COMMON SENSE FROM CLYDE: IMPORTANT TO READ!

[bob mitchell]

My fatherly advice while you are working on anything below the waterline: put the boat "on the hard" so the there is no water out there to start an unstopable flood. Been there, done that, and I don't ever want to hear of it again. Long story, may tell it sometime.

[bob mitchell]

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[bob mitchell]

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[Justine]

Hey Clyde,

I want to hear the story please Sir. You know me I always love stories :)

Justine

[Clyde A. Phillips]

Well, let's see.  As captain of Rutgers University's research vessel, a high speed rig that would never go faster than a Newporter under sail, I had to leave the boat at a dock in a creek up the bay when we were working up there.  We had an extremely high tide one day (four feet above normal tide) and the boat (on the ebb tide) came down on a sharp top piling and punctured a hole in her bottom below the water line.  To be honest, that was not unstopable, but she was hung up on the piling.  We finally got her free.  I torn out some of the ceiling above the damage, and luckily only one plank was stove in.  And luckily, all I had to do was hammer the plank down flush, cover it with a piece of plywood with a layer of English felt and a bedding (both sides of the felt) of roofing compound and screwing it down.  That lasted for as long as we had that boat.

Also (gee, been there, done that) I was the relief captain for a local oyster company with seven boats and seven captains plus me,  One of the captains heaved a dredge (well, he didn't, his deck hands did) and he turned away from that dredge (which, by the way, is a basic no-no in oystering in shallow water).  The dredge did not settle into dredging position, it stood in its after end, with the "eye of the dredge" straight up.  It being, of all things, low water and not deep enough for the boat to pass over the dredge, the eye was forced through the bottom, breaking a section of an eight inch wide plank completely out. And the skipper never knew it until someone went below.  Here we are, out in the bay, an almost 8 x 8 inch hole in the bottom of a boat with about 1500 bushels of oysters (about 65 tons) on the deck.  Needless to say a call went out for help.  The four other big boats of the fleet headed over with their spare pumps, two of them each tied the distressed vessel between them in as effort to keep her up,

My ceiling was of 3/4" pine; the ceilings in these boats are 2 1/2" white oak.  A hatchet did a good job of taking out my ceiling but it took a much greater effort to get to the actual hole in the oyster boat.  Long story made short: they did.  The pumps were able to more than keep up with the leak.  They did a similar patch as I did but it only slowed the leak down.  More luck: the company owned the oyster company also owned Dorchester Shipyard so that boat not only got the next open railway, they launched to boat that was on one so the oyster boat could be hauled and repaired.  A crew of yard carpenters were put on overtime until the job was done so the boat could get back on the job.

That's only two in which I was involved. I was more involve in the last one: we had five oyster boats and a couple of small boats all tied together, all engines running full tilt and in gear, and all captains save one on the sinking boat--I was the one. Did I tell you that I have also been a tug boat captain? That may be why I was left in the wheel house to maneuver that bundle of boats.