9 degrees

Friday 1/26/07

I flip on the radio in the pickup. WNYC says it’s 9 degrees. Ugh. I think the crew would benefit from sugar and caffeine propulsion. I’ll pick up extra coffee and donuts. I call Ernie and ask how many guys are coming in. Eight he says, quite a drop from Mussel Men day. I pull in to the dock at 0730; it sounds abandoned. The cold affects sounds making them small and tinny. I give a coffee to Machine, to two Hispanic guys who look to be engaged in make-work near a bucket fire, and to Freddy the burner. Ernie is already too busy to stop for coffee. Does that guy ever get any rest?

The good news is that I can’t see my breath in my bunkroom. The oil-filled electric radiator kept the worst at bay once the potbelly went out. Note to file: I could have slept on board. The galley situation is otherwise. No dish washing today! As I pour, the water freezes to slush in its gallon container and freezes hard to the sink on impact.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I had a metal fabricator make a new chimney section to replace a corroded one above the galley stove, a cast iron “pot burner” that runs on diesel and I’m told makes the galley roasty toasty. However, I was too busy to pick up the new chimney part before we dry-docked; and though we got it before the cold snap, it wasn’t made correctly and had to be returned. My hopes of diesel-baked cookies are dashed for now, along with any chance of easily heating dish- and hand-washing water. I’ve realized it’s not the cold that is the big hassle, it is the effect on water that is the big drag. I can’t pour water down the galley sink drain for fear of freezing it shut. The portasan (cheerfully promoting itself with “We’re #1 in removing #2) is OK except for night visits up a gangway at 20 degrees while wearing pajamas. I resort to a bucket aboard, with salt water to deter freezing.

The cold has cascading effects on all systems. I have two camping stoves that run on butane aerosol cans. All the cans seemed to peter out early until it occurred to me that they were de-pressurizing in the cold air of the galley. I now keep a few cans on my desk in my potbelly-warmed cabin and bring them to the galley for each use. My cabin is acquiring a mountain man décor as a growing number of things are stored there so they don’t freeze, harden up, or become uncomfortable if cold: all my clothes, computer, cameras, batteries and chargers, butane, water (potable and non-potable), the honey, hand lotion, and contact lens solutions (no necessary chemical action below certain temperatures I’ve learned).

My ears perk up when Ernie says there are guys working in the caisson, the floating door that caps one end of the dock. I head over and down a steep ladder. What a great place to work today! A cozy, riveted bubble out of the wind. I find two cheerful fellows turning bolts and chatting in a language I don’t recognize. Armando and Nonoy, mechanics, Philippinos, there to replace an 80 year-old pump in the 156 year-old caisson. Armando is a big fan of photography, and upon hearing that I used to work as a photojournalist, offers volunteer mechanical services on the Whalen. Thank you! We have quite a laundry list of mechanical things needing repair.

The caisson is really a boat, elliptically shaped like a double-ended canoe with rounded ends. Pipes through its core allow the dock to be flooded, a row of valves inside down the center, controls the flooding of the dock (takes 2-3 hours). Once the dock is flooded, the caisson is pumped out (takes 1 hour) by the large pump Armando and Nonoy are replacing. When empty, the caisson floats and is swung open. A vessel enters the dock, the caisson is swung closed, and pumped full again until it sinks in position. The 285 foot dock is pumped out (3-4 hours) by a cast iron monster housed in a subterranean brick room at the head of the dock.

It’s tough to repair the exterior shell plating of the caisson as the dock is in constant use (there is a severe shortage in port of repair facilities for workboats), so the crew plugs leaks at the sides with “the sausage” a long dangling tube of plastic filled with plastic and sand.

