Bequia Beauty

Plumbelly underway

Plumbelly's launch off the beach in Admiralty Bay, Bequia where she was built.

Sailing down to Bequia from the US, Grenada in the background.

Landfall in the Caribbean, down from New England.

Carriacou

Carriacou

lee bower

Bequia

Plumbelly at rest.

Tyrrel Bay, Bequia

Patrick and Joel just before Joel manifested his illness in the most visceral way.

It's 5 o'clock somewhere.

Zidan, Cabo Verde Islands

Boatbuilding family, Cabo Verde Islands

Jose and Boteline sailing. Cabo Verde

El Jagdida, Morocco

About half the fleet at El Jadida

Building in Morocco

Plumbelly on the hard.

Well stocked, 'bellies belly.

Galley

Back in New England

Flush decks

Save for the canvas dodger over the companionway

Goals accomplished, surf's up!



all photos courtesy Patrick DaLilla or David Jones

You can just about hear J. Buffet and a steel band in the background. This very interesting boat turned up in one of those tiny ads in the WB classifieds. I've been to St. Vincent and was regaled with stories of the Bequia whalers by my host, Captain Jack Longley. We were to deliver a 65' steel motorsailer from St. Vincent to the Cayman Islands. This is back in the early 90's. I was able to get away and had quite an adventure. But the story of the Bequia whalers, one of the very few traditional whaling communities still allowed to hunt whales, (up to 4 per year, though they rarely make quota, in open boats w/ harpoon, no mods no motors, sail only) has stayed with me and continued to intrigue me over the years. There's precious little info on them on the web.
Plumbelly is the quintessential Caribbean cruising boat, though I'm sure she fares well in other waters, and I've included some photos from Patrick's adventures across the Atlantic. She was built on a beach in Bequia by local shipwright Loran Dewar and Klaus Alverman, a German ship's captain who commissioned her. Built to Bequian whaleboat lines with the exception that she's not an open boat, but flush decked. I'll let the current owner, Patrick DaLilla, tell the story:

"When I bought my boat in Maine six years ago, people told me that she was famous, built on an island called Bequia and sailed twice around the world. At the time I preferred to consider her more “tried and true” than famous. But as I guided my (by now) beloved little boat back to her birthplace after her 28th crossing of the Atlantic, I couldn’t help but revel in her amazing history.
PLUMBELLY was built on the beach in Admiralty Bay under the shade of the palm trees in the place where Tommy Cantina’s now sits. An eccentric German architect and ship’s captain named Klaus Alverman wanted a small yacht to cruise the islands in, and he set out to build it with the help of Bequian shipwright Lauren Joe. They built the boat in the local tradition: hewing carefully selected timber from around the island into the shape of a modified two bow fishing boat. Her full body inspired the name as a passerby commented “look like she got a big plum in dee belly mon!”
She was launched in 1965 and a few years later set out to cross the Pacific Ocean. She had no engine, no electricity and no self steering device. After four weeks of sailing sheet to tiller with the bow down, PLUMBELLY arrived in the Pacific islands sporting a beard of algae on her bowsprit. While resting in Tahiti, a big red double-ender came gliding into the harbor with a wild eyed Frenchman at the helm(could this be Moitessier? ed.). The man had just sailed two times around the world non-stop. The two men became friends and Klaus obtained a design for a simple wind vane from him. He built the wind vane in New Zealand and it is still working it’s magic today.
PLUMBELLY and Klaus returned to Bequia to a heroes’ welcome; the first Bequia boat to be sailed around the world. For those in Bequia that know the story of PLUMBELLY there is a gleam of pride in their eyes when they speak about it. This is my second time in Bequia with the old girl and I’ve yet to meet someone over thirty that doesn’t know the name. And it’s not just in Bequia. In places as far afield as Senegal I’ve had people ask me, “That’s not the PLUMBELLY, is it?” “Bet your boots it is. The one and only!” People just smile and shake their heads.
When Klaus finally stopped after twenty odd years of sailing, PLUMBELLY ended up in the hands of an American science professor in Massachusetts. She was used for day sailing and coastal cruising until an adventurous young man from Maine bought her and once again pointed her bow in the direction of faraway lands. Now I am the third in a line of owners from Maine (actually I’m from Ohio but I bought the boat while living in Maine) whom PLUMBELLY has carried safely across oceans.
I once read that art is an expression of Humans’ love of labor, and people have described Klaus’s relationship with PLUMBELLY as “a grand love affair”. In the case of the Bequian shipwrights it was a love born out of necessity, for nothing less than a sort of love can create a vessel seaworthy enough for whaling. In PLUMBELLY, Klaus created a working monument to this fading tradition, a swan song which fused his love of construction and love of the sea. She is a vessel that has turned into a legend in the waters that she plies, always popping up to the delight of everyone who ever dreamed of just getting in a boat and going."

