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Mercer Slough

The Whitehall I built in 1983 is the finest bit of boatbuilding I’ve ever done. It began with a commission, so I wasn’t driven by daydreams of cruising as I had been with other boats I had built. For the Whitehall, I focussed on craftsmanship. Halfway through the project, my customer backed out on the deal, but at that point it didn’t change the nature of the work—I was building the boat for boatbuilding’s sake. I was deeply committed to traditional construction and put my best work into the best materials I could find: Port Orford cedar for the planks with mahogany for the sheerstrake, white-oak for the frames, and copper and bronze fastenings.  I fashioned the breasthook, quarter knees, and boom jaws from crooks that I gathered and cured. The fruitwood crook that provided the book-matched pair of quarter knees was a once-in-a-lifetime find, perfectly suited to the angle and the curves.

I finished the Whitehall bright. The wood was too pretty and noteworthy in its rarity to hide under paint and I didn’t want to conceal the work I had taken such pride in. I launched the boat without christening it, leaving the naming to a buyer I hoped to find. A young couple living in one of the tonier parts of the Seattle metropolitan area purchased it and over the years I lost track of them and the Whitehall.

Thirty years later it resurfaced when its second owner sought me out.  He’d had the boat for several years and loved it but was no longer able to use it. Feeling very strongly that it belonged back with me and my family, he let me buy it at a fraction of its value. Its transom had remained just as I’d made it, unadorned; the Whitehall was still without a name.

Between 1980 to 1987, four other boats I had built for months-long cruises got me through all the adventures that had captured my imagination and ambitions, and I was ready to settle into a career and raising a family. When I brought the Whitehall home in 2014, my kids were on their own and I had just been hired by WoodenBoat. Later that year, the Whitehall became a valuable asset for my work as the editor of Small Boats. It made its first appearance in the November 2014 issue in an article on Beaching Legs and has since appeared in one way or another in at least 54 more articles.

I enjoyed the attention the boat attracted at the launch and in my driveway, but all too often I treated the Whitehall very much like a trophy, brought out only for show and for polishing. That was until Nate and I spent this year’s Father’s Day together aboard it exploring Mercer Slough, a backwater surrounded by a park just south of downtown Bellevue, Washington.

 

The entrance to Mercer Slough lies under the spilled-spaghetti tangle of elevated off-ramps, on-ramps, and through lanes of Bellevue Way and Interstates 90 and 405. Beneath the widest expanse of concrete, the air is still but the traffic sounds like a gale blowing.

 

We started out from the launch ramp rowing tandem, but once we reached the slough it was best to take it in with a slower pace. We took turns rowing from the forward station and steering from the sternsheets. The nearest bridge here is part of a bike path that I’ve crossed often, looking down at the slough and wishing I were rowing or paddling rather than pedaling.

 

The center section of the slough runs straight for 1/2 mile and offers a glimpse of high-rises 2 miles away in downtown Bellevue, visible here just above Nate’s right elbow. At the next bend the city disappears from view.

 

Like me, Nate is eager to raise sail whenever there’s a breeze that can be put to good use. The spinnaker I made to fly from an oar stepped as a mast has become an essential bit of our kit.

 

Nate quickly took to stand-up rowing with oarlock extensions. To his left, on the far side of the fence is a blueberry farm that operates within Bellevue’s Mercer Slough Nature Park. Blueberries have been cultivated in the area since 1933.

 

Nate was in the stern, sailing the Whitehall, when my daughter Alison called to wish me a happy Father’s Day. When I handed my phone to him so he could talk with his sister, he took the phone in one hand and with the other slipped the spinnaker sheets between the toes of his right foot and the tiller-yoke lines between the toes of his other foot.

 

One of the trails that meander around the park curves through this atypical clearing at the edge of the slough. Nate and I pulled ashore and took a lunch break at a bench situated there. The grass beneath the boat grows on floating sod that sinks when stepped on. I took a short walk along the trail to look in the woods for windfalls that might make a taller mast for the spinnaker. The growth was too thick to venture into and I returned to the boat empty handed.

 

The upstream extremity of the slough leads to the concrete-and-steel Kelsey Creek fish ladder. It climbs to a culvert that was large enough for the Whitehall, but the baffles in the ladder leading up to it were impassible. (There were no signs of any fish.)

 

Nate took a close look at the culvert. At the far end, about 40 yards away, there were signs of a cattail marsh. The water was cold, and we decided to turn back.

