s/v Ardea: Adventures in La Paz Part III: A Cultural Experience

It's truly difficult to describe the experience of our first yacht club meeting at the Berkovich boatyard. In time, we would look back on it and describe a feeling as though our entire trip had happened in the three and a half days Ardea was hauled out. But for the moment, we soaked it in.

We sat at a shabby picnic table under a shabby tent among a mix of gringos unlike any other. There were the residents- a couple of viejos (older dudes) whose boats were anchored just off the boatyard that preferred the relative quiet and isolation outside of town. These were Banana Boy and Tuerto. Banana Boy (“David”) lived on his boat and was allegedly slowly getting ready to leave. Tuerto had made up more of a permanent residence. His actual name is Doug- tuerto refers to a man with only one eye and was given to Doug as a nick name because of the readily apparent hole on the left side of his face where is other eye used to be. Though he wasn't the first to express such sentiments, he did sum it up nicely when he said, “I came to La Paz for two weeks ten years ago.” Since then, he had opened a sail loft and continues to hand-build apparently very reputable sails. But it's unfair to leave it at that. We were struck by the animation of this man. Nearly eighty years old, he was a spitting image of the classic sailor; his face harks to memories of tales of whaling in Nantucket and adventures in the South Seas. His old wrinkled face was adorned with the classic long white beard that extends thick from the chin and cheeks but is rounded off at the end. He wore bell-bottoms and proudly proclaimed them easier to roll up when coming ashore. He laughed with a loud and exceedingly jovial “eh, eh, eh” that could bring a smile to the face of the most stoic and cynical. And, most of all, he had a constant stream of stories he could relate with youthful exuberance, which made him seem to us a classic caricature- the saltiest man I've ever met to be sure.

Of the residents, there was one with a bit of a different story. Mark, the ever-joyful friend that helped pull Ardea out earlier in the day, sat among the crowd at the all-important Yacht Club meeting. Mark had worked at the yard for a couple of years after perusing through Mexico on his way from southern California. He seldom wears a shirt or shoes. His skin was leathery and dark from sun and his feet so tough that only the spiral metal shavings cast off by lathes in the Berkovich machine shop could pierce them. He would later tell us about the Blackfoot Tribe of his creation containing as members those whose feet were dirty enough to represent a very strong commitment to shoelessness. Mark, who is more commonly known as Tarzan because of his formerly much longer and (somehow) shaggier blonde hair, but who also responds to Markovich and any number of other nicknames, is in his mid-fifties. We would never have guessed this- sitting there at the table at dusk, his silhouette and his ever-present persona could more easily have belonged to one of the Lost Boys. He was making 200 pesos a day (about $18 US), twice what the mexicanos in the yard were paid, and proudly declared that he spent 120 pesos a day on beer and cigarettes. He would come to be about the most fascinating and hilarious ambassador to La Paz that we could have imagined.

Working on my qualifications for the Blackfoot Tribe.

Then there were the transients. The half-dozen or so dudes, ourselves now among them, that had been in the yard anywhere from a week to a couple of years working on their boats. Of these, we would come to know the gentlemen of s/v Bounced Check the best. They were Mitch and David, brothers in law who had sailed from San Diego on a big concrete sloop. David, with long hair and a clean shave, owned the boat, which he and Mitch had sailed thus far without autopilot but with satellite t.v. Their argument seemed pretty strong- it's no problem coming off a four hour steering watch if you have Sportscenter waiting. Admittedly, we were slightly jealous. Mitch, who learned how to sail on the way down, had a shocking resemblance to a wookie and showed a most impressive ability to constantly drink beer and smoke cigarettes basically all day long. Evidently he had been clean cut all his life, but after he was laid off from his banking job in Chicago and had agreed to join David on a sailing trip, he awoke one morning and paused with the razor on the way to the cheek and said, “Forget it.” Except, of course, he used in place of “Forget” a similar word that is much more common in the sailor's lexicon, but which would make my Mom sad were I to write it here. Anyhow, by the time we met him, Mitch had long hair and a gigantic beard, which were an identical mottle of brown and blond.

The Yacht Club held a vivacious membership and we quickly became comfortable amid the uproarious conversation that night. Being new, we were made to give our story and duly harassed when we revealed we planned to be in the yard only about three days. Tuerto just had a little bit of work to do and his boat ended up in the yard for nearly ten years, it was pointed out. Mitch and David had been on the hard for a month, and they actually worked on the boat every day. Immediately the crowd began to predict the duration of our plight. We told the prognosticators about our rudder- the main reason we were out. Mitch laughed between drags on his cigarro and asserted we'd be there two weeks minimum. Later, we revealed that we had some side projects. We wanted to get a couple coats of varnish on the toe rail. Six weeks, they predicted. We were hoping to re-bed our stanchion posts. Ten weeks. We need to repair some gelcoat dings on the bow. Fifteen weeks.

