Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

70 страница из 92

One of the most important and time-consuming jobs was getting new hardwood handles into the dozen oars (including four spares) to which we would be entrusting our progress in the days to come. The new ones were a pearly white ash, as hard as gun metal yet less apt to cause blisters than are the state-of-the-art neoprene-wrapped handles on many sculling oars and virtually all rowing machines these days. It took four of our young crew members the better part of a week to break the old handles out of their graphite sleeves, a sliver at a time, and get the new, longer handles epoxied into place. More grueling yet was the effort of getting the “trampolines” constructed and attached—taut nylon “decks” on both sides of the boat, linking the hulls to the centrally positioned cabin, giving us a crucial six-foot-wide walking and living platform to both port and starboard.

Before we left Canada, Steve and I had agreed that we would work on the tramps together. However, in the end, it was Sylvain and Tom who were Steve’s ranking assistants, while I tootled around poking at oar handles and doing fussy work—and of course note-taking, preparing to write, which as the novelist Don Bailey once pointed out is largely a process of gazing out the window or down the beach, or peeking over the fence. At times, craving a little detachment, I simply slipped out the boatyard gate and enjoyed brief walks around the port. Anywhere there was a bit of spare ground, boatbuilders with mallets and four-inch-wide chisels banged away, hand-hewing bulgy little cypress-wood dories, or sixty-foot trawlers, gorgeous things that echoed the centuries and would, on completion, become part of the Moroccan sardine fleet, the biggest in the world.