SV Abrazo: Alaska to Cape Horn: A Theory of Rolling Balls

Please view the first entry in this blog if you are a potential buyer of our boat. Photos and specifications, along with contact info is in the entry titled: Sale Sail Sale Sail Sale Sail.

Current Situation:

December 18, 2014 We had the mast pulled from the boat. The marina crew laid the mast across blocks outside Club Nautico's lounge area. Richard went to work removing spreaders, radar, cables, and other hardware. The mast is spruce, glued in a box-shape with interior blocking. 53 feet. Grey paint over many layers of varnish. Richard will thoroughly inspect the mast, make any needed repairs, and then varnish and repaint for the second time in 35 years. Maintenance is a fact of life, right? Boats, houses, planes, gardens, cars ... Prospective buyers take note: This mast won't need to be pulled and painted again for another fifteen years. How often does an aluminum mast need to be pulled for inspection, maintenance and repair?

Sanded and ready for the first coat of new varnish: January 4, 2015.

On with the story:

Engaging with Dick Baila in Bellingham in the summer of 1978 was a life-changing experience for me. He was strong, skilled, highly energized, and focused on accomplishing whatever was the next step in his long-range plan. It took him about six months to draw me deeply into his dream of building the new boat, partly because I was determined to move forward in my own dream - to write my way towards something like a Great American Novel. In the interest of acquiring experience and material, I may have deferred my own dream to participate more fully in his (one of the themes of that as yet unwritten novel). No regrets. I recognized, in those first months of my romance with Dick Baila, that he was a guru to me. He knew how to WORK effectively; he knew how to make his daily efforts amount to real productivity. In a gesture to help me become more productive myself, he told me of his Theory of Rolling Balls:

There's a lot to do. What has to be done first? What is the correct order of doing things? Which task is most important? The many tasks at hand are like balls of varying size. The manager sets them rolling, one or two at a time, attending to the balls as they roll, adding new balls, keeping the old ones rolling, moving from one to the other as needed to herd the flock of balls along. At some point, one ball might be retired, its function completed. At another time a new ball might be added to the group. One ball might be large enough to contribute its own momentum; the effort to keep it rolling is almost leisurely. Other balls might be smaller, more intensely needed for the growth of the enterprise, balls that must be herded quickly toward their ripening. The balls represent the veins of creation ... all leading toward the intended new organism ... whether that is a boat, or a novel, or some other expression of WHAT YOU WANT.

Dick Baila demonstrated the workings of his theory every day, throughout the two years of work to construct the new boat. But my real introduction to the Theory of Rolling Balls came during the year before we began construction ... the year of waiting for the plans from Manuel Campos to arrive. There was a lot to do. Who knew what should be done first, or what was the correct order of doing things? Dick knew that what was most important was to get the various balls rolling and keep them going in the right direction. Here's a partial list of the balls Baila rolled or set to rolling during the period of late 1978 through November of 1979:

Correspond with Manuel Campos to contract the design. Of first importance: price. Puget Sound designer, Bob Perry (whose landmark design, the Valiant 40, was first built at Uniflite shipyard in Bellingham, in 1974), was charging $5,000 for yacht plans. When Campos wrote that his charge would be $500, Baila moved on to the next considerations: length, width, draft.
Having lived aboard the schooner Sea Lark with him for a few months, by this time, I'd agreed to marry Dick Baila; and we'd agreed that the new boat needed to be more spacious below deck than Sea Lark. Campos could quickly provide a design similar to Irupe, or Irupe Dos, but Baila also required an on-deck rig. He'd sailed his schooner for more than ten years by this time, so had lots of experience with Sea Lark's bowsprit, including the occasional dunking when out there on the end hauling down the jib sail. He'd had to replace Sea Lark's bowsprit, early on, due to rotten wood, and the piece of spruce he'd found to build the new bowsprit had cost him $17. Due to moorage fees based on the length of the boat, Baila soon realized, that bowsprit cost him an additional $17 every month. He wanted the new boat designed without "anything hanging out the ends."
An ongoing challenge in the Campos correspondence was our total lack of fluency in Español. We connected with a Spanish Prof at Western Washington University for translation help. She didn't know any Nautiguese, but we made do.
Continue working for the fishermen and yachtsmen who paid him his shipwright's wages. Dick Baila's shop was in the basement of Bob's Super Saw, a building at 1121 Cornwall Avenue in Bellingham. A huge garage-type door opened the back of the shop to his yard ... just above the constantly humming and steaming buildings of the Georgia Pacific Pulp Mill. Officially Bag End Trading Company, Baila's enterprise took on every kind of remodel or repair that could be made in wood, for every kind of boat in Bellingham's Squalicum Harbor. Over the years he'd almost totally rebuilt the Alaska troller, Rauma, owned by Roy Pihlman. He'd bent wood for new bulwarks and guards on Ken Anderson's troller, Laverne II. He'd fashioned curved panels of fir wainscoting for interior cabinets on Steve Mayo's Skua.
Collect 7000 pounds of lead with which to cast the ballast keel. We didn't know exactly how

