by John Urban

After a number of spring weekends and late weekday nights, good old Factor X is ready for the water. It’s splash-time. She was built in 1945 and she’ll be heading out of the shed looking as good as new – assuming you are standing afar on a low-lit cloudy day.
Actually, she looks pretty good and as the prep-work concludes, it’s time to step back and reflect. In considering my observations, please recognize that I am exhausted from months of physical labor and am drug-induced by various marine paints and chemical solvents. Nevertheless, here is a wooden boat owner’s stream of thought on the day of launching:
1. Screw top wine bottles shouldn’t be allowed aboard wooden boats – you never know when you might need one of those little corks to plug up a leak.
2. Varnish is designed to protect wood from water, sun, and salt. Don’t worry about drips, sags, scratches, high spots, and embedded brush bristles because they in no way undermine the protective purpose of varnishing.
3. Poor woodworking craftsmanship is revealed by scratches and gouges, but when you do the work yourself it’s more appropriate to see these as… character marks.
4. Polished bronze may be a nice look to some, but a seasoned boater knows that bronze hardware reaches its proper patina only after years of carefully managed neglect.
5. A professional shipwright measures twice and cuts once. The rest of us keep large containers of epoxy, filler, and wood glue handy at all times.
6. Perhaps the best advertising campaign in the history of boating featured Dick Fisher and the unsinkable Boston Whaler. I wonder how many leaky wooden boats Fisher owned before he and Ray Hunt developed the Whaler.
![Whaler_and_Fisher[1]](http://writeonthewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Whaler_and_Fisher11.jpg)
(An early Dick Fisher Ad – the unsinkable Boston Whaler)
7. Imagine being a Boston Whaler salesman back then. For the first time people would have no caulking, no leaks, no sinking, no painting…it was probably easier than selling iPhones.
8. Getting back to the drips, sags, and high spots on the varnish. Jackson Pollack spent lots of time on the East End of Long Island. I wonder what his boat looked like.
![jackson[1]](http://writeonthewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/jackson1.jpg)
(Jackson Pollack – now there’s inspiration for a novel varnishing technique)
9. If a boat slips from the travel lift as it’s being launched and the owner is nowhere in sight, will anyone hear it crash as it falls to the ground?
10. There’s an adage out there that goes something like: If God wanted us to sail fiberglass boats, he would have made fiberglass trees. This is a relevant question. I mean, am I alone in noticing those composite construction trees that are popping up alongside highways? And they must be God’s work because that happens to be one of the few places where I consistently get four bars on my cell phone.
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We had fun chatting and in the upcoming days, I gave them a fishing lure someone had given me (Montana – fish crazy? It figures), and a copy of Circle of Bones, and then after we both arrived in Hopetown, they gave me two fresh-caught fillets from a mutton snapper they’d hooked while trolling up from Little Harbor. Then one afternoon when I thought they were just stopping by to say hello to Barney, they told me they had decided to get married the next day, and they invited me to the wedding. They’d hired Vernon Malone, from Vernon’s Grocery and UpperCrust Bakery, who it turns out is also a minister at the local Methodist Church and presides over weddings and funerals. Vernon is a direct descendant of 




This morning I am moored in Little Harbor all the way at the south end of what people here call the Sea of Abaco. We have been side-swiped here by the outer edges of Tropical Storm Andrea. The weather has been gray, rainy and gloomy for a couple of days, so I came inside here and picked up a mooring to ride out the strong winds in this protected harbor. Little Harbor is the home of
The first time I visited this place was about 25 years ago. I was married to Jim Kling then and our son was about three years old. When we visited the gallery Randolph Johnston was still alive and we had a brief chat with him during our visit. Pete’s Pub was little more than a pile of flotsam with a bar in the middle and I there was no food being served. The roads from Marsh Harbor were not good enough to get regular provisions in. I love this old photo I have of Tim riding on his dad’s shoulders outside the gallery. It’s been 15 years since Jim died but whenever I come here, I am filled with memories of the good island times we had visiting as a family.
Catfish said, “Don’t worry. He’s just run off into the bush. He’ll be back in a couple of days, long as he doesn’t run into a wild boar.”

