inescapable sea-breeze that blows all summer long, which would theoretically scoot you right along on pretty much a dead run the whole time. You wouldn't even need a centerboard.

I disconnected the TV cable service back when I bought the sailboat, and I just got out of the habit of watching my $900 LCD HDTV. Which makes it a fairly expensive canvas rack. Actually I was delighted to have found a use for it.

The summer wind made itself painfully apparent as the days got hotter and the wind blew stronger  straight upriver very nearly 24 hours a day. Whether I wanted it to or not. There would be a bend in the river and I would think to myself "Oh boy it will be blowing acrossways now " but nooo, the wind bended too and there it was, dead against me there too, no matter the actual direction I was heading. It was almost personal. Every waking minute of the time it blew like a mad bastard and all I could do was to jog into it and let the current carry me toward my goal. Westbound.
And from Astoria I loaded up the skiff on its little trailer and drove back to Portland in an hour and a half.
Returning Eastbound, up-current,  in the dory, would very likely be a horse of a very different and possibly very interesting color. Under sail, that is, taking advantage of the flood current and the prevailing wind.
Which brings us to the present, and
New Sail Project Time.
My good pal  Maggi drove us out to the fabric depot last week and I came home eventually with 9 yards of 10 oz canvas duck and I got a book, Skiffs and Schooners by Pete Culler, an old-time shipwright and widgeon of the dockside that tells the old ways of small craft and I am lining out and beginning to produce a sprit sail for the dory. The canvas is very satisfying to work with, the smooth strong feel of it in the hand and the way the fat smooth needle pops through even 3 or 4 thicknesses of it, and it looks like I might have occupation for a fairly long winter agreeably employed and thoroughly amused.

The only place with enough open floor is outside my front door in the hall fortunately I live at the end of the ell so nobody has to walk past.  I measured a good many times before I cut the cloth, heart pounding with sheer terror . But it seems, so far, to be correctly laid out.

To top that off, Friday when I was climbing up to the bus stop out by the marina, where I had just finished winter-wrapping the dory in a 20 foot canvas tarpaulin bound in place with approximately a half a metric shit-ton of miscelaneous manila line and dacron tuna cord, there on the yellow line of highway 30 lay a full roll of hempen cordage twine. Methought, you know, I will need a bolt-rope for this sail and what better than to hand-make some rope out of this stuff. All rope amounts to little more than many strands of just such twine twisted together, and you can't really get high-quality manila any more. I've seen it made, and it isn't any big mystery.

Like Tom Sawyer I never do anything by half measures. I must make some rope. About a mile of it, apparently. The spool in the upper left is the "objet trouve"

They had more twine at the Third Eye joint over on hawthorn, and my big brother is making me a little cedar twisting device and I shall be happy to post some process photos when the time comes.

Mother Dear

Our sainted mother, Louise Francis Bailey, turned 92 years old this past Monday. The four of us sibs, Marilyn, Suzy, Bob and I took her out to a very nice dinner at Lark's, in the Ashland Springs Hotel.
The staff were attentive and kind, young folks who worked hard and paid attention to the whole room, not just us.

That's Bob in the background. I tell you the old girl has not lost her sense of humor. Back in the day Bob and I could bring her to tears pretty much at will when we got going goofing around.

Mom doesn't walk so good these days, and when the hostess saw us hobbling up the sidewalk at such a painful pace she unlocked a secret side door and brought us in that way saving a good deal of effort. That set the tone.
The food was very very good, kind of local-source nouvelle-europo, I'm told the wine was outstanding, and they even scraped up a fake beer for me, which was pretty good, too, even if I did leave half of it in the glass, a thing that was absolutely unknown before  my apotheosis.
The staff and even all the other diners sang Happy Birthday as they brought out a little cake with a candle, and there was a round of  applause from the whole room when Mom took a very matter-of-fact deep breath and then casually blew the candle right on out.

Sister Suzy on the left, she lives in LA, Marilyn in the middle, an Ashlander, and Betsy Bailey who is Bob's wife were as thrilled as I was when the cake came around...

We finished and the little plastic cards and the cash came out, and then, content with our evening, we bade good-bye to each other on the sidewalk, and the three of us Northerners hopped in Bob's bright red diesel Golf and flew on back to Salem, where I, for one, slept like a happy little log.