Cockpit Well Rebuild

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I wasn’t born chewing on ring nails and blowing sawdust out my ears.

In fact, if you’d asked me on the day after I bought Murre what the surveyor from the day before had meant when he said “this is beginning to look like a project”, I would have struggled to provide an informed answer. I wasn’t a shop guy in high school. I had no idea.


But early on Murre had a strange affect. When Jo asked if maybe Murre was more than we could handle and should we sell, my reason for declining was, “We wouldn’t get near what we paid.”

Even I knew that was a cover for something deeper. Murre’s deck and cabin side job of 2003 had begun to provide some context for the word “project”, how it might be approached, pursued, and completed. It also hinted at the great satisfaction gotten from doing one’s own work. And then Jo’s Christmas present of power tools sealed the deal.

The cockpit sole needed attention. It was a simple rectangle whose clean right angles I was sure implied only a few weekends of work. So in January of 2006 I put Murre into a shed at the San Rafael Yacht Harbor, and without quite knowing it, I began the cockpit job.

“How long you gonna be here?” asked Matt the Harbor Master as I laid the rent on his desk. “I’m just doing the cockpit, so a couple months seems plenty,” I replied. “OK then,” he said, flipping his calendar to a summer month before making a mark, “I’ll check on you in June. These things have a way of going on, don’t they?”

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