There is little visible progress on the Whalen today. The crew has shrunk with the cold; and most work is about planning the attack on the bottom. There is nothing major. Charlie Deroko’s survey of last January very accurately assessed the hull as essentially sound. The yard is eager to move on the steel work; there is a New York City fireboat waiting to come in right after the Whalen. However, the yard is also reluctant to move the blocks under the forepeak until Bobby the dockmaster can assess the load on the boat there. Now I hear he’s not available til Monday. Bow work stops; and the focus shifts to cutting the holes in the bottom for the two spudwells, the sleeves that will hold the spud (internal piling) that will allow the Whalen to “dock” in places without a dock. This brings a new man on the scene Roach, the fitter. He’ll be doing “the penetrations” which leads to some joking with Ernie due to Roach’s prior line of work as a male stripper.

Fitting the spudwells requires precise calculations. The ship should not ride on spuds at a diagonal, so we have to determine the future trim of the boat (the tilt from bow to stern) and then cut the perforations to match that trim. You can’t use a plumb bomb to place the bottom hole because the boat could be leaning one way or another. Turns out that her trim when setting on the blocks looks about right (which has her keel almost dead level.) This trim makes much of the ullage trunk (raised center deck over cargo tanks) almost flat and more easily walkable, and tips the boatdeck (deck above the galley and cabins) down enough so rainwater should run off better. However, putting the spudwells in for her current trim means that we’ll have to get her bow down once she’s back afloat. ow

I discussed changing the trim with Our Anonymous Engineer last year; but for lack of ship plans, we couldn’t calculate how much weight was needed. Thanks to this docking, we’ve learned that a forepeak full of water, plus the two cement blocks achieves this trim. I’ve got to measure those blocks so he can estimate the cement weight, the water weight he can calculate by forepeak volume.

However, if we refill the forepeak with water, we should protect those steel surfaces. That means blasting, painting, and installing zincs there. I’ll have to talk to Ernie and likely Joe Eckhardt, the chief estimator, and see if there is budget to at least blast and paint now. We can do the zincs ourselves. owH

The work in Dry Dock 1 peters out early; the cold is exhausting. There will be no night shift, and I’m looking forward to this first long, uninterrupted evening so I can catch up converting notes to blog posts. But first, I’ll stop by Gary Baum’s carpentry shop to get some kindling, look in on my 26’ powerboat in Red Hook, and then type away.

I’m bustling around the tanker tidying up, multitasking as ever. While talking to Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer, I decide to take the poo bucket up to the portasan. I have my cellphone wedged between ear and shoulder; and right after I think this is not such a good idea, the phone falls into the bucket. Shit! Literally. Another digital failure…for purely analog reasons. I have a flashback to a book I once saw near a bookstore cash register where they keep those little impulse-buy items: “Women who do too much.”

I wipe the phone off with 409 to sterilize it and race to the Verizon store to get the data off it before it crashes, the life is flickering out of it. I try getting it replaced for free (“this phone is really crap, it drops calls…) and maintain a straight face throughout. It has in fact been a crap phone during it’s 2 months in my hands, but I don’t succeed. A hour plus and $260 goes down the tubes at the Verizon store. The workday ends not with a bang but a wimper.

Sea Chests

Thursday, 1/25/07

I ended up sleeping on the boat after all. While I was having dinner, Ernie had called to say the painting was done. So fast? I raced back to the boat to check and found an abandoned yard and a black hull. Rather startling change after all the delays getting here and then getting sandblasted.

0915 Charlie Deroko returns for more steel inspection and discussion. We have extensive conversations with Ernie about the thickness (thinness really) of steel, it’s relationship to prior repair areas, ABS standards for plate replacement and develop and work plan. Charlie is popping by regularly as is job is more than finding problems, he recommends solutions. He’ll audio gauge areas under the stern around the main engine room where Freddy has washed off the remnants of the vintage zinc straps.

Freddy diligently picks his way around the boat cleaning off all unwanted protuberances, big ones like the of the external spudwell-- “the carbuncle” as I used to call it, and the little vestiges of prior attachments, fenders and the like. Machine is beetling about and attentive as ever and refills my water jugs. I’m using the non-potable yard hose supply for washing dishes and my increasingly chapped face and hands.

