Els horitzons d'en Ben

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OB on the telly

Back in January a Catalan TV reporter came to film OB with a view to making a short documentary about her. Aware of the fickle nature of television I didn’t think anything would come of it despite the chap driving off with five hours of material.

Readers in Spain should tune into the ‘Thalassa’ on Catalan TV’s Canal 33 at 21:55 on Friday 9th. The OB documentary is titled Els horitzons d'en Ben (The horizons of Ben) and lasts about 20 minutes.

Quite frankly I don’t know what to expect, I’ve had no hand in the editing nor have I seen the final cut. I could feel some of the questions pushing me in a rather esoteric direction and I wonder if I might be portrayed as a sort of Byronesque beach bum. We shall see.

At least there should be plenty of good footage of OB sailing, which I will link to or post here when I get a copy of the film—if it’s not too embarrassing.

A perfect system of pulleys

The most time consuming part of boat turning is the waiting around for someone to come by who can be roped into giving a hand. Recently OB’s been turned more often than rashers in a pan and I’ve been depending on a local builder for muscle. But when he was suddenly called away to birth of his fifth son I had to find a way to flip the boat alone.

Setting up a block and tackle in the olive tree I thought of Fitzcarraldo—the character played by Klaus Kinski in the 1982 film by Werner Herzog.

Fitzcarraldo is a passionate single-minded dreamer intent on building an Operahouse in Iquitos, deep in the Amazon jungle in northwest Peru. First he has to raise money by harvesting rubber from an inaccessible location. To achieve this he buys a 300-ton ship and steams upriver into an area populated by unfriendly tribes. The crux of Fitzcarraldo’s plan lies in employing native labour to haul the three-story steamship over a mountain from one tributary of the Amazon to another, collect the rubber and then run the rapids back down to the Amazon river and Iquitos.

It’s an amazing piece of film, the boat inching its way up the 40º slope. Herzog used no special effects to cross the isthmus and later called himself a ‘Conquistador of the Useless’.

At one point, on the muddy hillside, amongst the massive winches hewn from felled trees, Fitzcarraldo says, ‘With a perfect system of pulleys I’d pull the boat up alone.’

Turning OB is a good deal more simple.

Four oars

It started with a thick plank of Russian pine. I knew Onawind Blue’s new oars were in there somewhere, it was just a question of getting them out. I took up Mr Mushroom’s offer of cutting out the rough shape on his bandsaw. Then I managed to borrow an electric plane and took off the wood around the oar blades and looms.

I thought things couldn’t get any better when another carpenter friend lent me a spoke shave. With this marvelous tool I revealed the shafts and the handles. And there they were, a pair of long, elegant oars. It only remains to take off a little more wood with 100 grit sandpaper.

The handles are long in the hope that I’ll try OB as two-man rowboat.

Maybe she will fly.

A boat for all reasons

I feel I haven’t so much been working on OB over the past couple of weeks as gently communing with her. I know it’s hokum but I’ve always anthropomorphised my boat. Of inanimate objects I have known she is by far the most lively. And while stripping the varnish back to wood or uncovering voids (or a cracked epoxy fillet hiding soggy wood!!) I’ve been forced to consider the build quality.

She’s the first boat I’ve ever built and it shows. I have no problem with this however, and nor does OB. It was a steep and slippery learning curve.

I learnt a lot over the six-month build and with the experience I gained I’m more qualified to effect good repairs. This awareness of my greater skill has led me to speculate on other boats. (Though not around OB, obviously. Don’t want to offend her.) There are some real beauties out there and hopefully I’ll be around for long enough to give one or two a try.

For the moment though my situation hasn’t changed since I jotted down the brief that led me to build OB. And, given that brief, I still haven’t been able to find a more suitable craft. Well, not until Gavin Atkin reworked the drawings and produced the Light Trow Mark 2.

