This is not a project for the meek of heart, I must warn
you. It’s a project for real men, a project for men with hearts of steel and
nerves of brass, a project only the most fool hardy would attempt.
Unfortunately, there is only me around, so I will just fake
it.
The project is a “hard dodger”. No, it’s not what some of
you might be thinking. It’s not a lover climbing out the second floor window as
the husband pulls in the driveway. Nor is it, as my mother put to words – “The
Artful Dodger”, though I hope when it is finished others will think it might be
something of a work of art.
To us, a hard dodger is something to shelter us
from the seas and allow us to look ahead at the same time so as avoid running
into things. In landlubber terms, it is a windshield with a roof. It replaces
the canvas dodger/windshield which has served us well enough, but died a
natural death of sun damage. It was a choice to sew a new one or build a hard
dodger to replace it. With the 10,000
ocean miles between us and Vancouver in mind, I have been moved to tackle this
job it at last.
It is now the morning of Day Eleven. It is Sunday. My back
needs a break and so do I. My new Turkish friend, Omar, who has been sanding
and refinishing the galley all the past week, is off for the weekend with his
wife and cousin, so I don’t need to pretend to keep up with him (he is 35,
focused and meticulous) nor do I need to keep moving to stay warm.
Getting started
The challenges to building a dodger in Turkey are many.
Where to buy materials and pay a fair price for them, how to work on your boat
in the water without the yard cops shutting you down for getting sawdust in the
water, fending of the opportunistic yard Turks (the first one quoting me 4,000
Euros just to fiberglass and paint the dodger after I assembled the foam base),
and finally, how to work in the winter Mediterranean weather, must all be
negotiated. And oh yes, the design. The
Dodger is the highest point on the boat deck line so it really must be right to
not look like a dog house.
Last summer and fall, in the warmth of our apartments in
Singapore and then Istanbul, I fiddled with paper and pencil, scale and eraser
until I had something of a design I might build with limited tools and access
to technology. This meant flat windows so I didn’t have to find and pay to bend
Plexiglas. It meant foam/fibreglass construction because it is easy to shape,
light, and absolutely weather resistant.
And it meant something I could build with materials freely available in
Turkey. As a model, I had the example of cruiser friends who build a beautiful,
complexly curved flowing example of a dodger that looked like a jet cockpit on
their sleek boat. Beautiful, but he spent 6 months and many buckos to do it.
No, my dodger needed to be a lot simpler if I was going to build it in a few
weeks in Turkey with no heated shop or fancy tools.
I had time in Canada at Christmas to finally take the plunge. A few days before Christmas, Dad and I
drove to Toronto to buy four sheets of 1 inch Comex PVC linked foam, together
with a bucket of filler and bottle of polyester glue. Four hundred dollars
later, we headed home with me wondering, “What have I done?”
My nephew Cresswell Adam had a small Canadian Tire table saw
in a box he had never opened which he happily lent me. In four or five hours,
my Dad and I had pretty much reduced those flowing sheets of PVC foam to strips
of oddly angled pieces and a pile of sawdust. Would these pieces eventually fit together as a dodger
in faraway Turkey? And how would I get them there especially with a roof blank
that needed to be six feet long and 3 feet wide. With my heart in my mouth, I
ripped up the roof blank into 22 inch wide by 40 inch long sheets. “Hope this
stuff glues back together”, I thought as the table saw blew sticky bits of PVC
sawdust at me. I taped it all together in an imitation of what I thought would qualify
as over Viola! Would it be lost
by the airlines? Crushed by baggage handlers? Forgotten on the baggage conveyer
belt? (Not likely!) As it turned out, after three flights, Toronto – Winnipeg,
Winnipeg – Istanbul, Istanbul – Marmaris, I finally humped it down the dock to
the boat, a bit battered and bruised, but nothing a little epoxy filler
wouldn’t correct. The game was on.sized bag with the airlines and wrapped it in cardboard labelled, “Scott Paper Towels”.
I should add that the day before heading for Mamaris with my
foam prize, I went hunting for fiberglass in the Uskadar neighbourhood of
Istanbul. I met a lot of shop owners before I finally found someone who could
both speak English and knew where fibreglass cloth could be had. And there it
was down an alley, a dark door and small smoke filled office in the corner of
his small warehouse. The office windows you could barely see through, so tarred
with cigarette smoke. Once an economist, the proprietor now
ran this dusty shop. We had a cup of tea and discussed the world and he sent me
on my way with about twice as much fiberglass cloth as I needed.
