“Keeping the Rot at Bay”
For our second day at the Bayshore Center, we tweaked our schedule a bit to be more efficient. We’d work straight through until a later lunchtime and then leave right after lunch. But the first order of business upon arriving was checking out Cashier, the sunken boat we’d seen hints of on Friday. It was only two hours after low tide, and we could now see the massive hull mired in the mud, huge chunks rotted away. Captain Johann inspired us with the news that today we’d be focused on helping to make sure that the same rot didn’t destroy the AJ Meerwald.
One group started with the massive, unromantic, but helpful, task of sweeping every inch of the various docks surrounding the center. These docks were often covered by water at high tide, causing a build up of debris, so sweeping them was not trivial. Then this group headed onto the AJ Meerwald itself to paint deck boxes with white marine paint. One person would use a roller to cover the large flat surfaces and another would follow with a detail brush to get what was left.
Another group, self-identified as having good handwriting, started the day in the office writing thank you notes to people who had donated to the Bayshore Center. Then they moved to the area around the crew quarters where they picked up and hauled trash.
The third group spent their entire morning working on two of the boat’s gaffs, enormous spars (wooden poles) that had been removed from the Meerwald and set up on the dock. Each had to be painstakingly sanded and then, once respirators were donned, varnished by painting in the direction of the wood grain.
The final group spent their day in the woodshop working on blocks (the pulley part of a “block and tackle”). Every block from the Meerwald—there must have been thirty or forty—had been removed, disassembled, and sanded. The students had to snip flush the bits of oak that had been glued in to plug old screw holes, remove any remaining sanding dust using rags and denatured alcohol, hang the blocks using twine (learning how to tie a round turn with two half-hitches and a bowline in the process), and then apply a penetrating oil finish with brushes.
Most of us felt exhausted by the end of the day but also proud that we had completed such a huge amount of important work.
