THE JOURNEYMAN PAPERS

- continued Tenakee Springs, Alaska, April 2, 2008

I have just re-read George Lowe’s narrative about JOURNEYMAN and I am challenged to do as well.
It is now 2008, Wendy and I have had her for eight years and it is time for her to move along. A big reason for going to the effort of writing what follows is the hope that it will help her find the best possible next berth. She is an old girl and her garters may be sagging a bit and, though she is seldom admired by the young men, she still fetches many a lecherous glance from someone closer to her own age. I owe her this.

First a word about the boat and what I know and have learned about her. JOURNEYMAN is what they meant when they coined the term “good old boat”. She ain’t grand and she ain’t new any more but she is a damn fine, well built, capable boat with lots of years left in her. As George said in his little piece, she has several important things going for her. First of all, Bill Garden drew her and let’s face it, Bill Garden didn’t draw no ugly boats, nor any boats that didn’t do what they were meant to do. JOURNEYMAN was intended to take two people cruising Northwest waters in comfort and safety with minimum attention to cosmetic maintenance. She will hold a year's supply of food staples with none of it in sight. She will handle rough weather and she always draws the most interesting people where she docks. It is one of our lasting regrets that we never made it to one of the annual “Garden Parties” at his place on the B.C. coast.

After that comes the materials used in her. She’s wood and she’s 55 years old now and still sound. At the last haul-out we pulled a few fastenings and they were fine. It is just now coming to be recognized that yellow cedar is a premium boat building wood...perhaps even super premium when it comes to longevity. Perhaps even our American equal of teak.

Unfortunately, we know nothing about Mr. Dinius who built her. It does not appear that he was a professional boat builder but he did a good job on JOURNEYMAN. The Irish felt deck covering should be on a next owner’s list but it’s been more than fifty years! Those 2 3/8 inch side deck harpins are solid and the knees holding them will crack your noggin.

As George mentioned, a lot of the credit goes to Garden for designing in all that ventilation. Soon after we bought her I was showing her off to an old-timer friend, a guy so salty, as they say, that he pisses seawater. We were below and he gently interrupted my bragging by pointedly sniffing and saying that he already knew she was clean of any serious rot.

Without straining strict rationality I think that it is also safe to say that she has had a charm on her. We may know nothing about Mr. Dinius but Doc Freeman? If you’ve spent more than ten attentive minutes on the Seattle waterfront you know that the Freeman family is now in its fourth generation of a symbiotic relationship with boats. It seems that she went through a series of owners after Doc and I was unable to learn anything about them but it looks like someone cared enough to document her. (Names and old addresses are in the file for anyone who wants to try harder than I did.) Her last owner before George is said to have been a boat builder in Port Townsend but he either let her go to pot or maybe never got around to doing the things she needed by then. In any case, when I talked to him after we bought her, he confessed that she had sunk at the dock some days before the sale was closed. George wasn’t kidding about being able to see through the seams.

Then came George Lowe, to whom I give the credit of saving her life. George is one of those guys who love to fix up old boats. Remember the character Henri in Steinbeck’s CANNERY ROW? God bless them one and all. George was the attentive lover that she needed just then. It was he who brought her up to the standards of the time, who caught up on a couple of decades of neglect and who just pain injected money and energy into her before it was too late. He made only a couple of long voyages in her but he “used” her nevertheless. When we bought her she was berthed within sight of his Lake Union home. I had the impression that he fussed over her like a mistress.

Then along came Wendy and I, looking for the boat to take us north to stay. Like George, we had been sailors — the last a ‘50’s teak ketch bought as a derelict but a head- turner when we sold her - now we needed a multi-purpose boat to live on indefinitely, to fish from, to haul supplies and to pull logs off the beach. George makes light of the sound of that 353 Detroit. It was impossible. We bought her on the bet that we could quiet it down. At first we couldn’t evenuse the VHF unless we throttled back. I was charmed by it. “Run forever,” everyone said. “In half the fishing boats out there,” others said. “Slobber oil? Oh. they all do that,” the mechanics said. Then later, “Quiet them down? Easy, just turn it off”

Mark Freeman, Doc’s son and a man my age now, sent us to their house mechanic and he and I spent the better part of a month in, on and under her at Seaview East boatyard in Seattle. What George has to say about Lockhaven, I can second for Seaview and Adair James. Adair did a “major tune-up” on the Detroit. We re-placed every hose and pipe and lots of the wires. We added two saddle fuel tanks and a proper house battery bank. We got rid of what GM laughingly called a silencer but should more truly be called a resonator on the Detroit. We sound deadened everything and ducted intake air from under the aft cockpit and when we were through it was quiet at last. Later, Wendy found a nice piece of carpet, which, together with a sound barrier pad, made it really quiet.

I like black boats and we were headed for one of the few places in the world where you can get away with black as a boat color so we stripped her down and painted her black. We gave her late twentieth century electronics: radar, sounder, hand-held GPS, a proper VHF and a good chart drawer.

In 2001 we loaded her up with a year’s supply of staples, said goodbye to everyone we knew in Puget Sound and headed her north intending to find a place to settle out Three weeks later we were glad we had taken out the line of credit. The Detroit would not quit slobbering oil. Adair, at long distance, was at a loss and we were in Port McNeil, BC where we knew a good mechanic from a previous tragedy with a Volvo MD2. “It’s the crank case pan, “he said. “It’s been down in the bilge water for so long that it’s all pitted.” And so began the slippery slide. “Better in the long run to pull it out to work on it,” leading to, “Might as well do bearings while we have it in the shop,” and finally, “$3,500? Gee, a new modern engine would be $5,000? . . .and that’s Canadian? (when an American buck bought you a buck-and-a-half Canadian). Three weeks later we motored even more quietly out of Port McNeil with the new Kubota. We should-a done it at first. It burns less fuel, is quieter and lighter, pulls hard, starts at a touch, is easy to service, and is CLEAN!

Which brings us to the present — and close to the end of this narrative about this good old wooden boat.

We’ve been in Tenakee Springs (pop. 104) for going on six years, the first two living aboard. Somehow, like a boat that’s been run up on the beach, we have settled. I’m in the fire department and on the City Council and Wendy is the harbormaster and is on the Planning Commission. She fishes from her aluminum skiff and I’m building my ultimate small cruising sailboat. Suddenly I am 73 years old and crawling down around the engine is not nearly as much fun as it used to be. I am not keeping up with her. It is time to sell her.

She is ready. I have painted her and cleaned her up. Her mechanicals are all fine. Her next owner may want to finally attend to a couple of places inside where plywood has delaminated but it’s a common problem and not hard to fix with epoxy. An annual coat of Silver Seal keeps her decks from leaking but she would like new decks when time and budget allow. As is, she will go on for years.

As the yacht ads say, she is “lying” just a bit south of Juneau, which, as George has said, is just a bit north of Seattle. Alaska Airlines comes up from Seattle/Portland 4 or 5 times a day in a couple of hours. A floatplane or a ferry then gets you to Tenakee Springs in 40 minutes or 4 hours. I’ll split your travel costs if you buy her.

Because she is now a few years older and because she is in this out-of-the-way place I’m pretty comfortable pegging her price at $25,000.

If she looks like she may be your next boat, call me at 907-736-2442 or e-mail to sterngie@hotmail.com.

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