Up forward, some of the blocking will have to be removed to get at the areas that need replacing. GMD doesn’t want to do that until Bobby O’Connor the dockmaster can come over, so action doesn’t begin there immediately. Damn.

Charlie and Ernie and I go into the main engine room to find the sea chests that correspond to the through hull fittings -- which we only found after sandblasting. When I hired a diver Bob Davidson to check them before purchasing the Whalen last year, he surfaced and said “you better call the Department of Agriculture.” The growth on the bottom was so great, he couldn’t find a single opening.

Most of the through hulls allow water into the boat to cool machinery, though one connects to the fire hose. Each is covered with a “sea strainer,” grillwork that prevents plastic bags or organic matter being sucked into the system. The structure inboard directly connected to the hull is the “sea chest” and is built of very, very heavy pipe to prevent failure from corrosion; because if a sea chest fails, an engine room can flood rapidly and cause major damage (shutting down the engine) and possibly sink the whole boat. As the Whalen’s engine is dead (just for now, we hope), the sea chests will be sealed after inspection or “blanked off” with plates welded to the hull. If and when we find parts for her engine (hello, all ye retired engineers, please come help find parts!) the blanks can be removed to re-open the water system. Charlie discovers a released frame just aft of the high water valve where Ernie found thin-sounding steel the day after the priming. The primer had not held in a few penny-sized spots; that was the signal that something was wrong. Some banging with a chipping hammer revealed a weak spot the size of a watermelon.

I’ve saved the sea strainers as templates and as “souvenirs” I told the yard crew to some scoffing. I’ve already found a use for them, they resemble over-sized florist’s frogs, and I’ve made a flower arrangement with the plastic pointsettas’ from the dead Christmas wreath. I leave it on the picnic table expecting this will trigger some remark from Ernie. Since his shock at my pink hard hat on day one, I like to tease him with some girlie stuff now and again. There are NO women around her.

Charlie is very excited to hear that Artie Ellems, an old-timer, works here, albeit part time. Years ago, Artie turned Charlie’s drawings into new steel yards for the South Street Seaport’s Wavertree when the vessel was hauled at Caddell’s Dry Dock. With an “I’d love to see him,” Charlie takes off for the plate shop where Artie fabricates in steel and will be bending plate to replace the wasted parts of the Whalen’s rubrail. "Bushey Rail" as John calls the stuff produced by Ira Bushey & Sons in Red Hook, was bent plate not half a round pipe. This is more expensive at the outset but lasts longer. The crest on a half round would wear down pretty rapidly, not so the flat surface of the Whalen’s rails. Of the 40 feet that is wasted, only 8 of it needs to be fully replaced by new bent plate; the rest of it can just be capped by flat bar; the supporting sides are still so thick.

1620 It’s hard for me to leave, I sit in the pickup for some 20 minutes looking at the boat. I can’t take my eyes off her. She is so transformed already. I contemplate how to paint her topsides. The hull is now black again; what colors should the rest of her be painted? How will we celebrate her departure? Not champagne, this is not a christening… I decide that a huge bow with ribbon blowing down her sides while she is underway will be the festive way to catch some attention during her short ride home down the East River.

1645 I tear myself away to check on Geraldina, my 26’ powerboat, and the lonely lightbulb that is keeping her engine from freezing. I couldn’t winterize the engine right before Christmas as I discovered the flywheel was ruined. I’ve been so busy with the Whalen that powerboat Geraldina, the last souvenir of my father who passed away in 2000, is being neglected. Even with the cold blast that is bearing down on us, one little 100 watt bulb is keeping the engine compartment well above freezing. While at the Beard Street Pier, I stop to consider the demolition of the Revere Sugar Refinery. What a tragedy, what a lack of vision. The PortSide team is convinced that Thor Equities would have a more valuable property if they’d coupled historic buildings and industrial remnants with some very modern design. Instead it looks like they’ll level the place and be left with a generic plot – a loss to history, to Red Hook, and to them.