Design & Construction
PLUMBELLY was designed and built in 19the Bequia West Indies by Loran Dewar and Klaus Alverman. Launched in 1965, she was designed with a spoon bow, round bilge and a deep full keel. She has an attached rudder and a canoe stern. PLUMBELLY was designed and built for offshore sailing. The hull is constructed of 1" pitch pine in the topsides and 1" Silver Balli in the bottom all over 2 1/4" x 2 1/2" tropical white cedar sawn frames. In some areas the frames are doubled. All frames are on 11" centers, the floor timbers are 2" and 3/18" sided on varying centers. PLUMBELLY has an interesting keel structure: the keel is an iron box that is fabricated with baffles and 1 1/18" iron bolts welded into the inner web structure. The bilge area has been filled with concrete for additional ballast. Her decks are also built of planked 1' pitch pine over 2" x 3 1/18" deck beams on varying centers. She is flush decked with a small trunk cabin at the companionway with sitting headroom. Her mast is solid and round, stepped through the deck and lands on a mast step in a reinforced toerail. It is then drilled to take a lanyard from the dead eyes in the rigging. PLUMBELLY is gaff rigged and flies a topsail with a jack yard.

Interior
PLUMBELLY's interior is quite simple: there is a general storage area forward, followed by the cabin. The cabin has a platform with cushions on either side and a storage box in the center that doubles as a table. Aft to port is the small navigation table and an area for some electronics. Aft to port is the galley which has a two-burner kerosene stove and a fresh water pump that uses a jerry jug for a water tank. (Kerosene is also used for cabin light.) Aft of the galley is an area for the batteries. There is then a small companionway that leads to the cockpit.

Surveyor's Commentary
Over all the boat was found to be in good condition. She has had good care and maintenance over the years. The vessel was built to high standards and it is reported that Klaus Alverman sailed around the world in her. This vessel was designed and built for this kind of offshore sailing.

This boat is currently being offered for sale by David Jones Yacht Brokerage and has full specs listed on his site. David has a keen eye for interesting boats and I may do an article on his brokerage, located in Camden ME. The asking price of the boat is 20K, she's well found and has lots of equipment for cruising. If I had the 20K...
Patrick also mentioned, in response to my query, that he's lived aboard for 3 years. She's lying in Rockland, ME.

Tim Robison's 'Resting Dinghies' @ The Peregrine Sea

All photos courtesy Tim Robison

Tim Robison is, among other things, a sailor and a photographer. Rather a good photographer, I'd say. His website Pergrine Sea, named after his boat Peregrina, has several galleries, one of which is pictured above. It's called 'Resting Dinghies', a name suggested by Tim's friend, Webb Chiles, who wrote to me about Tim. Tim explains:
This is a collection of photographs taken at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington. The small boats, their beautiful details of there construction, and the setting at the south end of Lake Union with still water, make for some interesting photography. These photographs are a combination of recent digital photos and scans of slides from years ago.
My friend Webb Chiles, after viewing several of these images suggested the photographs were “compositions of resting dinghies.” I had not not thought of the the collection that way .......


This is just a sliver of the collections on tap at Tim's well crafted website, most of them related to sailing and sailing adventure. Tim and Sandra live aboard their 40' sailboat and wander when they can, and their wanders and journeys are chronicled at their site. There's lots here, and lots to like. Take a look, dig in, you'll find much to enjoy.

Roger Taylor's 'Mary Ellen' is available

courtesy Mick King

courtesy Hugh Bourne

courtesy Roger Taylor

Roger Taylor, skipper of Mingming,  and author of Voyages of a Simple Sailor is reluctantly offering his 1934 Gaff Cutter Mary Ellen for sale. Roger is preparing to leave shortly for the Arctic Ocean on Mingming, and gearing up for the 2010 Jester Challenge. Here's the lowdown:

Mary Ellen was built in 1934 by Kidby and Sons, Brightlingsea, Essex. They were builders of fast smacks and built her to their own design as a gentleman's yacht for a local farmer. The hull shape is that of an Essex smack, but with a spoon bow and a transom stern.

LOA 38'

LOD 30'

Beam9'

Draft3'3"

Heavily double sawn oak frames, pitch pine planking, solid mahogany interior, all original. She displaces approximatly 7 tons, has 4 berths in 2 cabins, and a Vestus c.550. 

Since 2000, Roger has been making steady improvements, including: 

Refastening the hull with bronze screws.

A new hollow spruce mast and yard.

A new Douglas fir boom and bowsprit

New sails by James Lawrence of Brightlingsea

New hand spliced standing rigging

New blocks and running rigging

Roger has an extensive archive on the yacht, which has been cruised as far as St. Petersburg.

Asking £12,000. GBP, or just under $19,500. US.

