More Landscape at the Wheelhouse

I just wanted to add two further notes to the last post about the landscape design at the wheelhouse.

         The first one is a further note on the construction of the woodshed. There are many ways to build a log cabin, but I chose a kind of joinery that I had seen used in the Alps and that is not very common on this side of the Atlantic, so I thought it might merit comment.

         The logs are trued; that is the top and bottom surfaces are made flat and parallel to one another. Logs are also matched, in other words two logs of the lame length are matched to one another based on having the same thickness, or distance between the trued surfaces. The next step was to shape each end of the log so that it has six sides. The drawing below came from the journal that I kept while building the wheelhouse.

             The reason for the six-sided ends is that the notches that hold the structure together can now be made as a simple three sided notch, rather than having to be scribed, and cut to the exact natural profile of each individual log.

             The other footnote is that while completing the wheelhouse I discovered a company that made wood fired, cedar hot tub. The tub is a kit I bought from the Snorkel Stove Company. I located down hill from the well, which makes it easy to fill with a piece of garden hose set up as a siphon. It is also set into a landscaped area with stone retaining walls and gravel drainage. This makes it easier to get into the tub without tracking in dirt or mud.

           The tub was great for soaking sore muscles after a hard day of moving stone, carpentry or gardening, but I don’t use it during black fly season, or in the later half of winter when it is too much work to dig it out after each snow storm.

The Landscape at the Wheelhouse

I was at the wheelhouse this morning trying to tackle the post-winter cleanup and thought I would put some information together about the landscape around the wheelhouse.

             Quite a lot of thought went into the landscape design outside the Wheelhouse. The building is in the forest, away from roads and modern conveniences like running water. I used stone left over from the building to put up small retaining walls and to create terraces for plants. The plan was then to gather all kinds of plants, but herbs in particular that have a tradition of medicinal use. The reason for this was that I wanted there to be a theme to the garden, and I wanted to have a cross section of plants that require little attention. Basically, those plants that did well in a forest climate in New England have thrived and the rest have taken themselves out of the mix. You can see from the garden plan below the original landscape layout at the wheelhouse.

             Two other elements of the landscaping that are important to the maintenance of the gardens are the well and the tool shed. The soil at the site, such as it is, varies in depth from two feet to about six feet deep and covers a granite ledge. I had excavated the soil where the building was to be built so that it sits directly on ledge. To the south of the building, the ledge forms a depression under the soil. In that spot, I dug down about through six feet of soil to the ledge and put a dry well so that water from the surrounding area would drain and collect in the well. The well is the physical center of the gardens and its location is intended to make the watering of plants as easy as possible with a bucket. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, you should know that my approach to gardening is one of minimal effort, and I water plants rarely, but the idea behind the well is sound, and when I do actually get around to watering, it is easy.

              The design of the tool shed was dictated by events in the forest. Blight came through and killed a small stand of fir trees. One year they appeared to be fine, and by next summer, they were dead. The firs needed to be cut down or become a fire hazard, so I decided to use the tree trunks to make the tool shed. The shed is a cross between a log cabin and an “A” frame. It has just enough room for garden tools, some firewood, an axe and splitting maul and not much else. Even though the construction of the tool shed is different from the wheelhouse the addition of Nordic “house dragons” on the eves of the roof help, tie it stylistically to the wheelhouse.

            Over the years, the gardens have taken on a life and character of their own. No matter how I try to impose order, plants have a mind of their own, after the third time I tried to put the soapwort, or the comfrey back where I thought it should be, I gave up and let them sort out for themselves who grows where. It now has a somewhat wild look but many of the plants are still doing quite well without interference from me.

              The tool shed, as all tool sheds do, has collected an assortment of items that have nothing whatsoever to do with either the gardens or the wheelhouse. Homemade bows and arrows have ended up there, leftover playthings of local children, now all grown up. Half-filled bags of some miracle garden product that proved to be, less than miraculous, clutter the corners of the shed. Squirrels store odd and ends from their own lives there as well through the winters. In short, the tool shed seems to have a destiny, like the garden, over which I have no control.

Celtic Wheelhouse Construction Drawings

Several readers have asked for more information of the construction of the Celtic Wheelhouse. The construction drawing that I have from this project are too big to scan in one go, but I have scanned some of them in sections and am including them in this post. Even though some of the drawings have the scale indicated on them, I would not try to measure off the drawings but would recommend that you only use them to get a sense of proportion and scale. The basic dimensions are; outside diameter of the building is thirty feet across, interior dimension is twenty-eight feet across. Height of the stonewall from floor to the top plate where the roof connects is six feet. Foundation is two feet thick and goes down to bedrock, a depth that varies from two feet to four feet below the floor.