As the night wore on, we joked and drank in the yacht club dining area and each time that new evidence was uncovered of our workload or of the ease of our assimilation to the Yard, the prediction of the length of our stay would increase. Now more than a few beers deep, we felt we had been in La Paz our whole trip and the Berkovich crowd seemed like old friends. Before we went to bed, Mitch let us know how well-suited we seemed to this scene: “Fifty-seven weeks.”

The rest of our stay at Berkovich was no less entertaining or eventful. We worked hard on Ardea and were glad to do so among such a jovial bunch of people. Before we left, we would have plenty of adventures with these folks. Dana would be briefly arrested and taken away for peeing on a cactus while Tarzan pulled the bumper off of Tuerto's car and threw it in the bushes. We would regularly purchase all of the Pacifico at the only store that far outside of town. We would all (including Mitch and David) come to view Abel Berkovich more as a demanding boss than the proprietor of an establishment we were patronizing. By the time we left, we could hardly imagined we'd been anywhere else. But, most importantly, we got the work on Ardea done and, despite the predictions, we were back in the water in three and a half days.

Waiting for the rudder to dry...

The rudder repair was relatively simple. First, I took a scraper and a knife and removed the paint and gelcoat for the whole length of the rudder shaft. I chipped away a very small amount of rotted wood and then set up two heat guns to start drying it out. We let it sit like that for a day before continuing the prep-work. The next step was to sand from the leading edge of the rudder aft so that there would be a large surface area upon which to lay fiberglass. Toward the end of our second full day in the yard, we began laying glass. It was a bit tricky because the heat caused the epoxy to kick so quickly that we had to mix numerous small batches one after the other. We worked out a pretty good system where Chittick would mix epoxy and while I was bathing strips of fiberglass cloth, he would go to the other side of the rudder to hold the piece while we put it in position. Then I would take the brush and blot to remove air bubbles and ensure it was saturated in epoxy. For much of the length of the rudder shaft, we also had to add filler before applying the glass. Using syringes, we injected epoxy mixed with silica filler into the cavity behind the rudder shaft and along the sides of the shaft where an air pocket my have otherwise developed between the rudder and the new fiberglass. We ran out of epoxy catalyst that night so we had to wait to finish the following morning. It was a bit hectic while we were glassing, but it turned out pretty well. On the afternoon of the third full day in the yard, the epoxy was kicked and we only had to sand and paint. Abel wandered by as Chittick had started sanding with our Fein tool (which has a pretty small sanding head) and, knowing he needed to get us in the water the following morning, said, “You're gonna be here all night. Let me get you a real sander.” We thought this might have meant a better tool, but he showed up with Martin, one of his employees. Martin had already done an excellent job repairing the gelcoat mess on the bow (from a flailing anchor). He then took an angle grinder with a sanding head and proceeded to knock out the sanding portion in about a tenth the time it would have taken us. It saved us a lot of work. Then, we had only to paint with primer and a slightly different shade of blue.

Prep-work done. Still drying.

Laying glass- round 1.

Done glassing.

Finished!

In the down time on the rudder project, we managed to get three coats of varnish on the toe rail and Dana and Chittick re-bedded the five or so stanchions that were overly stressed. I had been meaning to bed them on neoprene so that less sheer stress would be placed on the deck when the stanchions or lifelines were loaded, so we planned for this project a while back. I looked into bulk neoprene back in Berkeley but it was sort of expensive, so we snagged an old-school wetsuit out of the old lost-and-found and cut neoprene padding from that. The crew did a great job of putting it all in place and the stanchions are definitely better off. The wetsuit, which went from full-length to shorty, is now adorned by the children of a Mexican who was happy to take it off our hands.

A nicely re-bedded stanchion.

Dana at work.

We managed several other side-projects while were out of the water. It was an incredibly productive and enjoyable time. Abel and all the folks at the yard were helpful, honest and hard-working. After all the grief they'd given us for how long we'd be in the yard, David and Mitch had to put up with us rubbing it in a bit when we were done. As we had promised them during one of the many times we wandered over to Bounced Check to shoot the shit, we returned to the yard with cases of beer and pulled up chairs to watch as they toiled away painting and grinding. Enjoying our hyperbolic humor to the fullest, we talked loudly of our opinions of how they should be working on their boat while we drank and watched (it is quickly noticeable in the yard that everybody who wanders past has got an opinion about how and what you should be doing on your boat... if you can't beat 'em, join 'em). It was a great time and, ironically, we all felt a little sad as Ardea slid back into the Sea.