Fairleads > The Canned Ham Incident
September/October 2005
Hello all,I am very pleased to present a great Guest Fair Leads, courtesy of one of my favorite writers, Rob White. This story is excerpted, with permission from the author, from the book How to Build a Tin Canoe, a book that you need to rush right out and buy, right now. Or read this bit first, but I'm not kidding, it is the most amazingly funny, thoughtful, instructive series of essays you will ever see.
Fair Leads,
Brion Toss
In which I do not participate, so Hurrah for the other side
I guess it was about 1985 when I heard this story from a permanent resident of this island. Given that I was not an eyewitness, some of the accuracy may be in doubt, but it ain t the kind of thing that is normally embellished too much and the details are all too bizarre to invent all highly technical stuff, so if you ain t into that, better skip on. This is a long, long story–takes about three hours, what with kibitzing, to tell it right, but I ll try to cut it to the very bone.
There was a preacher from Missouri, or someplace like that, who got some supporters to outfit a missionary project, and he built a big pirate-ship-looking thing to sail down the Mississippi to the Caribbean to save the heathens down there. He had already made it down the Mississippi and east as far as he could go and still stay out of the open ocean. Though I was not a participant in the actual incident in question, I did see the ship docked in Carrabelle at the eastern terminus of the North Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, where he was fueling up to head outside for the first time across the gulf of the northeastern bend of Florida. You know, just that he had come all the way says something for the man and his ship. Errol Flynn would have been right at home on that thing. It looked like the boat was almost fifty feet long, but it was hard to tell where the actual boat stopped and the decorative part started. It had all sorts of filigree and dolphin strikers and chicken beaks and stuff up by the head and some sort of balcony and extra transom and windows back by the stern enclosing the enormous head of what would normally have been an outboard rudder. The kitchen was way up in the forecastle...on deck with full standing room and a regular-size cast iron, combination L.P. and wood-burning range. The living quarters were in the poop and had the rudderhead protruding up through the roof with a twenty-some-odd-foot tiller way up there seven or eight feet off the deck. It was worked by hauling tackles to a homemade spoked wheel, at least seven feet tall, mounted on a preaching pulpit in front of the forward bay windows of the living quarters. The well-lit cabin must have been a delightful place with all those windows and all those Bibles and hymnals and prayer books in shelves lining the wall, their spines gleaming with gold. There were two huge masts that looked just like pressure-treated utility poles with varnish on them. I noticed an ingenious use of semi-truck mudflaps as chafing gear for the gigantic yards lashed to the masts and secured at the ends by braces and the sheets that would normally be made up to the clew corners of the sails. The preacher was even kind enough to take me below to show me the stores and the engine room. I noticed hundreds of canned hams stored under a grating in the dry and spotless bilge, and boxes of spaghetti in racks along the sides of the hull. Big agricultural liquid tanks gleamed palely up in the bow. There were cardboard boxes of even more Bibles, hymnals, and prayer books secured with big rope netting. The immaculate engine room had a little Perkins diesel engine–heat exchanger cooled, three-to-one Velvet Drive gear, 1 3/8-inch stainless shaft, patent, never-drip hard-seal well-pump-style stuffing box. There were at least two fuel filters and a sediment bowl. A big old polished bronze and glass raw water strainer glistened like jewelry in the fluorescent lights. I was able to catch a glimpse of the dull but expensive gleam of no-telling-how-many genuine Rolls batteries under the stainless steel expanded metal of the engine room deck. There was a paper towel holder handy to the dipstick. Bounty paper towels there was nothing second rate down there. Errol might have fit in pretty good on deck, but you could tell, that preacher wouldn t have let him penetrate ever so slightly into that engine room with his slap-dash self. I even felt a little out of place, but I was glad to get a chance to marvel at it.
I liked his engine room and agreed with him about his mission. Somebody needed to do something about all those heathens down in the Caribbean islands. I told that preacher that I thought the way to do it would be to clench a Bible, hymnal, or prayer book in his teeth and swing over onto the heathen yacht on a halyard with a canned ham under his arm. I hope I don t give the impression that I am making fun of the man. His boat might have been something of a show and I guess that is what he thought it would take to accomplish his mission. It was obvious that he knew exactly what he was doing, so far, and I m sure he knew exactly how to deal with heathens without me. Unfortunately, I had to come back to our shop in Georgia to try to build a boat for a man and was unable to supervise the crossing of the open water of the northeastern Gulf of Mexico–too bad.
