Refinishing The Cockpit Deck

When you own a wooden boat certain encounters become routine. On pulling up to the fuel dock or a guest slip somewhere, one only has to wait a few minutes until another boater walks up. “Nice boat”, they say. Then, “I’d love a wooden boat but I can’t stand doing all that maintenance”. I have had that conversation at every dock I’ve ever visited, with every boat I’ve ever owned, from the south end of Puget Sound to the Canadian Gulf.

When I was younger, and full of energy and naivete, my stock answer was that it “doesn’t take more work than a fiberglass boat, really. It’s just different”. And then, after having my first large boat for a few years, it became “ah, it’s not really work if you love doing it”. And I believed that. Still do. There are very few things in life that are more satisfying than completing some finishing or maintenance project on a wooden boat.

But the thing about wooden boat maintenance, and especially finish work, and most especially stripping paint and varnish, is that it lends itself to philosophical musings. There is not much else to do other than ponder the meaning of one’s existence during hour upon hour of stripping paint with a scraper and a heat gun - a task that requires time and care, but does not tax the mind.

Today, my chore was to strip the varnish from Skookum Maru’s cockpit deck.

I’ve gotten behind on maintenance of the varnish, and now it has deteriorated so badly that it must be stripped back to bare wood and refinished.

A heat gun and a scraper do an efficient job of varnish removal, as long as one is careful to keep the heat gun moving, and not pause too long in any one place. But it is a slow, inch by inch process. Heat a six inch section of plank until the varnish just starts to bubble, scrape it off, move down the plank, repeat. Take care not to let the corner of the scraper dig into the wood and gouge it. Stop every so often to sharpen the scraper with a file. That’s it.

A professional would use much faster methods - more heat, larger scrapers, chemical strippers, or just sand it off - but, as an amateur I like a methodical approach. You can’t get into too much trouble if you take things slow. However, after the third or fourth hour of kneeling on the hard deck, hands buzzing from the vibration of the heat gun, sweat dripping into your eyes, a hot wire starting to creep between your shoulder blades and up your neck, the mind begins to wander.

What, I wonder, does it mean to take care of a boat?

…and a little while later…

How can you own something if you don’t invest any time in caring for it?

…and some time after that…

Can you really own anything that doesn’t own you?

And that’s the real question. What does it mean to own something? Not just have the use of the thing for some time, until it no longer serves your needs, or wears out, or goes out of style, but to own a thing so completely that it becomes an essential part of your life. To invest enough of your labor, and imagination, and life into the thing that it begins to own some piece of you in return.

At a certain point the labor stops being about “upkeep” for the sake of going boating - the tasks one does from necessity in order to get back out on the water - and becomes part of one’s identity. The boat is no longer merely a possession, but a thing that has a claim on its owner.

So the next time someone tells me that they would love to own a wooden boat, but they couldn’t stand the maintenance I will smile. And I will offer up one of my stock responses, designed to maintain the assumptions and illusions of the fiberglass boat owner. But I will also feel a little sad that they will never have the experience of really owning their boat.

Oh, and I finished scraping the cockpit deck.

Tomorrow I will sand it to remove as much of the gray stain as I can, and then begin the process of building up new layers of varnish.