Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7,
Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14
URBANNA — Every summer the Deltaville Maritime Museum offers a family wooden boat-building camp. The program is offered over a one-week period in the summer and it always seemed to me whenever this week comes about, it is the hottest week of the year.
Of course, this is just my imagination. I am sure if I planned a move or an outdoor wedding, it would also be on the hottest week of the year.
One year we decided it would be great fun to rustle up our grandchildren and enjoy a family project like building a wooden boat together. This had everything that appealed. One, a wooden boat is the best sort of boat, and two, the program offered help from expert boatbuilders who volunteer their services each summer to those pitiful souls that know nothing about building a boat, which is probably the category in which most people fall.
So, we signed up and paid our tuition and then began the long process of gathering up our “grands” and lining them up for that particular week when they could all converge in Middlesex County to enjoy this wondrous family activity.
The story of my life in a nutshell is my romantic feelings about how wonderful everything will be and my slow and miserable realization that life doesn’t always turn into a tray of roses. Sometimes you get a tray of weeds.
Anyway, I soon learned that my grands were all busy that particular week …baseball games when a member of the team could never miss a practice, let alone a game, basketball camp, summer jobs and conflicting family vacations already planned. Thus, Chip and I faced the family boat-building week alone.
It was a bit embarrassing when two grandparents turned up on the first day of camp to enjoy building a boat together. It must have seemed strange to the other families as they assembled around their boat projects in large groups ranging in age from 4 to 84 to see two grandparents showing up by themselves. But the situation worsened by the very next day.
Fortunately, our project site was in the shade of a large tree because the temperatures were headed into the 90s all week and even at 9 a.m. I was feeling weak. (In my opinion, Tidewater Virginia is part of the tropics.)
Chip and I stared at the pile of lumber and odd looking tools before us. What in the world should we do? The lawyer looked at the writer. The writer looked at the lawyer. Neither of us had even an inkling of what the first step should be.
I did recognize a hammer in the pile of tools and I felt capable of using it should it be necessary to put a nail into a piece of wood. That was about the extent of my tool knowledge.
Our confused expressions caught the attention of a friendly volunteer, a man who came immediately to our assistance. The first step was shaping strips of lumber to form the frame work for the top of the skiff. It was amazing how the strips of wood finally bent according to the plans. That was the most difficult part of the project. However, I really wouldn’t know because that day was the last day I attended family wooden boat-building camp.
That night while I was writing about my first day building a boat, my golden retriever “Lady” crawled under my desk and gave birth to her first puppy! I was so excited I never finished my story. (Finally, at long last, I am finishing it.)
Eight more puppies followed the first to arrive and I had my hands full cleaning them with a warm washcloth and setting them one by one against Lady.
The next day, after a sleepless night, I carefully moved Lady and her pups to a large plastic swimming pool lined with a blanket that I set up in the utility room. I spent the last four days of wooden boat school attending to the needs of Lady and her nine puppies.
Chip and the trusty volunteer who was an expert at building boats were left to finish our boat by Friday. It was a beauty. We named it the “Blue Chip” but it could have been named the “Happy Lady.”
The next day we showed up for the celebration rowing race in the new boats down the creek and back. At the sound of the start, Chip took off like a real yachtsman leaving the children and teenagers in their boats going around and around in circles. They were still rowing in circles trying to keep their oars in the locks as Chip rounded the buoy and returned way ahead of the pack to win the prize.
I gasped. The Blue Chip was half full of water! “That’s why I rowed so fast,” Chip said, “I was afraid I would sink!”
That’s when I learned a freshly built wooden boat has to age a bit so that the wooden planks have time to swell. The swelling seals the boat.
Prizes were then presented. Chip got first prize for winning the race and I got a prize that had never been awarded before … a can of white paint.
It was labeled the “Tom Sawyer Award,” like in Mark Twain’s book, awarded to the person who found a way to take off from a job and get his friends to do all the work!
(Continued next week.)
© 2024
Note: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We have so much for which to be thankful — especially that we are one great American family and that we live in the U.S.A.!
