Jagular Goes Everywhere: (mis)Adventures in a $300 Sailboat

Jagular Goes Everywhere: (mis)Adventures in a $300 Sailboat

By Tom Pamperin

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 by Tom Pamperin

Portions of Jagular in the North Woods, Jagular Gets Rescued, and Jagular Goes South first appeared in print at www.duckworksmagazine.com. Portions of Jagular at Swan Lake, Jagular’s Wild Ride, and Jagular’s North Channel Adventure first appeared in Small Craft Advisor Magazine.

The author is grateful to David Brazer and Mara Brazer for permission to include brief selections from Well Favored Passage: A Guide to Lake Huron's North Channel by Marjorie Cahn Brazer. Revised edition, published by Peach Mountain Press, 1983.

Drawings by Eric D. Bott.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Part I: Pirate Racer!

Prologue

Jagular Sets Sail

Jagular in the North Woods

Jagular Gets Rescued

Jagular Goes South

Jagular at Swan Lake

Jagular’s Wild Ride

Part II: Jagular’s North Channel Adventure

Shipwrecked

A Narrow Escape

Shore Leave

The Devil’s Horn

Unlawful Entry

End Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

I LOVE SMALL BOATS. For me they embody the very essence of adventure and a real connection with the elements. What’s more, a small boat can be a magic carpet that carries the spirit as well as the body to magical places inaccessible in any ordinary manner.

I’ve been high in the rigging of majestic tall ships, helmed amazingly fast ocean racers battling with the elements far offshore, sailed in world cruisers able to cope with everything that the sea can throw at them as they sailed toward distant and exotic ports, and worked on sailing freighters reeking with history and tradition. But nothing, nothing at all touches my soul in the same way as creeping up a narrow channel in a very small open boat, exploring the thin narrow places where others can’t go.

In a small boat, fighting my way around a point against wind and tide is an adventure akin to rounding Cape Horn in the world cruiser. Sailing across to a port fifteen miles from my starting point to go ashore and treat myself to an ice cream is akin to voyaging afar on the tall ship. Sneaking up on a (slightly) bigger yacht by cutting across the shallows gives me more of a kick than ocean racing. And as for the freighter? I’m hugely proud of the day that I was able to use my small plywood yawl to deliver some spare engine parts to a friend whose motor yacht had broken down while cruising.

All of this is so personal, so close a fit, and involves such an intimate connection with the elements and the boat, that it can be extremely difficult to communicate to others. But Tom Pamperin is able to do just that, something that makes his writing very special.

I first encountered Tom’s work when I read an early version of Jagular Goes South in Chuck Leinweber’s online magazine, Duckworks. In that story I met Jagular, the infamous Raspberry Newtons, the oystershell banks and the errant shirt. I loved the descriptions of the thrills and misadventures, the fear and exhilaration, the peace and beauty to be found sailing on what was, for a small boat, big waters. I empathized with the writer’s fears, felt again the joys, and sympathized with the painful lessons learned. Been there, done that, comes to mind. Wonderful stuff. I’ve wanted to participate in the Texas 200 ever since.

Much to my surprise, some time later I had an email from Tom, who was writing a story about me and my design work for a major boating magazine. We had the chance to meet at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, and later we managed to spend quite a few hours sailing together at Sail Oklahoma, where I was pleased to show Tom some tricks. We share a lot of interests and I’m privileged to know him as a friend.

Tom has a rare talent: he’s able to capture the whole of the experience most of us know from the classic words of Kenneth Grahame: There is nothing— absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. Those words are wonderful, inspiring, almost spiritual.

The stories in this book convey that reality. You’ll shake your head; I did. You’ll grin and nod; I did. You’ll say Ouch, that must have hurt; I did. And you’ll laugh—I did!

John Welsford

Hamilton

New Zealand

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Prologue

AT ONE POINT IN MY LIFE I left the tall pines and rock-studded rivers of northern Wisconsin to live along a marshy tallgrass finger of the Atlantic. From the dock behind my house I could watch the sun rise over the open ocean and hear the cry of the wheeling gulls, and I expected to develop a mysterious and satisfying communion with the sea. But the sea felt like sandpaper and smelled like low tide, and the gulls were no different from the ones that inhabited the landfills and parking lots back home. Barnacles covered everything that wasn’t already covered with slime, and packs of horseshoe crabs scuttled hideously along the shore like monstrous ravaging trilobites. My wife would wander the beach for hours looking for water-worn glass and colorful pebbles. I would wander the beach for about ten minutes and wonder where all the trees were. Then I’d go eat breakfast.

Gradually, though, I learned to love the sea. I even became something of an open-ocean swimmer, because once when I was wandering the beach on a military installation late at night some MPs came to arrest me and I swam away instead. The MPs gestured angrily and shouted at me and swept their big spotlight across the waves trying to keep me in sight until I swam far out into the open sea, out of sight of land. I kept swimming for so long afterwards that it became a habit. I always swam in the dark because it was easier to ignore the sharks.

You only swam in the dark a few times, Jagular interrupts.