And then off to Debby Romano’s once again to avail myself of shower and washing machine. I am into a groove on the Whalen, but I do wish she had working plumbing.

Reinforcements Arrive

Wednesday, 1/24/07

0630 Charlie Deroko, no lie-a-bed he, calls with his punch list of steel to repair. He tells me he’s taken almost 300 audio gauge readings on the boat between last year and this. He knows the bottom.

0930 smoke emerges from a forward vent. This is interior paint smoldering from heat on the exterior of the hull. Freddy, a very conscientious burner, is removing the snaggletooth remains of bow fenders long gone. “Weldments” Ernie calls these steel chunks, which always reminds me of a potential Altoids slogan.

0940 Joe Smallarz, a supervisor in Dry Dock #6 shows up, eager to see the Whalen. He provides the name of someone who may have parts for the Whalen’s cannibalized engine. I continue to hope some retired engineer will show up and adopt parts-hunting as a project.

Joe Eckhardt, the chief estimator, arrives for a walk through of the proposed steel work. I love Joe. He’s been working this harbor a long time, knows his stuff, and is a taut, old school man of few words but I think an appreciation of this endeavor shines through. Joe even knows what those weird long wasted bands of steel near the stern are. “An old way of attaching zincs.” How old? “Forty years or more.” Amazing that they survived this long.

1100 I have a chat with Guillermo, a compact, formal Mexican knicknamed “Machine” because he never stops moving. All the other workers have taken off for lunch, but he’s still tidying up the dock. He’s proud of his progress picking up the place, and well he should be. The last shipyard tenant here, known by some in port as Eastern Testicle, left it a mess. Despite the dock’s landmark status, the last occupant blasted dents in the granite, welded fence to a gantry rail, broke the top of the gantry crane and more. Machine is clearly all about work. He has lived here 14 years, and lives in Sunset Park, but has never heard of the Mexican funfest in Red Hook where the Mexican baseball league, and Latin American soccer teams and food vendors make Bay Street hum on weekends.

1200 reinforcements arrive. Karen Dryland, whose father Alf Dyrland, was captain from the late 50’s to the late 70’s, and her husband John Weaver are coming to help clean up. Sooo welcome. The accommodations are a mess. The sandblast dust pushed its way into the boat, some of it shot up the galley sink pipes before I put saucepans over the drains. A weekend of slush has carried the larger grit through the cabins. Dried mud is everywhere. I’ve been too busy to finish washing dishes, a slow process that requires boiling water in the unheated galley, and a sink full of dishes sits covered in frozen suds. Karen will tackle the galley, and John will shopvac the cabins.

Despite the mess, I feel things coming together. I’ve bounced back. I was so exhausted the day we arrived. I’ve re-mastered my firebuilding skills and carved out some domesticity in a world of no plumbing or central heating. I now know how much steel work there is to do, and there’s money to cover it. I can breathe. And in that space I can reflect on how GMD is doing.

Things feel good. The senior staff like the boat, and seem to like the effort to save her. They are impressed with her condition “we’ve seen worse in working boats.” They are allowing us to penny pinch and bring in our own steel, and they’re willing to take the time to give me estimates as we go along so I can match work to funds. The Hispanic crew clearly likes my being able to discuss the work in Spanish. Ernie, the dock supervisor, is really on top of things and totally supportive, and a kicker to work with. And this historic dry dock is a grand, handsome place to be. It wows all the visitors. I appreciate all this tremendously, especially given the brush we had with another yard, a lower bidder, who didn’t do right by us in the end.

We lost five months waiting for them to book us. I agonized during the wait but am now hugely relieved that they’re not doing the work. Everything feels right here. Actually, in retrospect, the wait served us well, thanks to the generosity of the free berth and support at American Stevedoring. What felt like a hiatus then I now see was time to get more in tune with the boat, to pull off some large proposals, and to give some very popular tours of the tanker in the Red Hook Container Port during openhousenewyork weekend. Right now, I could wish for warmer weather, but otherwise wouldn’t change a thing here.

