Skookum Maru

[Garret]

Triumph, Norton, Royal Enfield, etc. engines of the 60's were mostly 40's tech - but the aluminum castings were gorgeous!

[hawkeye54]

That time was also my introduction to the unique, to me , (at that time) a front-wheel-drive - transverse engine / automatic transmission Austin America ( our first car after we married ) . Notable in the ' owner's manual ' was the phrase 'skotch the tyres at the kerb' --- truly two countries separated by a common language.



Rick

[_QB_]

Triumph, Norton, Royal Enfield, etc. engines of the 60's were mostly 40's tech - but the aluminum castings were gorgeous!

For me, the epitome of the British bits-and-pieces look came a little earlier:

vincent.jpg

Definitely 40's tech!

[cstevens]

For me, the epitome of the British bits-and-pieces look came a little earlier:

Definitely 40's tech!

Yes please! The Vincent Black Shadow might be the only bike to top the Moto Guzzi Le Mans Mk 1 on my dream bike list. It may be more 1920s tech than 1940s (is there anything about it that wasn't done twenty years earlier by the Brough Superior SS100?) but never mind. It's glorious.

You are kidding ? Porous, leaky, mismatched, fragile, awful. That's the first thing people noticed about jap bikes, they didn't look like something from the stone age, poured into a depression in the firepit after eating a mastodon.

Perhaps, but "porous, leaky, mismatched and fragile" could describe many of the boats that we love here as well, no? There is more to a machine than reliability, otherwise we would all own fiberglass boats powered by Honda outboards. Japan built some great bikes in the 1960s. The Honda 305 Superhawk remains one of my favorites although the couple that I have owned were poor examples. But my dad, who owned both British and Japanese bikes in period, always preferred his Triumph Bonneville. I have owned motorcycles from Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha (strangely no Suzukis) and enjoyed them all. But I never loved them the way I loved the Moto Guzzi Le Mans that was my last bike.

The Guzzi was inferior in every possible way to most of the Japanese (and German) bikes I have owned. It leaked gasoline from the tickle button on the race kit carburetors. The gearbox had more false neutrals than gears. It was a pig on tight, twisty roads - a full workout to get it to change direction. It vibrated so much that my hands would go numb after an hour or two. But on the right road - one with fast, open curves - it was magic. And it was all the flaws and the work that it required to ride it well that made the good bits so much more rewarding.

It's easy to ride a good bike fast. I remember the first time I rode a Honda RS125 race bike on slicks after spending years racing converted street bikes. It was eye opening. I won the club 125 GP and Open Single class championships on it the first year I raced it. Going fast on that bike was huge fun but all it required was that you not make any dumb mistakes. Get your shift points and your braking points and your turn in points right every lap and the bike would do the rest. The Guzzi demanded more. It wasn't enough to just ride it well. You had to ride it the way it wanted to be ridden. And the feeling of getting a corner just right on that bike was better than anything else I ever did on a motorcycle. So yes, Japanese bikes were objectively better for a long time. But people love machines for all kinds of reasons that are not rational.

Now Harley Davidsons on the other hand... There's your firepit and your mastodon all rolled into one behemoth of American iron. I get why people love them, but I've never been a fan.

[_QB_]

(is there anything about it that wasn't done twenty years earlier by the Brough Superior SS100?)

Well... Foot-shift, four speed, unit case transmission for one thing. Sheer beauty for another. Anyway, every development in motorcycles is incremental since the Daimler Reitwagen.

[Garret]

Wow - having to explain the concept of something having a soul or a feel (British/European vs. Japanese bikes) on a wooden boat forum. Bizarre. We should all be running Bayliners & Beneteaus - as they're more reliable I guess.

I started on a Honda 305. Excellent piece of machinery - you could drive it down a nasty road beating it with a hammer & it'd keep going. After than I switched to bikes I could connect with.

[Garret]

Sorry I said anything to pollute your thread Chris. I'll go away now.

[The Jeff]

The Honda 305 Superhawk remains one of my favorites although the couple that I have owned were poor examples.

