Spudwell S1

Tuesday 1/30/07

I’m feeling in the groove here, like I’m living up to John’s knickname for me, “Tanker Princess.”

Ernie and I are getting along like a house afire. I’m feeling on top of this project.

I go down to check status of the forward spudwell. I never feel too welcome with this team, Roach always has a way of keeping his head down, no eye contact. I don’t have a sense of the other guy; but, I’ve always loved the cavernous, moody spaces of the cargo tanks and so this spudwork is great to photograph.

I’m loving photography again. The camera that Erica delivered yesterday, the latest little Elph, is astounding. Auto mode can expose images in low light and high contrast, it has a wide lens, a view finder even, and makes a 20 meg file! This little $400 cigarette pack is out performing my “pro” Nikon D1X that only makes a 19 meg file. No, Canon is not a sponsor. Hmmm…Hello, Canon?

Then I look down near the spudwell, I see that the Whalen’s gangway pin, a 4’ steel rod, threaded at one end with an eye at the other, has been used to lever the spud in place. The threads are mashed.

Something blasts out of me. “Yo pago, yo mando” (I pay, I give orders) and continue to dictate in Spanish that they will not use parts of the boat as tools, they’ll go off the boat for tools. I steam up the ladder “joder.”

Straight to Ernie “I have my first close-to-complaint.” Ernie is back in a few with the rod. He’s smirking. “I took care of it.” He waves the rod. “Yes, Ernie, the threads look better in daylight, yes, they can be recut.” I mutter about Roach’s attitude. Ernie tactfully points out, “you have to understand, it’s a macho thing… and his relationship to women is that they put bills in his underwear.” I laugh. Good joke about Roach's former job as a stripper, but maybe very wise. I move on.

I check in on the laborers cleaning out the crawl space underneath the forward engine room floor. Because the forepeak was not pumped out promptly, and the bulkhead failed, the water ran back into the next space; and as it wasn’t pumped out of THERE promptly, there are cakes of rust ice in the bottom of this compartment. Ernie doesn’t want to use heat to melt it as that will ruin the paint, so a team of Hispanics is hunkered in there smashing ice.

Diligent Freddy continues working round the hull, washing of steel. He’s always alone, up high on scaffolding or a high reach. Burning open the bow steel leads to lots of smoke and lots of looking from below and from within, looking to understand the structure, the damage and to devise a plan.

After lunch, I go back into cargo tank S1 to make nice with Roach. He says “this must be a special project, they never put me on work like this." I don't really know what to say, but at least we're talking. The day concludes without episode. We're all in the groove.

Looking for daylight

Monday 1/29/07

0715 I return to the Navy Yard from Oyster Bay to find a perilous cake of ice all over the place. No plows in operation here! Debby Romano is coming to borrow the pickup, and I warn her about my old tires.

0730 Boyfriend John Gladsky arrives in the Yellow Rose, his ex-Port Authority utility truck, with more steel plate. GMD has generously let us bring our own steel (squirreled away by John over the years) rather than make me buy it at new steel rates. China is gobbling up the world’s scrap steel supply, and prices for new steel ratchet up relentlessly.

1000 Erica Reynolds, PortSide wonder, is coming to tackle some office stuff. She was an amazing find at a Pratt Internship fair a year and a half ago. Her last job before art school was running a $2.5 million dollar Brooks Brothers store in Dallas. In addition, she has strong design skills, works as a contractor, and she can weld. A PortSide kinda gal! I pick her up at DUMBO’s York Street F stop. She laughs at me. “You look like a miner.” My face is covered in coal dust. I didn’t know.

Erica’s first task is to combine the various GMD estimates, from pre-haul out through discoveries of bad bottom steel, into one Excel document. Yup, we’re at max. I won’t be adding to the punch list. She’s also picked up a new digital camera and will set it up and give me pointers. The loaner camera has been overexposing and suffers from slow shutter. The photo record has been scanty as a result.

The spudwell pipe that will hold the spuds (internal pilings) is inserted in the forward deck hole, tomorrow they’ll trace where to cut through the bottom and let it down. There are some gaps where the spudwell meets the deck. Boyfriend John won’t be happy. He’s been coming almost daily to check in. I know it’s hard for him to let anyone else do steelwork, but sometimes I do wish he’d lighten up. I thought I was a perfectionist, but he’s intense.

