12 to 40. A yarn. (Part 2 of several)

Although time tends to erode memory and memory itself is impacted by the present there are events and characters in our lives that remain so well imprinted it's as though it were yesterday.

Jason was one of those characters!

Jason...not tall but erect as any Guardsman even in his advanced years. Jason with the pale blue eyes that always looked slightly amused, squinting as though looking up sun at some distant horizon. Jason with the omnipresent pipe and cloud of pale blue smoke that followed him wherever he went. Jason with the shock of white hair, bushy eyebrows and few words. A grunt and a gesture was often sufficient. You knew exactly what he was saying. You always felt as though you wanted to please him.

I don't know exactly how much time I spent scraping down that old, carvel built, dinghy. The yard was like a time machine for, once inside, time seemed to stand still and the work didn't seem like work at all. No belt or palm sander. Just a scraper that Jason had slightly modified with a file to take the corners off preventing it from gouging and a stack of sandpaper of varying grits.

People would stop and gam for a while or just stop and watch the progress as they made passage from one part of the yard to another. Everything unhurried. The buzz of the occasional fly. Sawdust motes hanging in the sunbeams flooding through the large doors to the shed. The rasp of the scraper. No thought given as to when the job would be finished.

At first my yacht was a lifeless turtle lying on those oversized sawhorses. Twelve feet of wood covered by a peeling layer of yellowing varnish which, in turn, covered another coat which, in turn another. Some of it dry and brittle. Some hanging on like a limpet not wanting to be worried off the wood beneath. Brass gudgeon pins and pintles, rowlocks all green with the verdigris of time.

As I scraped the wood below slowly came into view. Golden in color and soft to the touch. I soon came to know what Jason had known all along. Still plenty of life beneath those multi coats of aging varnish.

He would periodically stop by to view the progress and assess the quality of the job at hand. He rarely said anything. Sometimes he would look at the boat slowly coming to life and just walk away beneath his cloud of smoke. Other times he would run his hand over an area recently finished, grunt, look quizzically at me and then walk away. You knew he wasn't satisfied and you wanted him to be pleased.

I arrived one Saturday morning to find a gaping hole in the port side. A plank had been removed. I hunted down Jason. He was busy stoking the wood burning boiler that generated the steam for the bender.

He looked up. "Oi tore out one board. Didn't have no loife left in 'er. Oi'll bend a piece to fit for ee." That soft west country accent accompanied by a puff of smoke from his pipe. "Oi found the perfect piece for 'er in the seasoning shed."

He bent down and picked up a board to show me. I learned something else about him at that moment. He picked the board up almost as though it were alive. He didn't see just a board as did I rather he saw in it the function and the form. He could see it's shape and how it would become part of the whole. He exposed the artist in him.....unintentionally.

It took weeks to refinish that little boat. I think, under Jason' pale blue critical eye, I might have finished it several times. The hull both inside and out. The thwarts and gunnels. The centreboard, the rudder. The mast and boom. The oars. Jason laminated a new tiller as the original had gone missing. Perhaps rooted in the garden in which she had lay for so long.

At last she was finished. At least to the extent that any boat is actually finished. Experience has since taught me that boats are a constant work in progress.

We manhandled her onto a launching dolly and wheeled her outside for to meet another chapter in her life.

Jason took a hose and filled her with water while I watched in astonishment. "If it can't get out it can't get in."

Logical to me. Nothing got out!

Perhaps too soon she lay, right side up, in the sun showing off her several coats of new varnish. Now I know why varnished hulls are referred to as "bright." Her brass bits glinting. Her new lines coiled as if on a navel vessel. She was ready for the water. Problem........ I wasn't!!! I'd never been in a sailing dinghy before. Now what?

Over a mug of tea served in the cozy little shed that served as an office I said "Jason do you ever get out on the water?" He looked at me over the rim of his mug. "Ar 'ee wants me to take you'm out in 'er." "Oi'd like that. Must be twenty year since oi sailed that little skiff."

So began my sailing lessons. Jason in his overalls and flat cap. His only concession being that he exchanged his old army boots for an even older pair of plimsolls that had seen better days a long time ago.

Mudeford Water. An almost enclosed stretch of tidal water that the ebb emptied like a bathtub. Tidal flats that suddenly were there and least expected. Gusts of wind that exposed the frailties of small dinghies but sufficiently sheltered from the rowdiness of the English Channel.....but more of this later.