Day One:
Marmais, Yacht Marina
I rented a scouter and headed to town from the Marina to
hunt for plywood. I had no idea how to get it to the boat yard. In the industrial
section of town, I enrolled the help of another young Turk who spoke enough English
to translate my plywood needs in the shop next door. By enormous coincidence,
their delivery truck was being loaded with sheets of plywood for another
customer in the Marina! I chased the truck back out to the marina on the
scouter and strong Turk helped me drag my prize 250 m down the dock to the
boat. We were in business – the 15mm X 220mm X 170mm ply was beautiful. That
afternoon, with the prize laid on the dock I laid out the lines of the plywood
frames. The frames would stand in the cockpit coaming as a male mold to which I
would fasten the foam strips. It took me over an hour to figure how to nest the
four frames on a single sheet of plywood. In the end I had so many lines on the
plywood, ‘a jigsaw gone bad’ twice followed the wrong line and cut a frame in
half. Fortunately, I had my polyester glue, drywall screws, and enough scrap to
splint them back together. Sigh.
Just as I had the last piece of the plywood sawn, along came
the dock police who very politely said “Stop”. Now you have to know, that I am the
last boat at the very end of 250 m of dock, it is the middle of winter and
there is not another soul on the dock. I am certainly not disturbing anyone.
“You can’t work on
the dock because you might get sawdust in the water”, he said.
I said “Huh?”
He said, “Yes there is a 30,000 TL fine for getting sawdust
in the water.”
I said “Huh!”
Given that were surrounded by mountains of natural lush forest
that every day flushes whole trees into the Mediterranean Sea, should I be
surprised there was a 30,000 TL fine for getting sawdust in the water? Of
course it didn’t make sense, but that is pretty normal for Turkey. So I moved
my whole operation onboard with his agreement it was okay if I did all my
sawing and sanding below decks! I should have told him I faced a pretty hefty
fine of another sort with Irena for filling the boat with saw dust, but I didn’t
have many options.
Day Two through Seven:
The thing about building something on a boat, is that it has
few flat surfaces and fewer right angles. I made many, many trips below to cut
and recut each piece until it fit. My poor paper plans showed me the way as far
as a building strategy, but they were no use for helping shape the lines. As
you can see from the picture at the top, I started by creating level and square surfaces
with the sawn plywood frames, then continued to cut them, cut them and cut them
until the shaped that looked right emerged. Then one stick at a time, I started
to fit the foam to the outside of the frame. And that is pretty much what I did
for six days until it looked like this. By this time, I had all the foam bits
fastened to the frame, and I had the roof on temporarily. And then I made a
booboo that resulted in another visit from the yard cops.
Of course, by the 5th or 6th day, I had become
increasing lax about going below for each cut. Concealed by a big blue tarp draped
over the boat and by my distant location at the end of the dock, I had sheepishly
cut away with my jig saw in the cockpit without sanction. I know. I have no end
of guilt about not doing what I agreed to do, but I was very careful to keep
the sawdust on board, which, after seven days of cutting, cutting, cutting, was
ankle deep. Then faced with cutting the roof to fit with a handsaw, in a reckless
moment of defiance and hubris, I raised my power hand planner. It shrieked in
my ears and sawdust flew, but it I was like a man liberated from prison, as the
inches ripped off the roof as I brought it to shape. And of course, when I
paused for a breath, covered head to toe this time with sticky foam bits of
sawdust, on the dock I could see the a pair of legs and a radio, moving
impatiently back and forth. The cops were back.
With the foam evidence resisting every attempt at being
brushed aside, I made my way innocently to the dock to see my old friend
Mustafa there with a frown. Mustafa is the yard boss cop. He and I had become acquainted
when he oversaw some repairs to our topsides when the boat was damaged last
winter by poor marina management. “Sir, are you the owner of this boat?” he
said as I walked down the gangway to the dock, “Or are you a paid hand?”
“Mustafa, its me, Cress!”, I said smiling broadly.
“I don’t recognize you, who are you and what are you doing?”
Then I realized, for the white bits of sawdust and my hat,
he really doesn’t recognize me. With a flourish I took off my hat and was glad
to see a smile appear on his face. But he was adamant. No working on the boat
while it is in the water! So he said I could take the dodger ashore and work on
it in the yard, even though my boat was technically in the water. Sigh. You
see, technically, if your boat is in the water, you have to pay to rent space
ashore to work on stuff. Fortunately, anticipating just such an eventuality, Eddie,
my happy hour boat owner friend with whom I had taken to spending a few hours
of boat tales each evening in the bar and the owner of a 24 meter long “Spray”
replica (Joshua Slocum’s boat, in which he became the first man to sail alone
around the world), said I could work under his boat in the yard and use his
power! And so it has come to pass. And for now, no body has come along to
challenge me for working under somebody else’s boat. Yet, but I am guessing
they will.