 

On our way back from the fish ladder we found a stand of bamboo on land outside of the park boundary. Two of the stalks had fallen and were half submerged. A third arched out just a few feet over the water and I used a serrated folding knife to cut it off a few feet from shore. Nate and I trimmed the branches and we had our new mast.

 

The north end of the slough loops back to itself around a 1/2-mile-long island. Just 100 yards into our return along the alternative route, we passed under a concrete bridge, low enough that we had to duck to pass under it. Between the concrete girders were steel pipes within easy reach and Nate abandoned ship.

 

On our passage south back down the slough we found the breeze had switched directions since we last sailed it. The spinnaker went up on the new 9′ bamboo mast to catch the breeze above our heads and pull us part of the way home.

 

The change in my feelings about the Whitehall and my relationship with it happened as Nate and I tethered it at the bottom of the Kelsey Creek fish ladder. I had only one fender and, before I could get it properly situated, the gunwale grated against the rough concrete wall. The gouge in the oak outwale would leave the boat scarred, but I realized that it would be a memento of a day I’d be happy to remember. My own scars have made the events that created them impossible to forget: the crescent scar on my left index finger I got while learning to whittle when I was 10 years old, the stitch-puckered scar on my right knee where a scalpel-sharp flake of obsidian sliced into it while I was making arrowheads at 14, and the pale V at the base of my right thumb I got at 23 when I was running around Green Lake, tripped and tumbled, gored my hand on a jagged edge of broken concrete, and fell into the lake.

The only scar the Whitehall had carried before Mercer Slough is one that you might not notice. It’s a scarf joint 18″ back from the forward end of the third plank up from the garboard on the port side. I’d split the plank’s hood end while trying to nail it into the stem rabbet without steaming. I had to patch on a new piece. For the 39 years after I’d launched theWhitehall, it had been so gently used and so well maintained that there wasn’t another scar anywhere, no visible sign the boat had ever been subject to the mishaps that are inevitable when venturing out into the world. It’s tempting to coddle beauty, but it comes at the expense of character.

My other boats have scars that bring their histories to life. My sneakbox LUNA has a patch on the bottom where I hit a submerged rock when I stopped on the muddy Kentucky shore of the Ohio River to meet Shantyboat legends Harlan and Anna Hubbard. My Gokstad faering ROWENA has a gouge in the garboard where she slipped off a rail cart at the end of a remarkable portage across Alaska’s Admiralty Island. One of my Greenland kayaks has a patch where a harpoon I’d thrown during a traditional skills demonstration didn’t make it past the foredeck.

I’ll still take good care of the Whitehall, but I’ll seek out more opportunities to enjoy using it with my kids and those close to me. We all have scars, boats and boaters alike, and with its recently gouged gunwale the Whitehall seems more like a member of the family just like BONZO, HESPERIA, and ALISON, the other boats in our fleet that share in making memories. It may be time to give the Whitehall a name.

Getting Beneath the Surface

After an afternoon kayaking outing on one of the last warm summer afternoons of the year, I returned to the dock where I’d put in to pry myself out of the cockpit. There was a man in the water hanging on to the end of the dock. I asked him how the water was, thinking he was in there to cool off, but he made it clear that he wasn’t swimming for pleasure: “My girlfriend threw my pants in the water and all my money is in the pockets.”

I peered into the water that was in my shadow. On the bottom I could just make out a shopping cart and a green ride-share bike, but no pants. He said they were farther out, but on that side of my kayak there was only glare. I hauled myself up on the dock and wished him luck, as much for finding his pants as for finding a new girlfriend.

On the drive home I regretted not doing anything more to help, but he had a diving mask on, so if the pants were somewhere near the dock, he’d be able to see and retrieve them; the water there is only about 12′ deep.

The incident got me thinking about being better prepared to recover something that has dropped in the water. About 100 yards from that same dock, the rudder for my gunning dory slipped free and has been on the bottom. I wasn’t prepared then to recover it, and now, 20 years later, I can’t remember just where it would be. Recovering the rudder might have been possible if I could have done two things: see it clearly through the surface, and get a line hooked on it.

My son, Nate, used an underwater video system to retrieve this outboard that had gone AWOL three days earlier. The yellow video monitor is between his shins and he’s holding the 60′ cable that connects it to the underwater camera.