Interested parties should contact me via email (available at the top of  this page) and I'll put you in touch with Roger.

Stewart Brand Liveaboard in Sausalito

Tugboat Mirene, 1912

Stewart Brand

courtesy Long Now Foundation

Stewart Brand, mastermind behind the Whole Earth Catalog,  an author concerned with subjects as varied as cybernetics and the evolution of buildings who describes himself as a finder(of ideas) and a founder (of foundations and such), a perfectly 'Brandian' turn of phrase,  showed up in an email from my brother John today. Originally an article in the NY Times by Edward Lewine, it came to me as a post  on South Williard . Stewarts current project is called the Long Now Foundation and is dedicated to fostering long term vision and thinking as opposed to the faster/cheaper paradigm which  seems to (still) be the vision of most business and political thought. Stewart and his thought and projects, WEC in particular have been a huge influence in my life. Enjoy this: 

Brand lives on Mirene, a tugboat moored in Sausalito, on the San Francisco Bay.

By EDWARD LEWINE

NY Times Published: April 15, 2009

Deceased 1960s pal he’d like to see again: Abbie Hoffman. He was brilliant and a card and dangerous to know and delightful in every way.

His best line: In 1966 I had buttons made with the paranoid-sounding slogan, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” Well, we got the photos from NASA in 1969.

Moving house: The Mirene is a working, 64-foot-long tugboat built in 1912. We take the boat out cruising from time to time. We turned the wheelhouse and skipper’s cabin into our bedroom, with two rooms and a bath below.

Why a boat: The main thing is our houseboat community here, which is exceptionally congenial. The boat is inexpensive to live on, and you have no problem with earthquakes, wildfires or rising sea levels due to global warming.

Green living: I didn’t choose the boat because it’s green, but it is. It doesn’t take much to heat 450 square feet. Cooling is no issue on the water. We have solar panels and a demand water heater and use biodiesel fuel when we cruise.

Morning routine: Get up at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. The trip from the bedroom involves going down a ladder outside. I breakfast in the galley and then go off to work.

Job description: I design stuff; I start stuff; I found stuff. On the passport I put “writer.”

Bad trip: That was my first trip. I had 400 micrograms of LSD under quite clinical circumstances at a psychological research institute in Menlo Park, Calif. It was in a white room with therapists sitting around.

Good trip: In 1963 or ’64 I showed up at the door of Ken Kesey, the novelist and LSD evangelist. I was involved in Kesey’s Acid Tests, which were happenings where LSD made its way around and everyone was there to entertain each other.

Acid Test memento: I have my Acid Test graduation diploma. The conceit was, “Can you pass the acid test?” Mine was signed by Neal Cassady, who inspired Kesey and was the model for Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

On the wagon: Since 1969 I haven’t used psychedelics. I realized I’d seen all I needed to see.

Drug of choice: I’m stoned right now on two cups of coffee. I’m 70, and the easiest way to young-up your mind is to drink caffeine.

Worst thing about the 1960s: Let’s see. I made the mistake of being married during the sexual revolution. Nice marriage; inopportune timing.

Pets: We had cats, but we had to put them down. That was horrifying, and we replaced them with a life-size stuffed tiger.

Home office: I work in a landlocked fishing boat named the Mary Heartline, which sits about 100 yards from the tugboat in a parking lot. It looks like a Victorian cottage.

Item you need on a tugboat: You’ll always be glad that someone has stolen a shopping cart, so you can get stuff from your car to your boat.

Controversial stand: That technology can be green. The book I just finished, “Whole Earth Discipline,” has chapters on why nuclear is green, cities are green, genetic engineering is green. The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust.

Back to the WELL: I founded the WELL, a pioneering online community, in 1985, with Larry Brilliant and some others. The name is short for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. I have the American Heritage Dictionary I used to find the name.

Exercise routine: I hike Mount Tamalpais.

Evening routine: My wife, Ryan Phelan, and I tend to go to restaurants or throw together a dinner around 9 p.m. I’ll read a novel or a comic. We’ll take a bath together and be in bed by 11:30.

Favorite gadget: I have this memo-keeping device that must be 75 years old. It’s from the house I grew up in in Illinois. It uses rolls of adding-machine paper — which you can still get — and you write on it and tear the paper off.

Obsession: Getting rid of alien, invasive plants. I bear down on this form of pampas grass that comes from South America and has no business in California.

Art collection: We don’t have room for much. We do have a 1.5-inch-long enamel drawing of the Mirene under fireworks in the bay.

What he drives: A Land Rover LR2. As soon as there’s a good hybrid S.U.V., we’ll get one. We need a mountain vehicle.

Favorite item in boat: I have the table at which Otis Redding reportedly wrote “Dock of the Bay.” An antiques dealer in Sausalito obtained it. Everyone likes to believe the legend.