             Some of the drawings show stairs and a loft, which I opted not to build. The roof consists of a ceiling made of tapered boards, a layer of diagonal compression bands (see photo below) and an outer roof. The three layers, inner ceiling, compression bands, and outer roof, combine to make a tensile roof. The roof was then shingled in cedar.

                 I will be posting some more related construction material as I get a chance, and late in the summer I will be re-shingling the roof because, gasp, it has been just about twenty years since I built this. When that happens there will be further posts, I am sure.

Of Turk’s Heads and Dog Collars

Two of the most popular recent posts on this site have been the one titled “Junk” and the one about the “Ship’s Wolf”. As a follow up to both those posts, I thought I would share another creative idea that relates to those posts.

              When I first started taking Saxon to sea, a friend of mine pointed out that the information on her tags only related to my home phone and home address. His suggestion was to make her a separate sea-collar with more relevant, boat address related information on it. I had been fiddling with mandrels of different sizes and Turk’s Head knots at the time, so the more or less logical outcome was a Turk’s Head collar.

               There is a curved brass plate stitched to the collar that has engraved on it her name, a statement that she is traveling with me, and my name, the name of the boat, and a cell number for the boat.

               The picture below shows my largest mandrel, on which the collar was tied, hanging on the wall of the boathouse.

Boat Davits

I have written about designing the boat davits for our Friendship Sloop on “the Boat Page”. I wanted to go back to that subject, because I think it encapsulates the classic dilemma that all cruisers face; how do I carry everything I need on board without making my vessel a mass of clutter.

            I think the heart of any modification to your vessel has to be reversibility. I have seen a number of beautiful boats that were marred forever because the owners made permanent changes. If the premise of any design change is one, where “we can always remove it if it does not meet our needs and we will be back to what we have now”, then the options are greater and the possibilities are easier to embrace.

           Our boat davits are a nice example of this. As I point out on the boat page, our quandary lay in wanting to have a way to bring our tender aboard in certain conditions without adding some massive, out of place contraption and wrecking the lines of our beautiful boat. The clearance between boom and cabin top is not adequate to store a dinghy upside down on the cabin roof, towing our bathtub in a following sea is dangerous, and on a long delivery, towing creates a lot of drag. Please do not bring up the subject of inflatables; I will be prone to rant.

            The solution we came up with was removable boat davits that could be shipped easily because they could attach directly to our boom-gallows, which are incredibly strong. Further, our davits can be struck even more easily than they can be shipped, which allows us to remove them at will and return our vessel to her original appearance and function. Lastly, we went with a construction method that compliments the nature of our sloop, so that even with the davits shipped and the ship’s boat slung aboard, the appearance of our boat remains in character.

              What we did was to make up laminated hardwood davits over a pine core. The result is strong, durable, functional, and aesthetically about as compatible with a classic wooden sailboat as we could get. The sheaves for the blocks and in the ends of the davits themselves were made on a lathe, and the shells of the blocks were made from teak and stropped with rope. You can see from the diagram how simple the actual davits are.

             We have been very pleased with how this modification worked out on our vessel, and best of all it is reversible.

Haul Out

When I first started traveling to Deer Island in the Passamaquoddy Bay, I had an opportunity to rediscover a particularly cool method of mooring a small boat, appropriate for waters with large tidal ranges. The local name for it is a “haul-out”. It is a version of mooring for a dinghy or tender that I had run into before, but it is such a great system and so simple that I though it deserved some form of recognition.
           The system is made up of three parts: an anchor, a long piece of line made up into a loop, and two shore rings. There are divided camps concerning whether to use floating or sinking line, however, I am not sure that there is a correct answer; I think it may be dependant on the location.
           The ground anchor is simple, often a granite block with a staple and ring, or a concrete block with staple and ring.

           The idea is for the anchor to be placed far enough off the shoreline so that when the tide is all the way out the anchor is still in enough water to allow a small boat to float near it. One version of the anchor is a concrete block made by partly filling a plastic trashcan with cement and setting staple and ring into the cement. When the concrete is cured, the block can be dumped out of the trashcan. It is now possible to roll the block on it side, at low tide, down into waist deep water and stand it right side up; something not easily done with a granite block .
           With the anchor set, the line is now run out from the shore, through the ring in the anchor and back to the shore where it passes through the two shore rings and is tied to itself in a continuous loop. The two shore rings should be about eight feet apart to keep the line from becoming twisted.

           The idea is that you can eliminate carrying or dragging your boat up and down a beach. At any tide you can land, tie your boat to the line, and haul your boat out into deep water, and at any tide you can retrieve your boat by hauling in on the line and bringing the boat in to the beach.           There is a another version that uses a weir pole driven either into a mud bottom, or into a large granite block that has a hole drilled in it (this is the version I remember seeing as a child  in some of the island communities in Maine). The Pole method allows for the offshore ring to be attached to a float that goes around the pole and rises and falls with the tide. The pole in granite block version was used where there was a granite bottom and a pole could not be driven into the bottom and in some communities, I understand that the poles and blocks were brought ashore in winter to prevent ice damage.