My father bought a '66 when he was in the Army. He'd ride it 250 miles from Ft. Bragg to his parent's house in Suffolk VA every weekend, although occasionally he'd arrive in style via a Huey helicopter! He was a supply sergeant that worked in helicopter repair so he knew all the pilots who took the helicopters out on test flights or just to keep their hours up. Two guys could get the bike into the cabin and they'd drop him off at the church baseball field about 500' from his parent's house on Friday night. Then early Monday morning they'd pick him up and get him back in time for morning formation.

The front forks were originally chrome, but his younger brother wrecked it while dad was on vacation. He was going pretty fast with a friend on the back and they came to a Y intersection with an island. In the middle was a big metal direction sign on two legs and I'm sure you can see where this is going. Anyway, they hit the loose gravel that builds up on the outside of turns, popped the curb, and smacked into the sign. It just about took my uncle's head off, his friend went sliding down the street on his butt, and the front forks were trashed. No chrome ones could be found before dad returned, so he put on the black ones and dad was none the wiser for a few weeks. Once he realized, enough time had passed that he wasn't too mad.

Eventually dad sold the bike for safer transportation after running over a few dogs and getting sick of getting road rash every 6 months. One of the dogs was a local guy's prized hunting dog, so he made sure to lay low for a while and had absolutely no idea whatsoever about what happened to him. He always has fond memories of the bike though.

Oh, and I'm enjoying your updates on Skookum Maru. It's way more boat than I ever need or want, but it's fun seeing other people out there doing it!

[Marty J]

Says Red Molly, to James, "Well that's a fine motorbike.
A girl could feel special on any such like."
Says James, to Red Molly, "My hat's off to you.
It's a Vincent Black Lightning, 1952.

https://youtu.be/j0kJdrfzjAg

[cstevens]

Well... Foot-shift, four speed, unit case transmission for one thing. Sheer beauty for another. Anyway, every development in motorcycles is incremental since the Daimler Reitwagen.

Fair enough! All progress is incremental and assigning advances to decades is an artificial distinction anyway. The Vincent V-twin may not have broken any real technical ground but it remains a work of art nearly ninety years on.

Wow - having to explain the concept of something having a soul or a feel (British/European vs. Japanese bikes) on a wooden boat forum. Bizarre. We should all be running Bayliners & Beneteaus - as they're more reliable I guess.

I started on a Honda 305. Excellent piece of machinery - you could drive it down a nasty road beating it with a hammer & it'd keep going. After than I switched to bikes I could connect with.

Has nothing to do with soul or bizarreness. Fifties and sixties Brit bike castings were low-quality, porous, mismatched, leaky, poorly machined, and not especially attractive. Nortons were a little better than BSA and Triumph but still, lots of problems with them because of low quality work.

Can't entirely blame them because after the war Britain was not in any condition to be picky but shouldn't kid yourself, they were not good.

See this is where I would argue the point. "Attractive" is a personal choice. I think the side covers on a Triumph pre-unit twin are beautiful. Likewise the timing cover for a BSA single is marvelous. Sure, the production quality might have been a product of post-WWII economic conditions but needs must. I grew up on Japanese bikes but I'd never argue that any of them - even my favorite, the 1975 Honda CB400F - could approach a British bike in beauty. Although that didn't stop me from polishing one to a very high degree at one time.

Sorry I said anything to pollute your thread Chris. I'll go away now.

Never! If we did not have differences of opinion what would we talk about? That would be a dull world for sure. I think you and I may both need to agree to disagree with HRDavies on the subjective qualities of British bikes, and leave aside the objective ones like metallurgy and machining as being irrelevant at this remove. No one is buying a BSA Gold Star or a Norton Manx because of the engineering quality these days. They are valued for other things, and rightly so.

My father bought a '66 when he was in the Army. He'd ride it 250 miles from Ft. Bragg to his parent's house in Suffolk VA every weekend, although occasionally he'd arrive in style via a Huey helicopter! He was a supply sergeant that worked in helicopter repair so he knew all the pilots who took the helicopters out on test flights or just to keep their hours up. Two guys could get the bike into the cabin and they'd drop him off at the church baseball field about 500' from his parent's house on Friday night. Then early Monday morning they'd pick him up and get him back in time for morning formation.