Ernie comes in to report that the bottom steel under the forward engine room is not as bad as he expected. We go down together for a look see. The watertight compartment under that engine room floor was clearly not serviced for years. Rust mud must have sat at the lowest points and slowly oxidized the bottom and bulkhead (structural wall). It all gave way under the pressure of the ballast water put into the forepeak and the weight of the boat herself once she sat on the blocks.

GMD clearly expected the boat to be fragile or a mess because they put an awful lot of blocks under her. This spares any one section of the hull from carrying too much weight, but it also means blocks will have to be moved to get at the steel repair. We’ve been waiting three days for the dockmaster Bobby O’Connor to come by and approve block movement by the forepeak, and he finally does come, and does approve. Not a surprise, just news I was plenty ready to hear. I won’t know the full extent of the financial hit until we can see all the mess.

Ishmael begins cutting open bow steel, and I and go prowling for a hole I suspect exists. I had one of those jolt-me awake thoughts the other morning, a few days after we found the lower rub rail on the starboard side all wasted. “There must be a hole behind the wasted starboard rail!” Lying in bed, I remembered how one time last September, I came aboard after several days of rain to find two feet of water in cargo tank S4 (aftmost tank on starboard side). There had never been water there before; there were no holes cut in the deck above that tank as there were in S1 and P4 in anticipation of a spudwell hole. I pumped S4 but never saw water there again, and couldn’t figure out at the time how it got there. What occurs to me this week is that the week of rain lowered the boat just enough to put a hole under water, and we’d never seen daylight coming through the hole before because it must have been behind a hollow guard rail.

I enter tank S4 with Freddy looking for daylight. Nope, not behind the guard rail; but there it is higher and more astern, a small glint, too small to get a welding rod through. So small we can’t see it from outside even with a screw pushed through it. I descend into the tank again and insert a coiled pink Post-it because the pink shows up against the black hull. This works. A week after sandblasting, and we are still finding steel to repair, and yes holes this small are significant. Freddy and I check P4 for good measure. Nothing.

1630 I take Erica to the train. Next, the Red Hook post office to get a PO box. PortSide and I are in postal limbo. We left Beard Street because the landlord said he needed the apartment for his son (though we’ve just learned that he was using an old ploy; it’s not a relative with his name on the bell); but the tanker isn’t yet usable for sustained periods. We are camped out at my boyfriend’s in Oyster Bay--with a lot of stuff in storage. Time to get a PO box until we have full-time offices aboard the tanker and some pier address.

To return my pick up, Debby and I agree to rendezvous at Pedro’s in DUMBO, my new home away from home. How this hole in the wall, or hole in the ground (it’s below street level) has survived the gentrification of DUMBO I don’t know. Coffee is still 50 cents, and a hefty plate of pork, beans and rice at lunch is $5. Conveniently, it is a block away from the York Street F stop, so I decide to have all future visitors stop here for warmth and a coffee while I drive out of the Navy Yard to get them.

After dinner, I find trash from RR Framing, a barrel of wood slats, perfect kindling for the potbelly. I return to the Whalen for a night with plenty of heat but another criminally slow internet connection. Email is a snail; Blogger won’t upload. Will I ever get caught up on blog posts?

Leaking Mushrooms

Sunday 1/28/07

0430. I wake up for being too hot. Have my potbelly maintenance skills bounced back? Yes, but the cause for warmth is a freak jump in temperature-- I hear dripping. The upside of living aboard during a cold January is that all the deck leaks stop (and you can leave all the diary products on the table all day); now the deck leaks are back. I move my slippers from a new drip coming through a mushroom vent. I’ve decided all the mushroom air vents have to be pulled up and reseated. Most are leaking; best to get ‘em all before the last ones join in. I reposition all the drip buckets on the fidley deck and in the disaster cabin, formerly the Assistant Engineer’s cabin. This will become Erica’s and my office, but it has a long way to go. The Engineer’s cabin, just forward of that, is the soundest one on the boat.

The Whalen carried two engineers because she is a “bell boat.” There had to be an engineer on each watch because the engineers controlled the throttle while standing two or three levels below the captain in the wheelhouse. The Captain only controlled the helm (direction) and communicated speed and direction commands by ringing a bell or a jingle which prompted the engineer to move the levers on the telegraph. “Bells are direction, jingles are speed” says the crib sheet taped to the antique instrument panel. Speaking tubes allowed other commands to be bellowed up and down from engine room to wheelhouse.