1330 smoke curls up through the fidley grating. Freddy must be burning off those weird long steel pieces. A firewatch is set up. Power cords and water hose snake through the fidley. Blowers blast air down the cowl vents to push the smoke out. More mess and racket.

Karen plugs on behind the closed galley door. She calls me in excitedly about an ashtray. “It’s Norsk tin! Maybe my father brought it… well, maybe not. There were lots of squareheads (Norwegians) aboard then.” Her father emigrated from Norway; she explains the patterns to me,. I’ve made it a rule to not discard things on the boat (except the girlie calendar in the kindling bucket) until I know what they are or might mean. I’d admired the ashtray but had no idea the provenance. Karen and John are great to have around-- not only because they are helpful and fun-- they have such personal associations with the boat and are eager to share them. Alf died in the late 90s, but they have all his papers and have begun pulling them out so PortSide can compile some history of the boat, her crew, and her service. John has been emailing me excerpts. I now recognize Alf’s foreign handwriting in some moldy logbooks I found hidden under the drawers of the captain’s bunk.

1500 Freddy knocks off the hotwork and the day crew begins to pull out.

1625 Karen and John leave and I rush to tidy up and leave. Painting will start tonight, and I’m keen to avoid that smell. Another night off the boat.

Soapstone Diary

Tuesday, 1/23/07

0550 The alarm goes off. I fire up the potbelly, starting it with pages from a girlie calendar Scott found last night. Could this work like a mariner’s carbon dating system? Will it pinpoint when the Whalen went out of service? The calendar is a 1993, folded open to August. Future research will tell.

0735 Steve Gronda, the chemist arrives, fully two hours before Ernie expected him. He is tailed by Ivan, in yellow hard hat, one of GMD’s safety officers. Steve’s job is to certify the boat for hotwork, meaning he’ll measure all the compartments for the presence of gas that could lead to fire or explosions during welding or burning. This process has to be done every time a boat moves or a compartment is sealed and re-opened. The local marine industry is a small world; Steve tested the Whalen last spring before I bought her. He is a precise man who moves rapidly through the compartments with little chatter, squeezing himself into the smallest spaces including the narrow fuel tank/coffer dam just forward of the house.

Upon entering the engine room, he commands “turn the light off! Yes, you have a leak.” He’s spotted daylight around a through-hull pipe high on the starboard side. With that my eyes scan the space, I spot a larger chunk of daylight on the port side. I never noticed them before, likely because lights were always on and, with the boat in the water, less daylight hit the hull at that point. Both openings are so high above the waterline, we won’t fix them in the shipyard. We’ll do that back in Red Hook on our own to cut costs.

We chat briefly in the galley, and he mutters, as he did last year, about the city rezoning the waterfront. The marine industry is squeezed for space.

0820 He’s done measuring all sixteen spaces and adjourns to his car to write up the report. All clear. We’re free to do hotwork except near the fuel tank/coffer dam that still carries fuel. Even the fuel tank under the galley, black with dessicated fuel and exhaling stale diesel when open, is OK for hotwork. After a slow weekend of waiting and pumping, things are moving along!

0900 Celia Cacace, the straight-talking mother hen of Carroll Gardens, calls to report that the Daily News has done a full page on our trip to the Navy Yard. I hope that helps us find more ex-crew for the Mary Whalen Alumni Association, volunteers, and please, some investors and donors.

Thanks to last night’s blasting, the state of the steel will be clear to see. Boyfriend and Steelmeister John Gladsky is back to study it, and surveyor Charlie Deroko arrives at 1100 to return to areas with suspected problems to audio gauge. Both scour the boat, me in tow asking questions and learning. Hours are spent staring up at the bottom and marking the hull with soapstone.