The front forks were originally chrome, but his younger brother wrecked it while dad was on vacation. He was going pretty fast with a friend on the back and they came to a Y intersection with an island. In the middle was a big metal direction sign on two legs and I'm sure you can see where this is going. Anyway, they hit the loose gravel that builds up on the outside of turns, popped the curb, and smacked into the sign. It just about took my uncle's head off, his friend went sliding down the street on his butt, and the front forks were trashed. No chrome ones could be found before dad returned, so he put on the black ones and dad was none the wiser for a few weeks. Once he realized, enough time had passed that he wasn't too mad.

Eventually dad sold the bike for safer transportation after running over a few dogs and getting sick of getting road rash every 6 months. One of the dogs was a local guy's prized hunting dog, so he made sure to lay low for a while and had absolutely no idea whatsoever about what happened to him. He always has fond memories of the bike though.

Oh, and I'm enjoying your updates on Skookum Maru. It's way more boat than I ever need or want, but it's fun seeing other people out there doing it!

Thanks Jeff! Great story. My own father rode a Honda CL450 scrambler in the late 60s, but he was riding a Bultaco when he and a friend met disastrously coming up opposite sides of a dirt hill. He spent months in a body cast with compound fractures in his arms and legs, and still has the scars and metal plates from that accident today. Funny how these things become nostalgic with time. It must have been traumatic when it happened, although I was too young to remember it.

As for Skookum Maru, size is such a relative thing. Sometimes I think a smaller boat would be easier. But how small? Petrel was a nice size but I now realize that we could never have cruised aboard her even if I had finished the interior.



And sometimes I look at a really big boat, like Teal, for example, and wish we could afford a boat that size.



She came up for sale a few years ago and I thought about it but we aren't in that income bracket, or anywhere near. So I figure that Skookum Maru is just about perfect.

[_QB_]

Fifties and sixties Brit bike castings were low-quality, porous, mismatched, leaky, poorly machined, and not especially attractive.

Say what now?!

squarefourcase.jpg

[_QB_]

Now Harley Davidsons on the other hand... There's your firepit and your mastodon all rolled into one behemoth of American iron. I get why people love them, but I've never been a fan.

Me neither, with some notable exceptions.

xr750.jpg

[cstevens]

I could talk about motorcycles for days, but perhaps we should stick to just one thread drift at a time. Getting back to the Maserati story, it might help to have some context. Plus an excuse for another boat photo. In the late 1990s I was living a life of happy, if somewhat aimless, bachelorhood aboard a 1942 Monk Bridgedeck named Savona.



She was, and still is, a wonderful boat and we enjoyed many adventures together, but those are stories for another time as well. I had the boat, a few motorcycles, a couple of interesting but not very valuable old cars, and the Maserati. My friends all rode bikes and most of my life revolved around bikes and cars and boats. However that life was about to change.

At the end of 1999 I left my job at a small software company and went off in search of something else to do. A quest that landed me at the Seattle office of a large creative agency, which is where I met Victoria and Hugo.



I include them together because they were entirely inseparable. The one came with the other and I honestly couldn't tell you which member of the pair I fell in love with first. They were both amazing (present tense in Tory's case, but Hugo is sadly no longer with us, although he had a long and wonderful life).

The full story of how we met is not all that relevant, except at the very first. Because what's the use in being a single guy with a classic Maserati if you can't use it to impress girls? So of course very shortly after I met Tory I managed to casually mention that I had this Italian car I was working on... And it turned out that her father had owned Ferraris and Lamborghinis when she was growing up, and she loved fast Italian cars... and at a certain point she said that when I had the car running I should take her for a ride.