Quiet, I tell him. You’re not in the story yet.

And there weren’t any sharks, he goes on, ignoring me as usual.

There might have been sharks, I insist. Besides, you haven’t even been built yet. Just let me tell this part my way.

When does the part about me start?

Pretty soon, I tell him.

Good, he says. That’s the best part.

Anyway, I did a lot of swimming and saw some MPs, and it seemed like they were always angry about something or other. There may not have been any sharks or spotlights. But if you’re the kind of reader who insists on holding rigidly to the facts while ignoring the shadow of the larger truths behind them, this may not be the book for you. And either way, I still wasn’t a sailor or a boat builder.

But the romance of the sea proved inescapable, even after I moved back to the north woods, so I started building a twenty-foot yawl in my dining room one day while my wife was away at work. I worked on the mizzen mast first because it was the only part of the boat that would fit in the house. I didn’t even finish it. On paper the mizzen mast was made of straight lines; in reality, it wasn’t.

Eventually I dragged the partially assembled mast out to the derelict shed in our backyard—the carriage house, our real estate agent called it, somehow managing to keep a straight face—and started spending my time reading about boats instead of trying to build them. I read books by Webb Chiles and Robin Lee Graham and Joshua Slocum; I read books by Bernard Moitessier and Tristan Jones. I read Fastnet, Force 10 and The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst and Two Years Before the Mast. I spent days dreaming of the lonely limitless sea where I would wear bulky cable-knit sweaters and drink hot tea and wake up each morning with flying fish flopping on the deck and albatrosses soaring overhead. I’d pull out my battered sextant for a noon sight every day and carefully draw circles and LOPs and running fixes and bearings and other cryptic marks on the chart. Then I’d look at the clouds and glance at the compass and test the wind by licking my finger and holding it up to see which side felt cool, and I’d stare with squinty eyes at all the lines on the charts and wonder whether it would be better to round Cape Horn or submit to an undignified slog through the Panama Canal.

Between books I started going to auctions and bidding on leaky-bilged deep-keeled ocean cruisers, boats whose best days were so far behind them even I could barely convince myself they’d ever existed. My older brother, with a firmer grasp on reality, suggested that it might be better to start smaller, maybe a quick-build beach cruiser with a flat bottom and plywood sides. I’ll build one, too, he promised. We’ll each pick a design and build them together, finish them in a couple of weekends. Temporary boats, he said. Just until we decide what we really want.

I’m a temporary boat? Jagular interrupts again.

We’re all temporary, I tell him. Some of us are just more temporary than others.

I did my best to make Jagular as temporary as I could, actually, wanting to move on to that deep-keeled ocean cruiser as soon as possible. I tried to buy cheap luan plywood for the hull but misread the stickers at the lumberyard and brought home some better stuff by mistake—five plies, no voids, glue that looked like it might be at least water-resistant. To make up for my mistake with the plywood, I used a cheap polyurethane adhesive that even the manufacturer refused to claim would hold up to full immersion.

But however temporary he might turn out to be, Jagular had a solid pedigree, I knew; his lines were drawn by the great Phil Bolger, who included the plans in his classic book Boats with an Open Mind. That’s where I found my boat: Chapter 22, design 542—the Pirate Racer.

Pirate Racer! When I first read the name I could almost hear the tropic breezes stirring the coconut palms overhead; the crying of the seagulls, the roar of the surf; booming cannons and ringing cutlasses, tattered maps and shining pieces of eight; fair winds, long passages, and endless horizons. No matter that design 542 was a small flat-bottomed skiff hardly big enough to fit two adults aboard in even the calmest conditions. This would be my boat, I decided.

That’s the boat? my brother said when I showed him the plans.

That’s it, I told him.

He looked at the drawings again, shook his head. Well, he said finally. It should be pretty easy to build.

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Jagular Sets Sail

IF IT WEREN’T FOR MY BROTHER I’d have never even gotten started with this sailing nonsense, I remind myself in a fit of annoyance, having just mis-cut the bevel on the starboard chine log again. I could be safely at home curled up on the couch with my wife and cat. But here we are, with no wife or cat in sight, building a boat in my brother’s garage. We’re working from blurry photocopies of the plans in Phil Bolger’s book Boats with an Open Mind, and the accompanying instructions are almost impossible to read because the original plans were printed on sheets of paper the size of a kitchen table, and in the book the drawings have been reduced to the size of my hand. I guess at a lot of the numbers and make the rest up. But with my brother helping—well, with him building and me helping—we get the shapes mostly right, and the hull comes together quickly in his garage: sides, bottom, decks, bulkheads, and a layer of fiberglass cloth. Pretty soon we load the boat on a trailer for the drive home and then before I know it I’m finishing the boat alone in my own driveway.

By guess and by God, I tell the boat as I trim each ill-fitting piece and jam it in place. That’s how the old-timers did it. No worrying about measurements and so on.

Uh-huh, the boat says. Not even launched yet and already a critic. You’ve read the plans, haven’t you?

Plans? I say. Good builders never pay much attention to the plans.

Good builders, no.