I knew John was serious about me when he gave me my first soapstone “keep this in your mouse pocket.” He wanted his woman to be able to assess steel, and sometimes this haulout feels like a long awaited chance for him to teach me his steelcraft. I’ve gone out with a number of men who thought they wanted a strong woman, but it wasn’t until John, a craggy old salt, that a found a fellow who really likes and accepts my workaholic tomboy self, “a tough chick and a marinized one,” as he often puts it. But back to the steel.

Boats are unlike houses; the ship’s skin has to be completely tight and perfect. A ship can be undermined by an aperture the diameter of a pencil. We scan all 172 feet of the Whalen looking for the smallest cracks and failures in the steel. Old welds are inspected to make sure they are holding. If they have little bubbles, like an Aero chocolate bar, that’s electrolytic damage that calls for re-welding.

John and I discuss two hollows on her starboard quarter (right back end) that look as if huge potatoes were pressed into the hull. That’s where she must have run up onto some rocks. A sharp V in one potato indicates a course running up on the rocks and then reversing to get off. Is this how her propeller became “the tulip?” Is this how the drive shaft was scored? No repairs were done here and the scrape marks are still sharp, so this is likely relatively recent damage.

The bow steel caves in around the vertical frames, pressure from pushing through ice I theorize. Near the starboard bow, John and I follow two parallel indentations. This is where she hit something steel-- clang, clang, clang -- with sharp edges, and she, or it, bounced down the hull a good 20 feet. A buoy? There is even the vestige of a zinc or two, after 16 years. Amazing! They should be replaced every 5 years.

We can see two forms of repairs “inserts” and “doublers” the former more expensive to do. A row of little nubbins perpendicular to a weld line shows where wedges held up a replacement piece of plate. Pockmocks mean it is older steel, smoother means newer. One can literally read the bottom and assemble a history of wear, damage, and replacement.

On the ride to the Navy Yard, former Mate Bill McGee told me that Eklof put a lot of steel on the bottom in one of her last haul outs, they almost didn’t do it, it was so much steel. That was maybe 1988. This saved her. We can see it all along the port side near the turn of the bilge, and along the keel. This is what gave Charlie such good audiogauge readings last year. He was wondering how the 1938 steel had wasted so little. Older steel is better quality he knew, but the answer was that the bottom was hardly 1938 steel. Rick Falcinelli, at K-SEA (the successor company to Eklof) used to be a Mate on the Whalen when she delivered fuel up the Gowanus Canal. He told me that they were aground most of the time there. The Whalen essentially dredged the Gowanus. No wonder the steel up forward and along the keel was worn thin!

We find some things that even steel wizards like Gladsky and Charlie can’t explain. What are those very wasted long steel straps near the stern? Why are there bolt-on zincs toward the stern and weldable zincs everywhere else?

Charlie, ever concerned with accuracy, takes a moment to correct one of my blog posts. No, K-Y was not being used when he took readings. “That will do in a pinch, but that’s not what I’m using.” I’d seen K-Y in the rented audiogauge kit last year, and thought it was the standard goop. Oops.

The race is on to study the bottom; uncoated steel rusts speedily and if rusted, won’t hold the paint. GMD paints and sandblast, at night, because the neighboring tenants in the Navy Yard don’t like their cars getting dirtied. It’s not the Navy Yard of old where it was all about shipbuilding. The primer smell will be powerful and wretched, and I don’t want to sleep in fumes. I decamp again to the apartment of our museum designer Tim Ventimiglia. There, the internet connection really works, and I’m able to upload a few blog posts. I bang away at the keyboard til after midnight.

The Day of Reckoning

Monday, 1/22/07

This morning I should get the verdict on lead paint, the issue that has weighed on me over the weekend.

1130 I spot water rushing into the dry dock. Ernie is on it. The “sausage,” the plastic sock full of plastic and sand that plugs a vertical gap between caisson and granite wall, has failed. A crew of Hispanic laborers will fiddle with this most of the day.

