Old Stuff

Jim and I worked on the hard top framework yesterday, until a shower blew through and drove us away. I shot some pictures, but I didn't capture a pleasing image from our day’s product: Piles of wood chips and plane shavings on a patina of rain-spattered sawdust.

The plane shavings did start me thinking, however, about old stuff. My plane is very old. It belonged to my Dad, who would have been 104 on the 13^th of this month. I think that plane was old when he got it.

I removed some grab rails from the boat’s aft cabin top. They too are old—no doubt original equipment on this 40-year-old Albin pocket trawler. All the rails looked really bad-old when I got the boat. Peek over the stern and you’ll see our teak swim platform. In its previous life, it was on the stern of a classic 1950-something Matthews cruiser. A neighbor gave it to me. I cut it down to fit the Albin transom.

On the other end of Ms. Bettencourt is an anchor platform that I found in a Charleston junk shop. I think it came off a sailboat. It looked old then and still does now. The big stainless steel king post came, with just a few chain dents, from a salvage operation in Oriental, NC. Just aft of the anchor platform is a spring-top stainless hawse fitting, rescued from a barrel of old stuff found in Daytona Beach, FL. In a compartment under the hawse pipe is a 13-pound Danforth High Tensile anchor that came with a 1967 houseboat I owned in 1975.

I could drop down the hatch into the V-berth area and start a list of other old stuff down there. But you probably have a mental picture by now, of how old Ms. Bettencourt has been modernized, since her derelict days, with perfectly serviceable old stuff. I think new stuff would look funny on this boat.

We will need some long grab rails for Ms Bettencourt’s new top. Next month, its back to Oriental to pick up a pair of really ratty looking teak 10-footers I saw in a shop there last September. They looked o-l-d. They will look great on Ms. Bettencourt.

Meanwhile, when the rain abates, Jim and I will be making three more cross members for the new top structure. I will post some photos when we get that done.