On the Nail

Now and again I find myself with the privilege of a practical and necessary role in

Alec laminates a rib.

this difficult world. Two persons are necessary to rivet the new ribs to the planks of my old boat; Alec on the inside of the hull, myself on the outside. He drills the appropriate hole through both rib and plank. I drill it out a bit more to counterbore the copper nail, which I drive in, having previously tied a little caulking cotton round its head. Then I apply the big heavy dolly to it so that Alec can close it with a rove, cut the nail to length (half the nail diameter above the rove) and peen it with a ball-peen hammer on the inside. (He claims to have had this hammer for 40 years, and it has only had 4 new handles and 2 new heads. He says at the end of this year he is going to renew both!)

Clamping ribs in place.

There were so many dodgy ribs in the vicinity of the engine and its beds that one could not simply remove the lot and start again, for fear that the boat would lose her shape altogether. Alec has been replacing a few ribs at a time, which involves cutting strips of iroko to the right length, carefully bending and clamping them into place, leaving them overnight to get used to their new bends ('normalise' them), laminating them together with epoxy and again leaving them overnight, removing them to clean them up and then the nailing can begin.

Roves.

The dolly.

Between whiles, there is not a lot I can do beyond passing this or that or getting rid of junk, but Alec has plenty of interesting stories. He was born on a farm in Devon, but when he was 9, his parents divorced. A granny took him home for a while, but he ended up in care. As a teenager he soon started getting into trouble, robbing boats and cars and whatnot. By the age of 14, he found himself banged up in military detention for 6 months. He was however getting on well with one social worker, when the poor man jumped out of a window and killed himself. Fortunately another good social worker took over. Alec could now see that his life was going nowhere unless he could ‘turn over a new leaf’ and start making something of it.

Actually it was the travellers’ book that he took a leaf out of, finding he could make good money gathering scrap metal, especially aluminium. An eccentric but clever engineer, who drove around in dirty overalls in his Rolls-Royce but lived in a mansion near Shaftesbury and played classical piano music to revive himself when he got depressed, paid good money for the aluminium, which Alec started to smelt into ingots. He got interested in metal-work and machinery, and had always been interested in boats. He went to work in a boatyard in Bristol.

He decided he would build a small steel sailing cargo ship for himself, but he couldn’t find anywhere to do it in England. He had to have 3 phase power and a shed in which to do it there. He went to work in Holland and Brittany, and reckoned they were far ahead of Blighty. He met a girl and built his boat in North Brittany, and eventually sailed off to Ireland and the Continent.

Money got to be a problem. He sailed into Nazaré, liked the place, found an opening lifting and moving boats with a small crane, put his little ship on the concrete and has now been here solidly 4 years. Speaking French and Portuguese, he loves the easy-going international way of life and of course the climate. Now in his early 50s, he was thinking about how to get himself a bit secure in his declining years when Brexit suddenly loomed.

When it comes to seriously breaking into the business scene here, the difficulties are already daunting. Alec says there are a lot of obstacles when it comes to seriously building the place up. It is a problem for anyone from Northern Europe who may upset the established vested interests of those who are doing alright for themselves quietly milking the system. However the E.U. does provide a basis on which one might hope to see things getting straightened out, providing as it does some degree of the impartial rule of law. Now, with that being pulled out from beneath his feet, Alec faces the prospect of losing his rights as a European citizen here. There are many people in the same situation.

In Ireland, are people again going to find themselves confronted with barbed wire and nervous, gun-totting teenage British soldiers as they go about their lives? Or pulled over by aggressive Orange customs men, as I was in the ‘70s as I took a net-hauler on a trailer by the shortest route from Dublin to Donegal, who were quite pleased at the prospect of making things difficult for a ‘Southerner illegally importing machinery into Northern Ireland’? I took out my posh English accent to confuse them, but still they messed me around for a while!

We Europeans have acquired valuable rights which have, on the back of much bitter experience, been painfully if precariously established over half a century and mean a great deal to many people; how is it possible that they now look likely to be suddenly and arbitrarily removed from some, and all in the name of ‘Democracy’?!?

Sanctuario de Nossa Senhora de Nazaré.