I didn't have to be told twice! The last thing the car needed to be drivable was brakes. And I had been working on them for a while by then. I had pulled all the calipers and cylinders off and sent them out to be resleeved. I had replaced all the soft lines. I just needed to install all the parts, bleed the system, and take the car for a test run to make sure it was all working. This was in the second week of February, 2000. I know this because with my new motivation I had the brakes finished that weekend, took the car for an inaugural spin around the block, and then drove it work the next Monday, February 14th. Valentine's Day. To this day I don't think I have ever accomplished as much in as little time as I did to get the Maserati on the road for that one drive!

And it was worth it, in all respects. The car was everything I had hoped it would be. Fast. Beautiful. It made a noise like the growl of a big cat when you hit the accelerator. Sure it handled like a truck but I didn't care about that. It wasn't a sports car, it was a GT and it was designed to take you and a friend, with luggage, from Cannes to Monaco for lunch, or Nice to Rome for the weekend. As for the girl and the dog, well, that worked out pretty ok as well. Tory and I were married a few years later aboard the vintage steam ferry Virginia V, with Hugo as our ring bearer.



I won't say that it was all because of the Maserati, but the car definitely helped!

There is one last story to tell about the Maserati. I promised that there would be fire and adversity too. A little while after I got the car on the road I was driving it back across Lake Washington from a meeting when the car filled with smoke and started to slow down dramatically. I pulled off the highway at the first exit, parked the car in the nearest lot - which was conveniently next to a fire station - and got out to have a look, fire extinguisher in hand.

White smoke was pouring from the rear of the car. The rear wheels were getting very hot and from the way the car had started to slow I guessed it had something to do with the brand new brakes. Fortunately the fire died out within a few seconds on its own and after letting everything cool off, and after reassuring the deputation from the fire station that had paid a visit, I drove it slowly back to the shop. Putting it up on stands I started poking around, and it was immediately obvious that the rear brakes had seized on, heating them up and causing the caliper seals to catch fire. And after some further inspection I found the cause.

When I replaced the soft lines I had missed one that sat right on top of the differential. It was hidden and I never knew it was there. It had collapsed so that hydraulic pressure from the pedal would apply the brakes, but lifting the pedal would not release them. The heat had cooked the seals in the rear calipers, which meant sending them out to be rebuilt again, but once that was done, and that last soft line was replaced, the car was finished. Oh, it needed this and that. It got new tires after a while, which helped with the handling. I would have loved to really restore it but that sort of expense was far beyond anything I could afford. And when the opportunity came up to purchase my grandfather's last car, a 1959 Alfa Romeo Giulietta Spider Veloce, I sold the Maserati for the money to buy it.



And that is another story.

[Garret]

Excellent! Boy & car get girl & dog. Here's hoping they live happily ever after.

The Alfa's pretty nice too...

[Hugh MacD]

Great stories, Chris! Thanks for sharing those

[cstevens]

More progress...







Port side done and ready for cabin top fiberglass and paint. Starboard side closed up and just waiting on the cabin top repair. Still a bunch of finish work to do, but it's good to have the rot repair work done.

[ron ll]

I’m envious. I think my nightmare might just be starting. Plus Seaview can’t get me in until May 22, which I’m afraid might be true of all yards and shipwrights. I’m pretty sure Mark will already have his next job lined up.

[Hugh MacD]

YAAAYYY! Structural bit done!

[Chris-on-the-Boat]

Looking good! Nice to see new wood going on.

[cstevens]

Stopped by the shed to check on Skookum Maru again today. Wandering around the Seattle waterfront is always a nice break from the office routine. It's good to see the tug Katahdin getting new bulwarks at the Thomas Boat Repair dock.



All that well-shaped cedar sure makes the work on Skookum Maru seem trivial.

In the shed, the aft cabin project is coming along nicely. The wood work is done and the cabin top is getting new fiberglass sheathing.











When I stopped by Mark was prepping the trim and handrails to go back on. With that done she'll need some paint and varnish on the house and deck, and the usual spring list of small jobs done, and she will be ready for another season of cruising. I can't wait!

