ZEN AND THE ART OF BOAT MAINTENANCE.
I love PRACTICAL SAILOR ®. If you’re not familiar with the publication, it is of sailors, by sailors, and for sailors. It contains interesting tidbits about products that you can waste money on or save money by using. The information they publish is all pretty much how they see it, and since they sell no advertising, owe absolutely no allegiance for their opinion. If they feel a product is worth while, they say so. If they think a product isn’t worth bilge slime, they’ll say that as well.
While that’s a valuable asset to have for a product review newsletter, it’s not why I love them. Like most sailors, I devour the annual review of bottom paint, or engine degreaser, knotmeters, depth sounders, GPS’s or even of sunglasses, and meteor flares. But that’s still not why I love them.
From time to time, not only do they review products, they’ll also review used boats (no, as of yet, they haven’t done the Morgan 38....), but they’ll also review processes. That’s right, they’ll review and revise the way we do things on our boats. Take teak for example. For centuries, the latest rage at the yacht club has been what new gunk will be tried for the treatment of teak, and how successful will it be.....
The list is long, varied, and somewhat complicated. There are many things available on the marked to deal with the problem of teak treatment. You see, teak is a naturally oily wood. It’s that oil that we find so pleasingly warm and accepting about the wood. It also tends to age well, and not rot. The problem is that about a month after the installation of a new piece of teak, it tends to grey out, and look like the buildings in a Hollywood western (they pay a lot to paint the wood to look like that, an important point to remember).
We all want the teak to remain the way it did right after we first saw it. In order to do that, we must treat it. Therein lies the problem. What do we use. There is the original product, used at the Darwin Yacht Club, housed on the shore of the Sea of Beginnings, but it’s REAL hard to find amber these days. There’s also varnish, and various other treatments that are one and two part, that include crystal acid baths to prepare with, and stains to give it that perfect color, and so on. And, if you can believe it, you can even purchase bottles of the very oil that is contained in teak, to help preserve it.....
Well, PRACTICAL SAILOR® once reviewed all those products, and the processes they involve. That’s why I love the wonderful folks at PRACTICAL SAILOR®. It was a landmark article in the world of boat maintenance. It was the result of a year long investigation into the secrets of teak treatment. They gave every product a fair shot and every approach a fair effort. For complete fairness, they even left a new piece of teak alone for the year. Then came the results.
At the end of a year of exposure to the elements in their locale, the result showed that every single piece of teak involved looked pretty much the same. Some of the more esoteric products produced a darker grey, but they all pretty much looked the same. The untreated piece, they admitted, looked better than any of those that had been treated. Their final conclusion was that it pretty much didn’t matter what you did with teak, it would end up looking the way it would. Therefore, they decided the best thing you could do was scrub it from time to time, then pretty much leave it alone.
That’s why I love PRACTICAL SAILOR®.