On the hard describes a boat sitting on land. Above is Sea Gypsy on the hard at Boat Haven in Port Townsend. 

Last Wednesday I motored from Point Hudson, my winter home on the northeast corner of the Kitsap Peninsula, to Boat Haven Marina and Boatyard in Port Townsend for a haul out. A stiff breeze of snow covered Olympic Mountain vintage came straight over the bow. Sea Gypsy doesn’t have a dodger, and the cold air on our faces felt like some kind of late spring weather test. We were on the water though, with more good news  the Yammer seems satisfied with the new engine mounts I installed a month ago. No ominous vibrations or alien hails from below deck. 

The tide is dead low on a minus 3’ tide, which is about as low as it gets. The sight of mud flats extending a hundred yards from high water remind me to stay clear of the shoal area off the east side of the marina's entrance. Grounding in mud on a rising tide generally isn’t a big deal, which is a good thing, because a few minutes later Sea Gypsy met a mud bank. The bow sort of curtsied gracefully, and I gave the engine some throttle while turning the wheel hard to port. The wind on the beam helped, and in a minute we were clear. Ten minutes later we  tied up in the marina's inner basin, the staging area for boats coming from and going to “the hard.”

I pressure washed the bottom myself, saving $75.00, in about 45 minutes.
A brown scum coated everything below the waterline. An oyster found a home between the lower pintle and gudgeon on the rudder,  and it took a minute but even an oyster can’t hold on against that kind of pressure.  The only other growth is a cluster of seven or eight mussels hanging off the rudder. It would be worse if a diver hadn’t cleaned the bottom last summer when Sea Gypsy and I were still in Brinnon. Down there, 30 miles south in Hood Canal, marine growth occurs much faster. Foot long skeins of weed, mussels, oysters will form on a hull in a month or two if you let it. The Dosewallips and the Duckabush, glacier fed rivers draining the Olympics, empty into the Canal north and south of Pleasant Harbor, and along with many small streams create fecund environments for marine life, one reason why Hood Canal is renowned for its delectable seafood: the shrimp, crabs, clams and oysters. 

Sea Gypsy moved to a spot by the road. The guys blocked the keel and placed six jackstands, three sets of two on opposite sides of the boat connected with chain to keep the stands from jiggling loose and allowing the boat to fall over. That rarely happens, but it did last winter at Point Hudson when sustained 40 knots of wind loosened a 35’ sailboat’s jacks and it went down, shattering the aluminum mast like a piece of glass when it hit the boat next door. 

After the boat was settled on blocks and jackstands, I borrowed a ladder and climbed to the deck, now ten feet off the ground. At Point Hudson  the boat was almost in constant motion from the wind and waves doglegging through the entrance to the marina. During a blow the wind might heel the boats to thirty degrees for hours at a time. I’ve wondered if living in so much movement has affected my balance permanently, because now when I am on land I don’t walk straight. This is a common short term effect after disembarking from a sea voyage, but this feels different. But like many other things these days, it’s impossible to attribute this weaving walk to a single source. Is it the sea, or is it, plainly, me, evolving on the inexorable plane of aging. Either way, the rigid, foundational feel of Sea Gypsy on land was weird. So also was looking out the door at the green leaves of the poplars  swaying in the breeze. Just what was swaying? I felt like a squirrel on the end of a thin branch. 

The most routine thing people haul their boats for is to paint the bottom and replace zincs. Sometimes this work goes fast and a boat might make the round trip back into the water in a few days. But often there’s more to do. Some boats have been on the hard here for years. Sometimes there’s so much more to do it never gets done. A boat might go downhill so far the owner feels it’s not worth spending the money, or she doesn’t have the money, and she decides to walk away. Right now there are several boats with the yard’s notice of seizure for nonpayment of fees taped to the hulls. For some boats, Boat Haven is Davy Jones’ Locker, as it were. At the south end of the yard enclosed in hurricane fence there’s an area of sacrifice where derelict hulls are stripped of electronics, hardware, tanks, batteries, broken with an excavator, and piled into a waste container to be trucked away.

A final voyage on the hard can be cruel. Boats are more than assembled materials. They are manifestations of dreams. Of freedom mostly, of respite from the clutter and chaos of conventional society, of sanctuary in an idea of Eden. Once possessed the dream dies hard. It’s usually men who want to keep the dream alive past the time when the boat’s bones are old and brittle, or their bank accounts are not up to it, or their bones are old and brittle. On the other hand, objectively speaking, there is never a point of no return for any boat if there’s enough will, skill, and money. There have been many such rebirths at Boat Haven, most recently the sailing vessel Tally Ho, brought back from a rotten hulk to a masterpiece of craftsmanship and internet celebrity after seven years of dedication by British sailor and boatbuilder Leo Goolden. 

For now Sea Gypsy and I reside somewhere between a dumpster fate and the glory of Tally Ho. The latter status is unattainable for a fibreglass boat because it is the admixture of wood and the human soul that achieves the heights. The point for us is more mundane, that is, to stay afloat with some respectability and integrity for a few more years. We both have some time left. Neither are dumpster material just yet. 

Stay tuned. We’re going to be here for a while. What's it like to live on a boat on land? What do some of these dreams look like? And who knows, I might explain what a zinc does, or a pintle, or a gudgeon.