Herb Price was a indifferent teacher, having no time or patience for children. Herb owned and operated Miller Marine, a tiny boatyard on Seattle’s Portage Bay where we - my parents, my sister, and I - lived aboard an old wooden powerboat. We kids were tolerated around the yard as long as we kept out of the way, but his sufferance did not extend even the smallest fraction of a degree beyond that extended to feral cats, or silverfish. We were pests, just not of the sort that demanded any active attempt at eradication. So I learned almost nothing of boats or the water from Herb in the two years that we lived there. However, he did say one thing that has stuck with me for over four decades now, and which has shaped my thinking about boats and boat work.
Back then, I had a little wooden rowboat that my parents had given me. It was a flat-bottomed skiff, painted cream, with salmon-colored thwarts. It had no pretensions, no varnish, no elegant woodwork, but it was perfect in its simplicity. It was powered by a British Seagull outboard motor - a device which was an anachronism even in the early 1980s, with its hand-wound pull cord starter, exposed flywheel, and oval metal gas tank - and it had a pair of oars, for use when the Seagull refused to start.
The oars were rough, unfinished things, perfectly suited for pushing off of docks and pilings, poling along in shallow backwaters, and similar abuse - the sort of activities that a twelve year old boy would use them for. But I dreamt of oars like the ones I had seen in the window of the marine supply store down the street - hand-crafted spruce pulling boat oars, designed for deft strokes in the hands of a skilled sculler. Those oars shone with inner light, refracted through layer upon layer of golden varnish. They could not have been more different from my heavy, gray-pine, fishing boat oars.
My allowance did not extend to new oars, but I could afford a quart can of Man O’War Spar Varnish and several sheets of sandpaper. With those things in hand one morning, I laid the oars across a pair of sawhorses filched from the boatyard and began sanding. Starting with rough, eighty-grit sandpaper, I progressed through one-twenty, one-eighty, and progressively finer grades until some hours later, when Herb stopped by to have a look, I had gone past three-twenty and was starting on four hundred grit - a grade generally reserved for polishing gemstones, or the final coats of lacquer on a grand piano.
When Herb asked me what I was doing I explained, with youthful pride, that I was “refinishing these oars”, and proceeded to go into detail on my efforts to create the perfect surface for the multiple coats of varnish to come. All this was too much for Herb. “They’re just oars!” he exclaimed to me. And I have never forgotten that response. It was not the words themselves which were memorable so much as the tone of puzzled contempt with which they were uttered. To Herb, an oar was merely a tool. He would have no more thought of varnishing a pair of oars than he would a socket wrench.
In the moment of that exchange I formed what we might now call a “core memory”, in our post-Inside Out, pop-psych era. I realized that to Herb my efforts appeared to be a waste of time, but to me the time I was spending was the entire point of the project. Yes, I wanted to end up with a pair of shiny, golden, varnished oars, but even more than that, I wanted to be someone who knew the value of hard work, of a job well done, no matter how insignificant or quixotic. So I ignored Herb’s derision and pressed on with the project. I’m sure my varnish job was amateurish, filled with blobs and runs, but what I remember is the satisfaction of seeing those oars transformed through my effort and perseverance.
Thirty years later, when I was working to get Petrel back in the water again, I was not aiming for varnished perfection. She was an old fishing boat, and showed all the scars of her long working life. But the satisfaction of seeing her sitting at the dock, her hull shiny with new paint, was exactly the same feeling I had experienced when I was varnishing those oars back when I was twelve. The work was its own reward, and I took some time to enjoy the feeling of sitting on my own boat, on the water again for the first time in years. However even after she was launched there was still much more to be done before she would be operational again.
I launched Petrel in a drenching November rain storm, beginning our annual eight months of wet, gray, Seattle weather.
But even in November Seattle eventually delivers a break in the clouds. So over the next few days the dried out hull planking swelled, the seams took up, the pumps stopped, the sun came out, and I was able to get the mast stepped and tackle a few other post-launch chores while Petrel sat at the dock.
South Park was a half-hour drive from our home on Queen Anne Hill which meant an hour of travel time just to work on the boat. So instead I found a permanent slip for Petrel on the Lake Washington Ship Canal, just a few minutes from our house. It was a much better place for her but first I needed her there. And to do that I needed to get her three-cylinder Detroit Diesel 3-53 engine started, and find out whether Petrel could navigate under her own power again.
I had several tasks to complete before hitting the button though. So over the course of several days I patched the rusted exhaust pipe with fiberglass tape, checked and topped up the oil, added coolant, replaced the fuel filter elements, checked the engine stop cables, replaced the battery, traced the fuel system and set various valves to pull fuel from the starboard tank, and addressed innumerable other details. All that took time, but eventually it was done. Time to turn the key…
And nothing. The motor turned over but remained stubbornly silent. I tried again, and still nothing. After a spray of starting fluid in the air intake I tried a third time, and she stumbled to life! The engine idled smoothly. The oil pressure good. Even the gearbox worked, which was a surprise because from all appearances it looked like a solid block of rust. Petrel was a functioning vessel again.
On December 2nd, 2015, Petrel left South Park Marina under her own power, heading for her new home. I enlisted a friend to help me bring her through the locks that separate Seattle’s freshwater lakes from Puget Sound, and we cast off on a cold but calm and sunny winter morning.
Petrel ran smoothly as we traveled up the Duwamish Waterway and into Elliott Bay, passing the towering orange cranes of the Port of Seattle. We dodged the Bremerton ferry, just leaving the Coleman Dock terminal, rounded West Point, with its white and red lighthouse, and navigated through the Ballard Locks into the Lake Washington Ship Canal.
Finally, after a short run from the locks, through Salmon Bay and under the Ballard Bridge, we tied up in her new slip. Petrel was home.
There was much still to be done, and more adventures to come, but that is another story.
Herb was a character, a bit scary, and his was a sad story. But, indifferent teacher though he might have been, he taught us all much about what to value and what not to. In his own, cluttered-work-bench way, he taught you something about the value of work.