The yard crew isn't working today. I'm hanging around for visitors. Two old friends show up for tanker tourism: Cate Cochran, producer for the CBC show Sunday Edition who taped oral history of Todd Shipyard for PortSide before IKEA closed on the property. She’s down from Toronto; and Elizabeth Zeschin a photographer who I assisted in the 1980s, in town from London for a shoot. Elizabeth was shooting Martha Stewart’s Gardening Book at the time, which gave me a solid grounding in how to fake naturalistic lighting--and real insight into how not to run a home. Cate and Elizabeth go gaga over the tanker, Elizabeth shooting more than visiting. Her esthetic seems to have morphed from her 1980’s obsession with Victoriana to industrial hulks. They race off after a short while, two more women who do too much, and I linger waiting for Bob Guskind, saavy blogger of the Gowanus Lounge.

After he’s had his fill of photographing and video-ing the Whalen, I’m free to head for boyfriend John’s, to rest up, enjoy running water and to try uploading more blog posts. Methinks it’s not just the slow connection on the tanker. Blogger’s interface is pokey, especially with photos. I arrive to find that little Lulu has cottoned to John during the 10 days since her eviction for the Whalen. She now cuddles up to him more than me. Little trollop.

A slow Saturday

Saturday 1/27/07

The crew has withered even more. Yesterday’s 9 degree day followed by a Friday night makes for a nearly abandoned yard on Saturday. Even Machine doesn’t show up. Ernie is here, and so is Freddy, forever burning steel bits off the hull, but hardly anyone else.

Brunch is brought by Tim Ventimiglia, our museum designer, and his wife Elaina Ganim, an artist, archivist, text editor and fiction writer, their four legged sidekick Mila. With them are Mia Beurskens, a graphic designer who has been involved with PortSide, and her boyfriend.

Boyfriend John Gladsky, with his diesel mechanic Capt. Frank Persico, make a surprise appearance. We all have lunch in the galley. Frank runs a dive boat on the weekends and used to work on a tanker much like the Whalen and regales with tales.

Though Tim has spent lots of time on the Whalen, he’s wowed by her out of the water. Part of the jolt, I'm sure, comes from feeling that plans, talk, visioning are now becoming solid as the hull gets whipped into shape; but Tim also has an appreciation of steel fabrication. His artist father John worked as a welder in Maine shipyards before getting a position teaching art, sculpture, design and drawing at the Maine College of Art.

After the guests admire the Whalen hull and the granite dock, I propose we go see the caisson. Gladsky is not interested in the junket. “No, I’ve seen the caisson, I salvaged it once.” John’s line of work is heavy lift marine salvage. He picks up big things that sink, and workboats and harbor infrastructure sink more than one would imagine. John’s parting comment is to point out the muzzle of a buried cannon serving as a bollard. These cannons, Civil War surplus, dot this place -- reminders of how much history there is to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and how casually it has been treated.

There is such a meager yard crew to monitor that Ernie has time for tourism. He joins us visiting the caisson and the dock pumproom, a subterranean brick cylinder that houses the original 1851 pumps, now electrified. The dock is working on only one pump as one of the two tunnels is clogged. Ernie has plans to clean it out somehow.

Mia volunteers to select a font for the Whalen’s name. The last one was scrunched between fenders that took up a lot of space on the bow. Those are long gone, and Freddy has been washing off the remains of what held them in place, and the bow looks much cleaner. I’ve decided to return the bow paint job and name placement to what is likely the original position -- based on a photo of the S.T. Kiddoo, the Mary Whalen’s original name. Charlie Deroko tells me that "spirket plate" (“Amaze your friends and fool your enemies with that one”) is the name for the panel now repainted white. Spirket Plate?! I’ve never heard the term before and resolve to Google the word one night when I have nothing to do, should such a moment arise.

So… the work report being light this day, there’s more space for photos from the week.

Aft draft numbers are elongated so they read correctly when seen from above (from the dock or waterlevel) and looking down the concave shape of the after end of the boat.

Spent welding rod and blast grit in ice at the bottom of the dock.