[Pelirrojo]

Good to see the bulwarks on Katahdin are moving along, I chainsawed off the old ones about five years ago. She’s had a lot more work than just bulwarks done too. All new deck and beams aft of the the house, extensive repairs to the pilot house and Texas deck and many many other things.

[_QB_]

With the sheathing on the cabin top done right -- which the previous iteration was really not -- it should last a good long time.

So Mark did not note any issue around the starboard side aftmost house window lower corner... that's good too.

the usual spring list of small jobs done, and she will be ready for another season of cruising. I can't wait!

You and the family deserve a good long cruising season for once. Enjoy! If you're up for the border crossing, Kim and I will be on Gabriola from May thru October, stop by.

[Alan71]

Hello Chris,

I can understand that you would find a beautiful woman with style enough to wear black/white wing-tip spectators and a dog named Hugo completely irresistable !!!
What a picture they make.

Alan

[cstevens]

Good to see the bulwarks on Katahdin are moving along, I chainsawed off the old ones about five years ago. She’s had a lot more work than just bulwarks done too. All new deck and beams aft of the the house, extensive repairs to the pilot house and Texas deck and many many other things.

That's a lot of work! A good reminder of why I don't really want a big boat, even though I'm tempted sometimes. Skookum Maru is plenty big enough.

With the sheathing on the cabin top done right -- which the previous iteration was really not -- it should last a good long time.

So Mark did not note any issue around the starboard side aftmost house window lower corner... that's good too.



You and the family deserve a good long cruising season for once. Enjoy! If you're up for the border crossing, Kim and I will be on Gabriola from May thru October, stop by.

I still want to poke around the pilothouse a bit more. There are a couple of spots that I want to open up and get a look at soon, but I want to get the aft cabin buttoned up first. Anything else might have to wait for the fall. And yes, we are hoping for a longer cruise this year. Gabriola is very much on the list for a visit.

Hello Chris,

I can understand that you would find a beautiful woman with style enough to wear black/white wing-tip spectators and a dog named Hugo completely irresistable !!!
What a picture they make.

Alan

Cheers Alan! Yes, Tory has all of the style in our marriage. What little I have, if any, is entirely down to her influence.

On another topic, I finally made it up to B.C. to look at that MGB GT I've been chasing. It's not bad.







A little rust, but not too much from what I could see (although I'll acknowledge that, like rot, there's no such thing as "a little rust"). Definitely a ten-footer, but with a little detailing and touch up it would be a perfectly acceptable daily driver. And it drives very nicely. Good oil pressure. Runs great with no hesitation. Tight steering. Good synchros (all three of them - no synchro on first because real drivers don't use first, except from a stop, right?). Excellent brakes. I'm going to have a shop in Vancouver give it a look over, but unless they tell me something I don't know I'll probably own an MGB GT in the next few days.

[Boatsbgood]

Ooooh! Nice if you end up with the BGT, always wanted but in the tropics, good ones are,...well, rare will have to do. And, very good Skookum M is on the closing up side of the aft cabin repair, here's to the coming summer !

[Hugh MacD]

Waycool! Keep us posted on the status of the "B" I think about one periodically to augment my roadster, but realistically I should just look around for a good hardtop. There's a really good Forum for MGs at https://www.mgexp.com/forum/mgb-and-gt-forum.1/ I call myself "OldEnoughToKnowBetter", but frequently belie that statement...including buying my '76, a sow's ear that I'm determined to turn into a silk purse

[cstevens]

Ooooh! Nice if you end up with the BGT, always wanted but in the tropics, good ones are,...well, rare will have to do. And, very good Skookum M is on the closing up side of the aft cabin repair, here's to the coming summer !

Thanks Brian. Yes, I imagine that with the salt content in the air most classic British cars would have dissolved by now. I sold the Honda CB400F that I restored to a guy in Hawaii and I always wondered how well it would last out there. And yes, here's to the coming summer! I was surprised to see a photo of snow on Haleakala recently. I knew that it got cold up there, as I researched it once when I was planning a bike ride up to the summit (yes up, not the usual coast down, but I never found the time to do it when I was young and in shape for such things). But I never thought it could snow.