This picture of our tender on her haul out in NorthWest Harbour. Note the black lines in the left foreground going out and back to the anchor.

Owner’s Manual

I was just down at the shop getting the cabin soles of the boat ready for some varnish when for some reason I was reminded that I wanted to put something on this site about the owner’s manual.
          In 2004, WoodenBoat Magazine had a great article by John Waterhouse on creating an owner’s manual for your boat (issue 176). I had been toying with the idea for a while, not because we charter our boat, but because two families own her I thought it might be helpful for everyone on both coasts to have something that they could study in spare moments. For that reason, I wanted our owners manual to be long on illustrations and short on text.  I also figured that this was the quickest way for me to get it done too, because I prefer drawing to writing and like to draw boats in particular. The article in WoodenBoat was excellent and was all I needed to inspire me to get started.
          It was a good plan, but there were several flaws in my scheme that I did not perceive at the time. One was that since I wanted this to be something that was fun to look at (so that we would all actually use it) I did not allow for how long it would take me to create the drawings for the manual. Another is that essentially we are talking about writing a book, one for a very small reading audience, but a book all the same. Further, no mater how simplistic I try to make it, in order to be of any use as an owner’s manual, this is a document that has to provide detailed information about some sophisticated stuff. In short, it has proven to be a much larger undertaking than I had originally planned. My hope is that by the end of this spring I will have the Safety section, the systems section, the Storage section, completed, and the section on Operations at least begun. The irony here is that when I took on the restoration of our sloop I had a much better idea of what I was getting into than when I started the owner’s manual.
          If you ever decide to take on a project like this, be forewarned, it is a labor of love. If we did not have such long winters up here in the mountains I never would have gotten anywhere with it.

 

            

Reading

I was reading with delight an article from my favorite magazine Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors. I subscribe to a number of boat related journals, as well several journals devoted to Archaeology, and History, but I think my favorite is MB,H,&H. There are several reasons that I look forward to the arrival of each issue, one is clearly the subject matter, but the writing is another. Editor Peter H. Spectre writes with a perceptive and dry Yankee wit that borders on the caustic. I look forward to his column “In the Lee of the Boathouse” and read it before I read anything else (see his blog Compass Rose Review). The clean layout and design are also reasons that I enjoy reading this magazine cover to cover. I find it refreshing, to pick up a magazine where one can actually find the contents and can tell, at a glance, the articles from the advertisements.
          In the current issue, writer John Andrews writes about “Three Reference Books for Sailors”. In the first paragraph of his piece I particularly liked a line wherein he describes cruising as;”…a personal affliction, ruinously self-indulgent and wantonly aesthetic”.
          All three of the books he champions are terrific choices: Sailing:A Sailor’s Dictionary by Henry Beard and Roy McKie, Maine Lingo by John Gould (a former contributor to the M,B,H,&H and a former Friendship Slooper) and the Sea Scout Manual By Carl Lane (He has the 1939 edition, my copy is the 1940). While it is always fun for me to see which books make it onto some one else’s “best”, or “must have” list, it is the actual writing and reasoning of the article that I find so enjoyable and typical of this magazine. I will not give a synopsis here check out the original for yourself.
          Mr. Andrews’s article inspired me to list some of my own reference favorites here.
          From the perspective of a boat owner my three favorite reference books are:
          How to Build a Wooden Boat by David “Bud” McIntosh beautifully illustrated by Sam Manning, The Sailmaker’s Apprentice by Emiliano Marino, again a beautifully illustrated book, this time by Christine Erikson, and The Rigger’s Apprentice by Brion Toss.
          In the category of sea stories, I have voyaged with writers like C.S. Forester, Conrad, Marryat, and newer writers to the genre like Dudley Pope, and Alexander Kent to name just a few, but for story telling and use of language, I think that the Jack Aubrey series by Patrick O’Brian is the best. If what you are looking for is the 18th C equivalent of a Bruce Willis movie, then I doubt these books would appeal to you. However, as a writer of dialog, for character development, and for ability as a storyteller, I put Patrick O’Brian head and shoulders above the rest. I go back and re-read books from the series from time to time because Jack and Steven feel like old friends and each read is like a field trip to the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
          For boat related periodicals, I have read WoodenBoat since the late 1970s and am still a devote, even though the magazine has changed over the years, and I repeat that my favorite magazine is Maine Boats, Homes, and Harbors, always an enjoyable read.