Invented by a Scottish
shipwright, the marine railway operates almost unchanged two hundred years
later.
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Packing oakum, by Carol L. Douglas |
This is the first year in a while that I won’t be painting
through fit-out, the annual renovation of the Maine
windjammer fleet. I leave for Scotland on Monday. By the time I return they’ll
be mostly finished.
The windjammer fleet is annually hauled out of the water
according to a very loose schedule, written in longhand and pinned to the wall
of the office at North End Shipyard. These boats are very big and very old. They
spend nearly all their lives in the water, where they’re prey to worms, barnacles,
and other underwater stinkers. They need regular repainting and occasional
replanking. The Coast Guard carefully inspects their nether regions as well.
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Setting blocks, by Carol L. Douglas |
The marine railway, or patent slipway, was invented by a Scottish
shipwright in 1818. Thomas Morton
was looking for a cheaper, faster way of dry-docking boats in his Leith boatyard. As with so many
brilliant ideas, his plan was deceptively simple. A boat would be secured to a
wooden cradle while still floating in the water. This cradle would then be raised
up a set of rails—the slipway—to dry land. A block and tackle arrangement would
give a mechanical advantage, but the hoisting power came from men and mules.
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Big-boned (Heritage), by Carol L. Douglas |
With the advent of steam power, a donkey engine replaced
the living horsepower. Today it’s an old, repurposed diesel engine. Other than that,
however, the railway at North End Shipyard could be from anytime in the last
two hundred years.
While some of the work now involves air compressors and Bondo, there’s a lot of it
that’s straight out of the past as well. Hulls are still caulked with oakum and
a long caulking mallet. Paint is scraped away and then replaced with brushes,
and the Coast Guard laboriously walks the length of the hull pinging every plank
with a hammer to search out rot.
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Striping (Captain Linda Lee), by Carol L. Douglas |
In most cases, the boats are out of the water only a few
days. Sometimes the work they need barely outlasts a tide cycle. Conversely, the
crew can find work that’s so extensive that they can’t get back in the water for
a week or longer. Or weather can prevent hauling. Hence the vagaries of the
schedule.
Those few days out of the water are hardly all the work that’s
done every year on these boats. Their tenders were repaired and refinished in sheds
over the winter; so too were the wooden blocks (pulleys) that the lines run
through. Under their plastic covers, decks have been refinished, and repairs
have been made to the below-deck accommodation for passengers. The masts are
greased so the hoops can travel freely, and ratlines are retarred.
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Coast Guard Inspection, by Carol L. Douglas |
Everything above the waterline will be painted from floats. The
Coast Guard will make sure that all the lifesaving equipment works and that the
crew knows how to use it. It’s an intense, laborious process, all so these
beautiful vessels can parade proudly for five months a year.
Despite the immense usefulness of his invention, Thomas Morton
did not get stinking rich. He earned a total of £5737 in royalties and a lump
sum of £2500 from the House of Commons. That made his total profit around a
million modern US dollars—not much, considering how widely the marine railway
is still used today. Perhaps when I’m in Edinburgh, I will search out his old
shipyard and give a nod to one of the many inventions through which the Scots
changed the modern world.
There are still a few openings in my sketch-watercolor
workshop aboard the schooner American Eagle, June 9-13, 2019. This is
a class to learn how to catch landscape quickly and expressively in watercolor,
pen and pencil. And my annual Sea &
Sky workshop at Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park has had a
cancellation; I’m dying to know who’s going to take that last spot. For more
information, email me.