More recently, I was testing an electric outboard motor that suddenly pried its tiller from my hand, turned sideways, and wrenched itself off the transom. (It’s the very last time I used an outboard without having it tied to a safety line.) The motor went down in about 30′ of water in the middle of the shipping canal, too deep and too dangerous for me to look for it by free-diving. I went home,  made a grappling hook out of steel rod, and connected it to a long line and my little underwater video camera. It took three outings at the canal to find the motor, and it was only with my son’s help manning the hook and watching the monitor while I rowed a search pattern and dodged boat traffic that we found and recovered the outboard.

The motorwell on the Caledonia yawl is located just to port of the skeg. The plug that fills the hole when the motor is not in use has a window. The box-like plug is also a handy place to toss my hat.

When I built my Caledonia yawl, I incorporated a simple device for seeing into the water. The plug that fills the motorwell while I’m rowing or sailing has a plexiglass bottom. It comes in handy when I’m sailing in shallow water and need to keep an eye on the bottom, but it has some limitations. When I was exploring the fringes of Yellow Island in Puget Sound’s San Juan archipelago, I got a brief glimpse of the tip of a submerged boulder just before it tore my rudder off.

My helmet required weights front and back—about 90 lbs altogether—to get it to sink the volume of air inside it.

I’ve had my best view of the underwater world with a hard-hat diving helmet I made out of plywood and plexiglass. A plastic pump for inflating rafts, manned by someone I can trust, supplies air through a 50’ length of garden hose. I made my first dive with it in a marina, and I was quite content to just sit on the bottom, 12’ down, looking out across the sandy wasteland under the docks. I could have stayed there for quite a while, but I could tell by the diminishing airflow that my pump man was getting tired.

With air pulsing through the garden hose, our friend Bobbie begins his descent while Nate looks on.

 

While the helmet’s four windows offer a good view of the underwater world, the noise of the bubbles in the helmet gets to be quite loud. It’s not exactly tranquil.

An easier way to see underwater is through a different kind of windowed plywood box, one used at the surface. On the south coast of Menorca in the Mediterranean, I saw fishermen wading in the shallows, bent over with their faces pressed into things that looked like oversized megaphones. They had openings at the top to fit around their eyes and windows on the bottom. I never found out what they were looking for, but I was intrigued by their devices, called bathyscopes or aquascopes. They’ve been around for quite a while, perhaps almost as long as window glass has been.

The contoured opening keeps light from getting into the bathyscope and making distracting reflections on the plexiglass window. I’ll add foam strips to the perimeter for comfort.

After worrying for a while about the unfortunate man who’d lost his pants, I made a bathyscope from stuff I had lying around the shop: some leftover mahogany plywood, oak from a desk I’d made years ago, a scrap of 1/4″ plexiglass, and a pair of brass window-sash handles. The top end is 3″ x 5-3/4″ with cutouts for my forehead and nose. I pressed a length of lead-free solder to my face to make a contoured pattern.

The 1/4″ plexiglass window sits in the recess created by the trim framing the bottom of the bathyscope. A thin bead of silicone caulking, applied only on the outside, makes a watertight seal that will allow easy removal of the plexiglass if it needs to be replaced.

 

Painting the interior flat black eliminates reflections and improves the view.

The window at the bottom is 7″ x 10″ and recessed in the trim pieces at the bottom so it won’t get scratched when set down. The interior is painted flat black to make the best of the underwater view. The handles are angled for a comfortable grip and offset from one another vertically to provide firmer control if the water’s a bit unsettled.

I had a clear view of the bottom off the end of the dock, but I saw no sign of the missing pants, just a shopping cart and a bicycle.

The bathyscope was ready a few days after I’d met the man looking for his pants, so when I returned to the dock with it and a grappling hook I didn’t have much hope of finding the pants, or reconnecting them with their owner if I did. I got a good look at the bike and the shopping cart, guided the hook to them, and hauled them up. There were no markings on the cart, so I’m stuck with that. I took the bike to a service center where the company repairs them. The technician there recognized it as an older model, so it had been missing for quite a long time.

While letting the boat drift at the end of its painter, Nate scanned the bottom for treasure.

With winter coming, the water here will be getting much clearer. I’m planning on rowing around the marina with my bathyscope, grappling hook, and a large magnet. I suspect the water there has been hiding all manner of treasures under its mask of ripples and reflections.