I don’t bother to answer. There’s too much work to do. I build the mast out of a couple of two-by-fours glued together—even shape it with a hand plane and sandpaper until it’s nicely rounded. Well, round-ish. I build the yard, a long spar to hang the lateen sail from. I build a mast step and mast partner. I install cleats: halyard cleats, yard cleats, leeboard cleats, lots of cleats.

Back at my brother’s house the next weekend, I stand around watching while he turns a twenty-dollar plastic tarp and a roll of carpet tape into something more like a sail. Then home again, where I build the leeboards, big pear-shaped slabs of plywood tied onto the sides of the hull like retractable fins so that, in theory, the boat should be able to move forward against the wind rather than just sliding sideways.

But wood floats, and the leeboards will have to sink to work. I cut a circular hole in each board big enough to hold about ten pounds of lead, then buy a bucket of old wheel weights from a tire store and fire up my little single-burner backpacking stove. I throw a bunch of the weights in an old pot and set it on the burner, trying to hold my breath and avoid touching anything, hoping there’s no moisture in the pot to make the molten metal spatter explosively. It’s a legitimately dangerous operation. I should be wearing leather gauntlets, a heavy apron, a face shield. Instead I’m wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, holding my breath, and trying to stand upwind of everything. Lead, I know, is toxic.

It’s also incredibly heavy—too heavy for my stove, it turns out. The entire set-up is tilting, the pot slumping sideways as the burner collapses beneath it.

You probably should have used a bigger stove, the boat says, watching my backyard foundry crumple and spill long dribbles of molten metal across the driveway. I’m too busy pouring what’s left of the lead from the pot into the leeboard holes to answer. There’s not enough to fill them. I throw a few more chunks of lead in the pot and set it back on the mangled burner for a few minutes, then try another pour. No good. The new lead refuses to mingle with the old.

Assimilate! I shout at the lead, poking it with a long-handled spoon. Stop clinging to your own separate identities so selfishly and defer to the greater good. Unity! We must have unity!

But it’s no good. The new lead stays shiny and new and entirely separate from the old lead. I wait a few hours for everything to cool down and then pry off the new lead, which has formed thin disks on top of the old lead without sticking to it. I throw the shiny disks of new lead into a corner of the shed and stare at the leeboards with their half-filled circles. I’ll have to remove the first pour and try all over.

I tap the lead circle with a hammer: a dull thud. I hit harder. Nothing. I pound. Still nothing. I go looking for a bigger hammer. I thump. I pound. I jump up and down on the lead. Nothing. I jump harder. The little circles of lead stay firmly stuck to the leeboards. I pound and jump and pound some more. The half-inch plywood bends and cracks until each leeboard takes on a gentle curve, like a giant palm leaf gently curling in the sun. The lead stays firmly fixed.

Days go by. Finally I buy another sheet of plywood and make new leeboards, melt and pour more lead. Install some cheap half-round molding strips for rubrails. Build a rudder and tiller. And so it goes. Finally there are no pieces left to add. Nothing else to buy, no more supplies to gather. It’s time to paint.

How about a nice bright blue? Jagular suggests. Something cheery and tropical.

A Pirate Racer is like a Model T, I tell him. You can have any color you want as long as it’s black. Now don’t bother me. We’re launching tomorrow and I want to get at least two coats of paint on.

We’re launching tomorrow? the boat says.

Yep, I say, dipping my roller into the tray to reload. We’re meeting my brother at Bear Lake. And you know how anytime two boats are sailing together, it’s a race? Well, my brother’s boat is twelve feet long, you’re fourteen and a half. And in sailing, length equals speed. We’ve got an extra twenty-five square feet of sail besides—we’ll be sure to win.

Uh-huh, Jagular says. Isn’t that a water-based latex paint you’re using?

I pick up the can to read the label. That’s what it says here, I tell him. Why?

A moment goes by before the boat answers. Never mind, he says.

Bear Lake is a long weed-fringed pond with a wide spot in the middle where power boaters circle around a couple of buoys, pulling little kids on inner tubes. Now and then one of them falls off and starts to cry. The obnoxious two-stroke buzz of outboard motors fills the air, along with the smell of gasoline. The sun beats down on everything relentlessly.

There’s a boat ramp somewhere but not at this side of the lake where the campground is, so my brother and I back our trailers through the pines as close to the water’s edge as we can. From there we carry our boats down to the beach one by one and lay them on the sand side by side, ready for launching.

My brother has designed his own boat instead of building from plans, and I can’t help thinking that the result is better than it should have been. Like my boat, it’s a simple flat-bottomed skiff. But where Jagular has a boxy slab-sided hull, my brother chose to fit three overlapping plywood planks on each side, a method that seems elegant and old-fashioned in comparison. Then instead of painting, he oiled the bare wood. Whenever people see his boat they say things like Is that an antique? and Did you build that yourself?

When they see Jagular they hurry past without saying anything.

But neither boat has been in the water yet—today’s the day. After messing around for an hour or so with all the fussy little bits of ropes and rigging that should’ve been done before we got here, figuring out where to tie