Fixer

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy."

-Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

Holed up in a stuffy house this morning, after we realized around 4:30 that one of the skunks living under the house next door had let loose a spray that our window unit air conditioner was pumping into the master bedroom.

Peg declared she couldn't sleep in the stench (I'm a little less sensitive to olfactory insults), and we trudged into the one bedroom we keep closed up during the summer for a few minutes of steamy sleep before the alarm summoned us into the day at 5:30. Peg had the option of taking today off, and left for work regretting her choice.

I fed the cats on the porch, worried that they'd been sprayed and would track the aroma into the house. On her way out the door Peg picked up each and sniffed, confirming Dean and Slane were no smellier than usual. For the next forty minutes or so Dean slept in my lap while I read the paper.

Yesterday was sort of a bust for me. The plan had been to tow the Chris Craft over to Cayuga so Phil and Ken could address whatever caused our oil pressure to hang around at about half where it should be, while the engine temperature crept upward, on our last outing. I drove up to the Cliff and watered the plants, as always enraptured by the view across the lake.

Then I drove the truck to the yacht club, hitched the trailer (taking care to pin the ball this time), and proceeded to drag the old wooden vessel through Canandaigua and Geneva, then Waterloo and Seneca Falls, finally turning down NY State Road 90 to Cayuga, at the northern tip of the eponymous lake.

I came upon Ken in his shop, working on a fitting at his work bench. He and I walked out to the boat, opened the massive door to the engine bay, and started talking through what might be the source of our problems.

I suggested maybe an oil pump issue, but Ken was adamant that he'd never seen an oil pump fail on one of these, that they were heavily built with almost nothing that could go wrong. He checked the oil, rubbing some off the dipstick with a paper towel as he asked whether this was a rebuilt engine. I answered in the affirmative, but really wasn't sure. It was 67 years old--how could it not be?

Ken rubbed the oil between his fingers and pronounced that it was break-in oil, whatever that meant. He said it was only meant to be used for maybe 45 minutes, and was too light to adequately lubricate an engine running wide open. That explained the problem, in his view. Case closed.

By this time Phil joined us, with his new apprentice tagging along. Phil's a very big guy, bald with a bushy mustache and a gruff demeanor that stands in contrast to wiry, earnest Ken. Both made a point of telling me how impressed they were with Peg, who seemed to be "quite a sailor". I acknowledged she had a lot more experience with sailboats that I'd ever have. I'm guessing at least one of them has a little bit of a crush. I get that.

So the old Chris Craft just required an oil change. And for the bilge to be pumped out---the bilge pump sits near the bow for some reason, but the boat rides bow high and the engine bay tends to hold water, as it was here. Ken also talked about how to check engine temperature with a handheld gage placed near the heat probe or the exhaust manifold, and produced the hand pump and quarter-inch tube I'd need to empty the old oil out of the sump. These old boats don't have a filter, so it's just a matter of getting the old oil out and the new oil in.

Except . . . except . . . I didn't ride over to Cayuga for instruction on how to change the oil and a list of tools I'd need to do that. I rode over to get my oil changed, or more accurately to fix whatever was causing the engine to run hot. My changing the oil means time lost that I could be billing at $400+ and hour so I can pay these nice guys maybe $100. Temporal arbitrage.

But that's not how Ken and Phil see their mandate. From the beginning they've spent literally hours talking P and me through how to address things on our own, saying repeatedly that their goal is for us to "get out on the water." When one's vessel is a very old wooden boat, that entails a measure of self-sufficiency; things are always going to break and sputter and leak. Having a mechanic on speed dial doesn't really help much.

Pondering on all this, I note that the few wooden boat people we've encountered, including the folks at the boat show in Hammondsport a couple weekends ago, all seem to know a lot about the care and feeding of their watercraft. It's a different thing than owning a center console fishing boat with a Yamaha on the back. Here we are stewards, charged with taking care of this thing that's older than I am. There's a place in all this for a professional mechanic, and for a craftsman to help maintain all that mahogany. But there's also a DIY ethos to this type of boating.

Maybe it's also regional--in an economy that doesn't provide the same sorts of opportunities for selling one's time to buy things as we have along the Gulf Coast, and where that income when it exists gets taxed much more aggressively than in Florida, it makes sense that people perform their own routine services instead of working all the time to pay someone else to take care of things.

I'd add that changing one's oil may also provide a tactile satisfaction and sense of accomplishment, but that task won't come around until Saturday, when I have all the equipment and oil I ordered on Amazon (after stopping at four auto parts stores, none of which had the pump and tubing required to draw the oil out through the dipstick hole of this old boat). I'm hoping I feel that way, but it's just as likely I'll be swearing and covered in old break-in oil, trying to find a mechanic to finish the job I botched.