It is seven o'clock on a Wednesday evening and all is quiet aboard Robin. She rocks gently, and the laundry hung in the saloon sways, but there are few sounds. The refrigeration, which cycles every few minutes, just stopped running. The thunder storms that drenched Cambridge an hour ago have passed. My dinner of Dinty Moore stew escaped from the sauce pan and into my mouth. Now it's time to work on the book.
Today there was significant progress aboard Robin. I removed, cleaned and replaced two heavy bronze portlights, replacing the quarter-inch plywood liner surrounding each which had rotted due to leaks in the portlight caulking. (I'm using the word portlight because But Taplin, the Westsail guru, does. I really don't know if that's the only thing they are called, but I'm a conformist when I have no better information.)
I have not finished any of the three portlight replacements because I haven't taken the time to install new moulding around the edges of the wooden liner and to paint the raw wood. Rather, my emphasis has been on stopping leaks. I make no claims as to the effectiveness of the repairs, even though we just had rain. I'll wait and see.
Yesterday, while I did not get much done on the boat, I got something done for the boat. I contacted a man who makes "tong shafts" for oyster tongs -- long poles attached to a wire mesh scoop that "tongers" use to harvest oysters from shallow, muddy oyster beds. This has to be some of the hardest work there is. Makes your rotator cuff scream in terror. You stand on a boat all day with the tong shafts -- maybe twelve or sixteen feet tall -- one shaft in each hand and you plunge the scoop into the mud. Then you bring the shafts together and lift -- at least that's my concept of how it's done. It would have to be done over and over. The more oysters -- their shells like baseball-sized rocks -- you scoop, the heavier the tongs.
Anyway, I called Wilbur Messick, who had a sign advertising his tong shafts taped up in the dockmaster's office. I asked if he could make a replacement handle for our beautiful boathook. The eight foot long wooden handle got snapped when it got caught on a piling while we were docking last year.
He said he lived in a remote eastern shore village about an hour south of Cambridge. He asked if I could come down.
I brought my splintered old boat hook with me and followed his directions to a really beautiful part of the country I'd never visited, along the Nanticoke River.
Messick Bros. has been making oyster tong shafts since 1859, according to a sign in their shop, an unadorned barn-like structure. Inside was the aroma of pitch, a sweet fragrance oozing from stacks and stacks of long leaf yellow pine, a nearly extinct species.
When Mr. Messick began cutting a plank to craft my new boat hook handle, in the very instant the saw teeth cut into a piece of pine, the resins burst into the air and made my sinus sting. That's potent pitch, my friend.
It took him an hour and a half to create a handle that fit perfectly into the old bronze boat hook head. All the while, we talked about lumber and oystering, about his service on a Coast Guard icebreaker in the late 1960s and about the tools of his trade. Messick Bros. has some antique machinery, cast iron with big electric motors, that are used for one purpose -- shaping tong shafts.
The only other product that may come out of the shed -- a flat bottom skiff that Mr. Messick is in the process of building. He might finish it, and he might use it or, if someone wants it, he might sell it.