1140 Ernie tells me the lead guy will be late; he has problems with the testing gun. Will the lead suspense never end? Poof goes my hope for a morning verdict, and then an afternoon out of here to get some much needed stuff, a new digital happy snap camera, potable water, a trip to the bank. I ask Ernie to call me when he comes.

1240 Ernie says the lead guy came, he was in a rush due to the delay so they didn’t call me. The guy took nine shots, and the Whalen passed! “Seal up the hatches, Ernie says, “blasting starts in a few minutes.” After so much waiting, now a rush.

1250 I hear a different clomping on deck. I go investigate. Here’s a new team of small men, mummies really, their heads wrapped in t-shirts and cloths tied down with straps. One unplugs my shore power. I ask what’s going on. Silence. I ask again. I get an eruption in some Asian language. These must be the Koreans I heard were coming. They must really know what they are doing because after a few attempts I realize there won’t be much way to communicate with them in English.

1410 Sandblasting starts. Music to my ears.

1500 I’m talking to Our Anonymous Engineer about what we’ve learned about changing the trim of the ship (angle from bow to stern) thanks to the forepeak water and cement blocks on the foredeck. The cellphone battery dies. My digital universe remains a struggle.

1600 I call Jim at Smith & McCrorken in Red Hook. They’re major suppliers of marine zincs in this port. I got a nice price from them late last year for zincs and buying them direct will save me $750 over GMD’s price; however, someone building a dry dock has just called and got the last of their 22 pound bolt-on zincs. Bummer.

The zincs are necessary to protect the steel that is vulnerable to electrolytic action in salt water. Zinc is a softer metal than the steel of the hull, or the bronze of the propeller, and as a result is consumed first by the electrolytic action. I’d worried a lot about the hull since the Whalen has not been hauled since 1991, and there were likely no zincs left. We’ve decided to go with bolt-on zincs after talking to paint guru John Tretout of Amorica, rather than the more typical weldable zincs. That’s because today’s modern coatings could last up to 10 years on the Whalen as she won’t be underway very much (moving through the water increases electrolytic action). The zincs aren’t likely to last that long and would need replacing. Divers can go down and bolt zincs on and off, but the weldable ones can only be changed by hauling out the boat which costs thousands of dollars.

At dusk, photographer Stephan Falke arrives to shoot the sandblasting. Soon thereafter, friend and computer geek Scott Baker arrives. He informs me that the fluttering sound coming out of the laptop suggests the hard drive is about to crash. Another digital headache. I begin to like tending to steel issues more than this IT (Intermittent Technology) stuff.

I monitor the sandblasting crew for an hour or two. I want to make sure they keep the blast moving so they don’t make thin spots in the hull. They work on a gangway dangling off the gantry crane. The two blasters are in dark hoods and look through thick, dark metal framed rectangles much like welder’s goggles. One mummified worker holds the end of their gangway to spin them along the hull’s curves near the stern. Even 30 feet away, the backsplatter of grit is startling. I’m afraid for the camera lenses and don’t take many pictures. As night deepens and they reach the bow where one can get further from the ship, more photography is possible. The sand haze rising off the hull refracts the worklights in an eerie fog. At moments, the scene looks as it if were underwater. I watch the contours of the Whalen emerge as crusty rust and dangling and discolored paint disappear.

Stefan and Scott want rides out, and I head into Red Hook to Gary Baum’s and Amy Sisti’s for a shower. Indoor plumbing is my new favorite thing. I return to Dry Dock #1 with a coffee and cookies for Ernie who tells me “we’ll finish blasting tonight; I want to bang it out.” Normally a light sleeper, I don’t care about noise tonight. I’m bushed and the blasting is a happy reminder that we’re past the lead hurdle. They are working right under my cabin so I tuck into my bunk wearing engineer’s earmuffs.

Sometime after midnight I wake up, probably for the silence. The blasting is done. In the morning, we’ll finally really be able to see the condition of the hull.