much lead we'd need for the ballast keel ...more than 3 tons? The price of lead varied widely on the scrap market. Used wheel weights, collected in 5-gallon buckets wherever auto mechanics rebalanced tires, could be had for twenty to forty cents a pound. Wheel weights come in different sizes, weighing less than an ounce or up to six ounces. A 5-gallon bucket full might weigh 60 lbs. How many of those does it take to make a ton? The little metal clips that hold the weight onto the tire don't count, as they are not lead. Dick had a couple of old metal drums behind the shop, and after every foraging trip to auto shops up and down the I-5 corridor between Vancouver BC and Seattle, WA, we would dump our trove of wheel weights into those drums. At the County Rifle Range we found lead shot for sale. At the big hospitals on Seattle's Pill Hill we bought cylindrical lead containers from the nuclear medicine departments.
Consult with Bill Modrell, master shipwright of Triple & Everett Marine Ways on the Duwamish River in Seattle, and professor of Lofting and Boat Building at The Edison School. Dick was living aboard Sea Lark under the Duwamish River bridge in 1968-69, when he got to know Modrell. Repairing Sea Lark's various structural flaws gave Baila plenty of reason to talk with Modrell, who knew almost everything, and enjoyed talking. The two men became friends, and deer-hunting partners over the years, until late in 1973, when Modrell's neck was broken in a jeep accident. Rendered paraplegic, Bill Modrell could still deliver lessons, opinions, examples, theories, and true-life stories from his great bank of experience in boat-building. We visited several times in Bill's West Seattle home during the year of waiting for the plans. He helped Dick design his loft floor, and prepare for the task of lofting.
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Sell the schooner, Sea Lark, in order to capitalize the purchases of lead, lumber, screws, fittings, cotton, engine, sails, paint and other materials for the new boat. Dick and I lived aboard Sea Lark in Squalicum Harbor, on the commercial side, moored on E dock in between two of the seiners that fished Bellingham waters. Word flared quickly through the harbor when Dick Baila hung a For Sale sign on his schooner. One young couple who'd been living aboard their much smaller boat on the next dock over, put in some serious time trying to decide to buy Sea Lark; but their fates took them in different directions. By mid-summer, though, Sea Lark was discovered by a couple of mountain climbers who wanted to expand their outdoor experiences onto the water. Tom & Celeste Gotchy negotiated with Dick to buy the boat on a two-year contract. They were ready to move aboard, with plans to live and work in Bellingham.
Doug and Cheryl, the couple who ran Bob's Super Saw and rented Dick his boat shop offered to rent us the apartment above their store in the same building. We made the move in early September.
Build the loft floor, the platform on which to draw out full size the designer's lines. Basically, this was a rack of beams erected over the top of the lumber pile in Dick's shop, and covered with full sheets of plywood. Enough room below the floor to walk between the stacks of Alaska cedar, Douglas fir, white oak, mahogany, etc in Bag End's inventory ... enough room between the floor and the shop's ceiling to crawl around on hands and knees for the lofting.
Study the book of boat-building by Howard Chapelle.
Identify the best sources for lumber that will be needed, and begin to accumulate said lumber. Dick had purchased many thousands of board feet of lumber over the years, including a van-load of air-dried material when Triple & Everett Marine Ways closed down after Modrell's tragic crippling. There were always new leads to be followed, though. We drove to the wilds of Hood River, Oregon for example, to make a deal on some white oak that would have to be still green enough to act right when steam-bent for the ribs of the new boat.
Locate a couple of cast iron bathtubs appropriate for melting the 7000 pounds of lead. It was amazing to me how many strong young men labored in yards and shops all over the Puget Sound, building the boats of their dreams out of wood. Dozens of these men cast their lead keels by pouring molten lead into prepared molds. Some of them used old cast iron bathtubs as the vessels in which to melt the lead. In August of 1979, Dick and I went to a little party on Guemes Island, where David Hartford, a skilled and popular "corker", had his own boat under construction. The two bathtubs he'd used were scheduled to move on to Edison, where another boat project grew behind a thick patch of blackberries. If all went well, those tubs could be available for Baila to use by the time he'd need them.