I’ve had a sneak preview of the drawings and can see that with more built-in buoyancy, self-draining mast steps and stitch and glue construction she’ll be even more suited to easy building and effective cruising. I gather that Gav is going to release the plans soon and for free in Water Craft magazine and at intheboatshed.net. They’re well worth a serious perusal… There’s a lot of fun to be had with a boat like this and now that the Light Trow is a proven design I expect it will gain the following it deserves.

Where would we be?

One of my neighbours made it clear that he had a problem with me working on OB in the communal garden. Fair enough, I said, I’ll get the boat out of the garden, but what exactly is the trouble? As I listened to his argument my eyes flicked between his jugular and the chisel in my hand. Where would we be, he asked, if everybody did their boat up in the garden? Unwittingly he’d chosen a line of reasoning calculated to get blood throbbing into my head.

‘Where would we be if?’ can be a good question. Where would we be if everybody owned a car? Where would we be if everybody ate tuna fish? Or cod? Or wanted levis and nike trainers? But it’s not the question to ask the small guy tinkering on his boat when he alone forms 15% of the local boat owning population and is the only person with a boat small enough to fit through the garden gate.

I made a list of all the jobs I wished to complete before the next weekend when I would get OB out of the garden. Sanding, sanding, priming, sanding, painting, sanding, painting, sanding, varnishing, sanding, varnishing and so on. And as the week nears its end I find that most of the items on the list remain to be done. Particularly the sanding.

Lists are amorphous things, expanding and contracting daily. More often they’re written to clarify rather than to follow and we list writers should retain the right to change and abandon lists as the situation requires. If not they can become the most terrible dictators.

So as the weekend draws near and the work on OB is far from complete I ask myself—Where would we be if we all followed lists to the letter? Where would we be if we all did what we said we were going to do?

But I do generally do what I say I’m going to do and so the boat is out of the garden and work is suspended until next week.

‘The uncharted coasts of the human spirit’

A long-awaited copy of William H Longyard’s A Speck on the Sea arrived this morning. With more than 70 accounts of big adventures in small boats I couldn’t resist plunging in immediately. Now on page 40 it is proving to be everything I hoped it would be—well researched with a gripping subject matter.

Being a Mediterranean rowing story the first full account, William Okeley’s 150-mile journey from Algiers to Mallorca in 1644, is easy to relate to. After four years enslavement in North Africa, (No, I couldn’t relate to that bit.) Okeley and several companions built a cloth-covered ‘folding’ rowing boat, which they sneaked out of the city in pieces, assembled on the beach and so escaped from Algiers and slavery.

Heading due north contrary winds hampered their initial progress and when dawn broke on the first day they were still within sight of Algiers. After four days rowing (this is the part that I could relate to) they were exhausted. On the verge of giving up they came upon a sleeping turtle, which they divided among themselves and, so sustained, rowed on to Mallorca, which they reached two days later.

One story that doesn’t appear to feature in A Speck on the Sea is that of Sebastian Näslund. His story is one that I seem to stumble upon every now and then via this tantalisingly short youtube clip.

Näslund is a Swedish sailor and freediver who built a 14ft boat and, in 2004, set sail from Sweden to cross the Atlantic. He then sailed his craft ‘Arrandir’ back to Sweden.

The book of the journey ‘Ensam met havet’ is available in Swedish. According to the website it focuses on the inner journey, the loneliness and the character building that such a voyage provides. Which reminds me of the Webb Chiles line ‘If a sailor doesn’t learn anything more from the sea than how to reef a sail, the voyage wasn’t worth making.’


Multi-talented Näslund appears to major in freediving. He has been down to -74m on one breath. He has written a freediving booklet titled Bloodshift—an approach to expert freediving. From the blurb, ‘It (Bloodshift) assumes that you are in it for the lifestyle, and if you are not, the text tries to give you the tools that are needed to make freediving a way of living, on land as in water.’ It’s sounds as if the manual may have a broader application as inspiration for anyone thinking of exploring their limits. What Webb Chiles (again) called ‘the uncharted coasts of the human spirit’.