The way I heard it from my islander buddy, the preacher listened to the droning, on and on, of the National Weather Service and looked at the weather fax until it looked like it would be good for a while and then motored out the pass between St. George and Dog islands into the open gulf, heading for where the intracoastal waterway resumed at Anclote Key about a hundred miles away. He was planning to motor the whole way like he had been doing so far and save his sails for the trades He listened to the radio too long, though, and missed the tide in the pass, and by the time that little 4-108 had pushed that behemoth out past all that water coming in, it was getting late. Later he told my buddy, one of Dog Island s hard-bitten permanent residents, that he was counting on the land breeze to give him a nice lee of the island and the shoals east of there to make it an easy cruise. It probably would have been a nice trip in a more predictable season of the year. After the preacher got outside the pass in the nice easy swells of the big water, he activated the autopilot and went into his house and got a chair and his bedroom slippers and sat there watching his great big wheel turning ever so slightly in tune to the flux gate and watched the Floridians turn on all those electric lights that they use to demonstrate their dominion over nature. I guess he was thinking about opening up one of them canned hams when the wind started breezing up from the south a little like it does around here when a cold front whips a little farther down than expected and begins to draw the weather in from the gulf. By the time he got the chair and the bedroom slippers secured, it was blowing pretty good. Too bad it wasn t the expected land-breeze and there wasn t any lee. The preacher said that it was blowing about fifty with fifteen- to twenty foot swells. The data buoy anchored eighty miles out in the gulf said eighteen with gusts to twenty-two and four- to six-foot waves, but you know, things are real variable in the Gulf of Mexico.
About midnight or so, my buddy, the permanent resident of the island, was coming home across the bay. I guess I better explain that situation. This island where I live most of the time has no bridge or public transportation to it. Because of that and certain other characteristics (like intermittent electricity), there are only a few people who live here all the time. Most of the folks over here just come on weekends when the weather is good and the FSU Noles ain t playing. It takes a special person to be able to handle this place. So, this friend of mine was coming back to the island in his motor whaleboat from checking in at the Tiki Bar (a little bar right on the river with roaches in the palm-thatched cabanas to enhance the ambiance) on the mainland, which he sometimes visited for a little while, when he noticed eleven very bright flares from somewhere around the shoals east of the island. He knew that a vessel was in distress big-time, from the quantity and quality of those flares so he headed to the rescue and found the preacher and his boat washed up sideways on the sandbar (called Dog Island Reef on the charts). Turned out that, while he was skirting the windward side of the shoals watching his GPS and Loran and radar wondering when the land breeze would start up, the beam sea began rolling those telephone poles around in the holes until they wallowed the wedges out and then they really went to flopping. Before long, the yards had snatched enough slack in the lines securing them so that they were trying to sweep all that tophamper off the deck. There was nothing the preacher could do but hold on to the wheel and try to give the autopilot and that little Perkins all the help he could while he dodged those spars. He would have probably managed to slide by the shoals if one of the canned hams hadn t hopped over and popped the nipple off the state-of-the-art plastic (I ain t gonna mention no names but I am a bronze-age man myself) raw water intake through-the-hull fitting to the engine. After that, it didn t take long to boil all the coolant out of the heat exchanger. The preacher was too busy to notice until the engine ran hot and seized and the whole mess washed sideways up on the bar. The preacher dove for his emergency cabinet and all those (not out-of-date) SOLAS-approved flares. Would have shot an even dozen but he dropped one while he was side-skipping the sweep of the main yard. My buddy says he was amazed at the spectacle of just eleven of those things. Said, You know them little shotgun-shell flares like go in the plastic pistol, just ain t in it with the real thing.
When my buddy got there, the big boat was lying over on its side with its bottom to the breakers in about four or five feet of water. My buddy eased the whaleboat around to the lee side and tried to hold a conversation with the preacher about what he wanted to do. Turned out that he should have just told him to hop on board if he wanted to go back to Carrabelle because the man refused to abandon all those Bibles. While they were trying to shift the good books from one boat to the other in the surf, that one-inch fitting in the bottom of the big boat was equalizing the inside water level with the outside water level (both well above the batteries), which killed all three radios (single-sideband, VHF and CB) and left only the meaningless drone of the dry-cell-powered weather radio. The wind shift from the cold front came, the tide turned and took the wreck off the reef, where it sank down to where the spars and part of the preacher were all that were sticking out.
It took a while for the preacher to convince himself that it was all right now to give up the good fight and get out of that cold water. Unbeknownst to both of them, during the decision making process, the whaleboat was winding up six hundred feet of half-inch nylon line with it propeller. My buddy finally figured it out when a big inflatable boat appeared, coming rapidly up from astern. The cold, the Tiki Bar, and the frustration of trying to be subtle with this preacher had dimmed his wits, and at first he thought this thing was just coming to see how things were going when, in fact, it wanted to dive under the stern of the whaleboat, explode, and wrap all up in the wheel in a knot as hard as a truck tire. He and the preacher spent a long time trying to cut the damn thing loose, but they were frustrated by the coldness of the water, the roughness of the fabric of the top-notch dinghy, and by a five horse British Seagull outboard motor that was also wrapped around the wheel and shaft of the whaleboat. By the time they gave up on trying to clear the propeller, the Seagull was all they could get loose. Too bad the stopped lark s head the preacher had tied around the mast of the ship to make up the whaleboat didn t hold like that knot around the propeller, and they had been drifting rapidly toward the Florida Middle Ground all this time. They tried the old trusty 12H Danforth which had held the whaleboat so faithfully for so many years in the rough anchorage at Dog Island, but it wouldn t find the bottom with the line that they had close to hand. Of course, they had the six-hundred-foot dinghy painter spooled up between the wheel and the strut, but that was unavailable. My buddy estimated that they would end up somewhere down around Ft. Myers if they were really lucky. If they were just sort of lucky and the wind came on around more east like it usually did, it would the Keys or Cuba. If they weren t lucky, they might get to work with the heathens after all. Hard to predict on the first day of a four- or five-day norther.