Waycool! Keep us posted on the status of the "B" I think about one periodically to augment my roadster, but realistically I should just look around for a good hardtop. There's a really good Forum for MGs at https://www.mgexp.com/forum/mgb-and-gt-forum.1/ I call myself "OldEnoughToKnowBetter", but frequently belie that statement...including buying my '76, a sow's ear that I'm determined to turn into a silk purse

Yep, I expect a hard top would give you 90% of the utility of a GT unless you need to carry anything too large to fit in the roadster boot. And thanks for the tip on the MG Experience forum. I actually joined a while ago when I first started searching for an MGB, and that's how I found the car in B.C. It was listed in the Buy, Sell & Trade forum last year. This one.

https://www.mgexp.com/forum/buy-sell...6/#msg-4545076

There wasn't any indication that it had sold, so I chased it down. It took a couple of weeks to get in contact with the seller but sometimes it pays to be persistent. Although I will say that it was listed as having "no rust" which is not quite true. Maybe it's "no rust" in the PNW/BC definition of the concept, but not in the SoCal/Arizona definition. Oh well. I could spend another year looking for a perfect, rust-free GT in my price range or I can buy the one that is right next door and drive it until I can get after the rust.

[cstevens]

So, a thing happened to me last week. I've been dealing with some exercise fatigue issues for a while now, beyond just the "54-yo guy a little out of shape" range. After a bunch of inconclusive tests over the past few months I finally was able to get in for a stress echocardiogram last week (the thing where they put you on a treadmill and run you to exhaustion to see how much work you can do. It's a lot like wooden boat maintenance, come to think of it). And, well, the stress echo turned into an emergency angiogram and the emergency angiogram turned into emergency coronary artery bypass surgery when they found 99% blockages on all of my major coronary arteries. This was me the day after surgery last week.



Recovery from that state was a grim slog and I'll spare everyone the details, but at least it progressed fairly rapidly and this is how I looked this morning.



Somewhat in need of a shave, but much happier. I'm home now and resting for the next few weeks while things like my sternum go back together as nature intended. Fortunately there doesn't appear to be any permanent damage other than to my dapper image and my self esteem. But the lesson here is don't mess around with health issues. I felt ok just sitting or doing household work so I could easily have passed it off as being very out of shape for a few more weeks, until some inevitable, major, cardiac event took me away from all that I love forever. Blind luck and a team of fantastic surgeons and nurses fended off that bleak ending for me, for which I will always be grateful.

And I am grateful, too, for all the friends who kept our lives on track over the past few days as my wife juggled caring for our son and our dogs, and spending long nights in my hospital room making sure I was going to stick around a while longer. Even the work on Skookum Maru kept going, to the point where I think we may still be able to get some cruising in this year once I'm back on my feet. Here is the latest update from Mark.







So the boat and I have both come through major surgery looking like we might be here on earth for a few more years. I'm calling that a good week in the end.

[pcford]

Dude! I'm having a stress test Thursday!! Good luck to us both. Pat @77 years of age.

[Garret]

Holy Crap! Glad to hear you came though it OK. I sure hope your health insurance is good.

Thinking good thoughts...

[Bruce Bateau]

Glad to keep you on this side of the bar Chris!

[jpatrick]

Here I sit at home nursing a sore jaw after some rather minor periodontal procedure done today. You've certainly put things into perspective! I wish you nothing but smooth water thoughts, Chris. Get well soon. Treat the home shore crew well.

Jeff

[Boatsbgood]

Dang Chris!! Great they did finally figure it out, but dang! Health stuff has a way of putting things in perspective: I had a craniotomy last spring for a tumor, was not anywhere on my to-do list! Wishes for the speediest and most complete recovery for you...
Brian

[Hugh MacD]

WOW! I thought my knee and blood loss were major. I was SOOOO wrong! Glad to see your smiling visage and I'm looking forward to reports from Skookum underway!

[jsjpd1]

You’re looking pretty grey in that first shot Chris! I’m very happy for you and your family that you are on the mend!