Cave, cave adsum

So here we are sitting topside, just behind those windows on the port aft, 70 and a salve of rain coming out of the clouds,  staring out over boat masts into the fog. Twenty-two days after stepping foot on the Adak. So strange – everything since that day of arrival has just been perfect! So smooth. I stepped on the boat – and it was just, like, everything just happened for me. I rode off into the Alaskan sunset.

Not so much.

Twenty-two days of more or less pure work. Corroded pipes, cracked exhaust manifold, split engine compressor, ruptured valves, blown impellers, dying refrigerator, leaky heat exchanger, pin-holed air lines, oil-filled bilge, broken pumps, clogged faucets – doesn’t even begin to tell the story. And the cherry on top a harbor master – Hi Christy! – who says the boat will be impounded by the city and taken to the boat graveyard, put to anchor until it sinks, if it doesn’t move by the end of August.

We’re at July 19th. Start the clock.

All that time in the truck staring into the sun thinking deep thoughts, lazying on the deck in Crested Butte, high-stakes musing over various and sundry social cliques in Los Angeles – all that time gone. Now just one seemingly endless list of things to do, get sorted, figure out. The engine room, cargo hold, lazarette – how to explain it? Like one hazy picture of pipes and valves and cylinders that slowly, as I spend time down there, comes into focus, one piece at a time.

Engine parts – connecting rods, rocker bars, pistons, cam shafts, valves – not unlike people: the more time you spend with them, the more they reveal of themselves. A butterfly valve an extrovert – you turn it 90 degrees, a ball closes the passage. The other, the passage opens up. The heat exchanger a little more complicated, takes her a little longer to come out of her shell. But with any of them, if you let the relationship drop – don’t maintain it, that is – the nylon will fail on the valve, the tubes will gather debris and the fittings will leak on the heat exchanger. As they did for me. Makes perfect sense.

That about exhausts that metaphor. The engine a collection of steel and cast-iron and copper and brass and aluminum and gaskets connected one to the other. And it works together with a particular beauty. Not that I’ve witnessed this beauty yet. But I’ve heard speak of it. And I will witness it. Inshallah.

The wonder and difficulty of this engine, constructed first in the 1920s, is that it’s mechanical. No computers to plug in. No circuit boards. The flywheel drives the worm drive, each piston connects to the main shaft which makes the boat move forward, or backward.

Now this the most difficult part for auto mechanics to wrap their engineering minds around: there’s no neutral! Normally, in an engine, you have the transmission sitting forward of the engine, the flywheel connecting to the engine, and a clutch plate connecting to the transmission, with the pressure plate separating or joining the two, depending whether the clutch is in or out, thus engaging the engine and the drive shaft.

In a direct-drive engine, such as the Fairbanks-Morse in the Adak, the pistons are connected directly to the drive shaft. So you’re either going forward, or you switch firing order of the pistons and you’re going backward – or the engine isn’t moving at all, and you’re stopped completely.

Anyways, more about that later.

Suffice to say that life on the Adak has been good, but hard. The impending impoundment does not sweeten the deal. I’ve been lucky to have good friends – Xander, Rick, Spencer, Marat. Xander who helped me move in with his 15 HP skiff, ordered up a boat-warming gift of half a cord of spruce, reveals tie lines that just aren’t functioning how they should be, and who has a boat a couple slips over, the Sound Judgement, which offers an example of how a boat should be. Rick, who helped stock my fridge Alaskan-style when I first arrived, took me fishing for kings out at Silver Bay to get my mind off the boat, and contributes whenever he can find time. Spencer, who has made footsteps for me to follow, both in a life and in a livelihood, except when it comes to getting out in time for the king salmon opener. And finally Marat, who has been key in this whole project. Honestly, I’d be pretty fucked if he wasn’t around. I can figure stuff out pretty good, but it takes me a while. I can safely say I’m not a natural when it comes to engineering. I work pretty well with concepts, larger pictures, but this – it’s all about the details.Sans detail you get no larger picture. And I can do it – I do have an understanding of how engine work, and I’ll tinker till the sun goes down – and comes up four hours later, as the case may be – but I didn’t grow up with it.

Anyways Marat and his wife Amanda run Otolith Sustainable Seafoods in Philadelphia – one of the premier CSAs for wild-caught seafood on the east coast (http://otolithonline.com). He has the Sunset, a halibut schooner from the 1940s anchored up here in Eliason. He knew enough to take one look at the engine room – the washing machine dumping into the bilge, the 3700 Rule pump in the main bilge without any float or alarm switches, the lack of pumps in the lazarette or cargo hold, the engine running gravity-fed for fuel off a 15-gallon day tank and think – and say this is not how it should be. Me – I’d still be at the point of wrapping my head around the systems in the first place. It would take a while before I could present alternatives.

Not to say there haven’t been moments or relaxation. Sitkans work hard and play hard. Unlike New Hampshirites, who just work hard. Or Coloradoans, who just play hard. Sunsets off the stern, hikes up Gavan, Verstovia, making smoked salmon, king salmon stock, chatting with Don at Old Harbor Books, fireworks off the bow, catching up with Shan, strolling the docks and long lunches with French couples who have been cruising on their sailboat for the past five years – all this has happened. And I’ve had folks hang on the boat – okay folks are staying onboard and providing suggested donations that go toward engine work. Christy I do hope you understand. This is some expensive shit.

Anyways Kyle is here now – he is a fish-spotter and flies floatplanes and does Top Gun –style fly-overs the Adak mast, waggling the wings of his SuperCub hellow. He makes a good fire and dries his clothes on a clothesline so is good in my book. And good neighbors, who set examples of how one should work slowly, but constantly, especially in these summer months, on the boat. So you’re not chasing dry days come October.

So the work continues.The Adak, slowly but surely, becomes cozy, with the Monarch fired up, the humidity guage dropping from the seventies to the fifties. Chopping wood in the morning, building bilge platforms to set on the keelson and installing float switches in the afternoon, reading the Fairbanks-Morse engine manual at nights – how well-written it is, with moments of humor even – the days tick by like pages in a flip book, the whole thing forming a slowly, but surely, moving picture.