My buddy finally brought all his faculties to bear on the problem and decided to try to get the Seagull running. The muffler was gone, the shaft was bent in a U, two of the five propeller blades were busted off (all on the same side, wouldn t you know), and the whole steering handle-throttle control arrangement was gone. Not only that, but it looked like something had been snatched out of the carburetor by the throttle cable. Only after they had taken the foot off and straightened the little square tubing thing that the Seagull factory uses for a shaft between the head and the foot, and beat the housing back into some kind of shape that would allow a little strained rotation, did they discover that the crankshaft was bent so that the flywheel was jammed against the magneto stator plate. (Y all following all this? Might better read back over it or the rest ain t going to make a bit of sense.) They finally straightened it out so that it could wobble almost clear by driving screwdrivers up under the rim of the flywheel and prying against the stator plate and the face of the core of the coil.
My buddy had five gallons of gas that he was carrying to the island for his generator, but there wasn t any oil. He was very proud of the integrity of the whaleboat s own 4-108 and felt that the display of gallon jugs of Delo400 was undignified in a good boat. They had to break the antenna off the weather radio to use as a straw to suck the black oil out of the dipstick hole of the whaleboat s engine with their lips. My buddy, an old mariner for real, said that that sucking business was the closest he ever cam to being seasick in his life, but he had to do it. Luckily, the preacher was up to the job, too, so they took turns sucking on the antenna. They mixed the oil with the gas a little at a time in a cut-off bleach-jug bailer and poured it in the Seagull s squashed gas tank. Then they tried to crank it while it was clamped onto one of the interior bulkheads of the whaleboat–no spark–so they turned it upside down and poured gas all up under the flywheel to try to flush out some of the water from the pints and coil and all. When they pulled the rope after that, the old Seagull fired right off–literally–those SOLAS flares were puny compared to the fireball that came out from under the flywheel of that Seagull.
So there it was running, wide open (the thing that had been jerked out of the carburetor by the throttle cable turned out to have been the throttle itself) in a pool of flaming gasoline. My buddy said it was hard not to back up to the fire for a little while in that cold wind in his wet clothes. Finally, the out-of balance of the wobbling flywheel, the bent shaft, the broke propeller, and the nature of the Seagull itself combined to vibrate the clamps loose and the whole bellowing mess fell off the bulkhead into the fire, where the oxygen finally burned up enough to shut it down. Of course, the impact knocked some of the paper towel (not Bounty) stuffing out of the holes in the gas tank and added more gas to the fire, which increased the draft so that my buddy and the preacher had to dance around quite a bit to avoid the flames that were whipped every which-a-way by the increasing north wind. Unfortunately, they had chosen the bulkhead that the fire extinguisher was mounted on for their mechanicking. Luckily those old surplus whaleboats are made out of fire retardant resin or their gooses would have been cooked. Finally, all the wasted gas burned up and they were able to proceed to step two after they had sucked some more oil out of the dipstick hole with their lips.
I m going to try to cut this thing down as best I can, but there is only so much that can be left out... What finally happened is that they nailed the cut-bait board to the stern of the double-ended, thick fiberglass whaleboat so that it wobbled sort of cattywampus off to one side and clamped the Seagull to it and tied it off to the towing bit to help the nails hold a little longer between re-nailing and motored off into the cold wind. It was a slow trip, but they didn t get bored. They found that they had a steady job sucking oil out of the crankcase of the whaleboat s engine. They were mixing gas by instinct and scared to death that they might starve the Seagull of oil and gall the liner and rings, and maybe even seize the already overstressed crankshaft, and then, considering the way the wind had veered, it would be the heathens of Africa for sure, so they sucked hard. The colder it got, the thicker the oil became. When they cranked the Diesel to warm the oil up a little so it would be easier to suck, the dipstick hole pooted little droplets of black oil right in their faces, but that was an insignificant thing in the face of the rest of all this. Finally, in the desperate scramble to transport the open container of precious mix and pour it into the out-of-reach gas tank of the crazily wiggling Seagull, one of them bumped into the whaleboat s gearshift, and instead of instantly choking the engine down against the fouled propeller, the old whaleboat began to motor ahead. It turns out that all the pitching and rolling from the rough seas had unwiggled the Avon from the wheel, unwound the six hundred feet of line, and they were under way, upwind in a forty-horsepower motor whaleboat built just exactly for that kind of duty. They hooked all forty of them horses up, pried the baitboard off the stern, let all that foolishness go to the bottom, and headed for Dog Island. They got there just in time for the arrival of the 11:00 a.m. private ferry. Man, what happened to Y all s faces? said the wit that met them trudging up the dock.
Epilogue
(I ll cut this to bone, too.) They went back and re-floated the Heathen s Revenge with two waterbeds inflated in the hold by a scuba tank and sold it and divided up the revenue in an agreeable fashion. The preacher went back to Missouri and my buddy went back to the Tiki Bar.