Native American memorabilia: I used to be a member of the Native American Church. I have my old peyote-ritual gear: the feather box, eagle-bone whistle and tortoise-shell rattle. That’s for use with peyote, a spineless cactus that gives you an eight-hour trip.

Favorite vacation: We got a weekend place on the Petaluma River. It is a dead dairy farm, and that is where we are every weekend.

Always in fridge: Root beer and Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. I love root-beer floats.

Next big purchase: Hearing aids. That is going to be $2,000 or more.

At age 5, he wanted to be: A veterinarian. As an early teenager I wanted to fight forest fires.

Current project: With the Long Now Foundation, I am helping to build a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain in Nevada. We are trying to get people to think long-term, because civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.

MAY 2ND, 2009

Flotilla (water striders)

A flotilla of water striders

bask in a pool

of autumn sun. 

Haiku and Photography graciously shared by Melinda  Schwakhofer ©

Steve Roberts has for years had a vision of waterbourne seafaring intentional communities. He calls them "Flotilla's", and has taken a step toward actualizing his vision. He's gathering a group of folks  with similar yearnings for a discussion with an eye to fleshing out the possibilities and bringing them to fruition, at least on an experimental level.  In Steve's words..."Actually, this goes back many years.  Over the gestation of the Microship, and well into my more recent Nomadness project, I have had the fantasy of forming an "intentional community" of sorts... but on water.  For a time, we had an active list geared toward relatively local adventures on small boatlets in the Pacific Northwest, but a few things have happened to bring this notion to a new level.

First, I'm now traveling on a boat of ocean-voyaging scale (see 

http://www.nomadness.com for more, especially the blog at 

http://www.nomadness.com/blog 

which is updated every few days).  The scattered community of open-ended voyagers is beginning to fascinate me, and it is not at all difficult to imagine a loose tribe with a critical mass of essential skills and tools, traveling in the same general direction and making the occasional rendezvous (all while steadily connected by the "Flotilla Area Network").

Second, I have a partner named Sky who has her own vision of nomadic community geared to ad-hoc theatrical productions that are initially a spin-off of the nautical life.  This sounds like a fun way to involve musicians and other colorful artistic folk in what might otherwise be a band of crusty techno-geeks, and I'm all for it; we even coined the term "Dramanauts" to hang a label on the meme.  Sky now has a blog by that name:  http://dramanauts.blogspot.com

Third, it has become increasingly apparent that I'm not the only one with ideas like this... not only are there long-established sea-gypsy communities worldwide, but the unnerving geopolitical and economic shifts of late are creating a sort of zeitgeist in the form of redefining one's sense of security around agility, self-sufficiency, and reduced location-dependency.  It's time.

I am not yet sure what exact form this will take, but it is clear that there are enough interesting folks with similar fantasies of aquatic adventure to yield at least an experiment or two in 

technomadic community."

If you would like to join the discussion hit my title and subscribe. 

The photo and haiku I found while searching for images of flotilla. Very intriguing blog written by Artist, Poet, Photographer Melinda Schwakhofer. Inspiraculum. Please visit her as well.

Reuel Parker's Ibis via Scott Williams

I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with Reuel Parker of Parker Marine. If not, you should be. Much like Iain Oughtred, he's adept at taking traditional working craft and adapting them to modern usage and construction. He's building a prototype of his new design Ibis and has had some conversation about this new darling with Scott Williams. to wit:

"Reuel Parker is building the first prototype of his new line of (BIG) trailerable boats in Florida: a double-ended sharpie schooner based on the Straits of Juan del Fuca mackeral-fishing sharpies of Washington State in the 1880's. The new sharpie is 45' on deck, 10' beam, 2'6" draft, 15,000 lbs displacement, with an unladen trailer weight of 12,000 lbs. She is a bald-headed gaff schooner, with self-tending sails."

That's the blurb and there's some really interesting conversation between Scott and Reuel on Scott's blog. It's good. Scott is a boatbuilder himself, an adventurer with a personal exploration of the Caribbean in a kayak under his belt and the author of several books on kayak exploration of his native Mississippi, the Caribbean, and general rants about culture and disaffection with modern life. Look.

Bob is looking for his perfect boat

Bob Wise has a very nice blog called Boat Bits. An interesting fellow, Bob is a boatbuilder, filmmaker and runs a charter business currently out of St. Maarten. He's built a couple of versions of Phil Bolger's advanced sharpie, named Loose Moose (LM1 at the top and LM2 below). Click the charter link to get more of his history. A self described Lug nut, Bob has a passion for the rig. He is currently looking for a design to self build, in the 40' to 50' range. Wants lots of accommodation, shoal draft, and possibly lug rig, though I think the first two criterion are most important. I don't think he wants to go multihull. Oh yeah, it should also look great and he likes to build in ply. Any suggestions?