I laboured sheepishly for another day on the boat (without
power tools or sanding) gluing in the last few bits of corner rounding trim and
fastening handles to the dodger frame with which to carry it, then on the
morning of the seventh day, I rested. We no actually, only God gets to rest, my
labours continued. I moved a few bits of rigging aside and then Omar and I carried
the still fragile dodger off the boat and deep into the yard, a ten minute walk
away. We set up the dodger on a couple of saw horses. Omar, went back to the boat
and I set about getting ready to work under Eddie’s boat.
The first thing I did was drop the dodger off the saw
horses. I was adjusting the spacing of the saw horses while crouched under the
dodger lifting it with my back. Suddenly, the dodger was gone from my
shoulders. With a crash, it rolled off one end, and did a complete summersault and
ended up on its back in the gravel up against the keel of Eddie’s boat! I
rushed to my precious to see if that was the end of the show right there. With nothing
to protect the foam, and only toenail screws holding the bits to the frame, it
was pretty vulnerable. And it was a bit of a spring fit with the curves. I was
almost too afraid to look, but it seemed to be only slightly damaged and only
one corner had broken. I begged a Turk working nearby to help me right her, and
lift back on the saw horses and that we did. Repair work began.
Day Eight to Ten:
I began filling and sanding the foam. It took two full days
of filling the cracks (and damage divots) with the putty and then sanding each before
she was ready for epoxy and glass cloth. I still didn’t have the roof front
edge fully formed to my liking, but I decided that can wait another day while I
tried out the epoxy and glass. It didn’t go well. For some reason, the glass
matt, didn’t ‘release’ in the epoxy resin. Usually the temporary binding that
hold the dry glass matt in together, is dissolved in the polyester or epoxy,
allowing the matt to take the shape of the object being covered. No dice. When
I left it the dodger that night I didn’t know if it’s the Turkish epoxy or the
Turkish matt that is at fault. Full Stop!
Day Eleven
Tis morning, and the wind howls in the rigging, and rain
lashes the deck. I was up last night at mid night to stroll across the yard
with a coil of rope in hand to tie my dodger down, lest it leap from the saw
horses again. This morning, I am so bloody tired. My hands are sanded down the
bone from 40 grit paper. My back is so stiff I can barely stand straight. My
whole body aches for a long hot bath. Thank goodness for the rain. I get a
guilt free day off. Well at least for now. Maybe I will try and sort out the epoxy/matt
problem latter.
‘Tell me Cress, what has been the experience behind the dodger project?’, you might be asking.
Trading places between foreground and background to the dodger project is the incredible environment in which the marina exists. Clear skies, where the stars shine and moon rises and sets, clean air, keen and pure, clear water deep and blue, and sun mixing with billowy white clouds, today aside, make me well, content. Happy. It is such a relief from the City, any city. Lying in the quiet peace of the marina on a still night, snug in the berth under the open hatch cool under my trusty down sleeping bag, smelling the pine brushed air is precious to me. I almost don’t want to sleep, just lie there and enjoy it.
Then there are the “rules” here in the Marina, and for that matter, the rest of Turkey. It’s hilarious, really, Turkey seems to have more rules per square metre than I have seen anywhere, but the Turkish are the least likely to follow them. Surprise, surprise. There are so many, if you followed them, living would be practically impossible. For westerners all these rules poses a delima. We are taught as children the rules are the framework of the social contract – you get to enjoy the fruits of society, in
exchange for giving up some of your freedom to the rules. This is one side of the coin. On the other side of the coin, rules are routinely abused by the more powerful to force compliance on the less powerful.
Lastly, the dodger project represents a voyage into the
unknown, in a small way. Like all challenges, it demonstrates for me the value
of jumping in when the success is uncertain. We need to get off the dock,
commit to the challenge, and then allow ourselves to rise and meet the
challenges as they appear. What so interests me, is that each problem gets
solved one way or another just when it needs to be solved. Almost always. Our
discomfort with the uncertainty is our own creation. If we are unconscious, we
will allow the fear of failure to slay our opportunity for success. It’s like a
glider pilot hunting for the lift of a thermal to sustain flight: He must
counter the gliders natural inclination to allow passing thermals to lift a
wing tip and steer the glider away from the thermal. To rise, the glider pilot must steer in the
opposite direction for the heart of the thermal. We are more successful as
creatures of challenge, than as creatures of comfort. But our natural
inclination is away from discomfort, from the opportunity for success. 
Lastly, we must put ourselves up in the sky in the first place, seeking thermals. This is the hardest work of all, making ourselves value something enough to be willing to suffer our discomfort, mostly our fear. This is the unseen value of ‘character’. People of character have developed the capacity to see past their unconscious inclination to avoid discomfort. Watching television doesn’t do this. Following the rules doesn’t do this. Following other people doesn’t do this. Only a learned willingness to suffer our discomfort while going after what we really want does it.
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