Winter is good for a lot of things. Without winter, that red headed kid who snowboards would only be known as the red headed kid who skateboards. Without winter, flora and fauna would just grow and grow and grow, all year long. That’s why they have 20′ long pythons in south Florida now that will someday eat little Florida kids. It’s true. Without winter, no one would ever leave the north, which would be unfair for the south, which would pose a geographic inequality that people would decry along with income inequality and the more important but less known and never protested intelligence inequality that tends to lead to the former. Without winter, that would be a key election issue this fall. But perhaps more importantly than those things is this thing: without winter, there would be no time to tinker with boats.
If you’re going to tell me that summer is time for boat tinkering, you would expose your naivete. When boats need repair or replacing or refurbishing in summer, it is less a tinker and more a frantic race that is furiously maddening. This summer, if you must be proven wrong, please sit at a boat launch. No need to sit there all day, just a few minutes, perhaps 15, and those minutes will do. Within that time you’ll discover that there is nothing tinkerish about a boat that will not start in July. On a sunny Saturday, with the sun lifting higher and the launch line drifting longer, there is no such thing as tinkering with a boat that will not start. There is loud swearing and profuse sweating and silent drives home while your kids weep in the backseat, but there is not tinkering.
In the winter, there is no rush. There is no line, no warm sun, no kids on the pier with their life vests on. In the absence of these things, there is room for tinkering. Why do you suppose the Chicago boat show was held this past weekend instead of another warmer weekend in July? Because July is a month for action, when no one has time to tinker or dream or to delay. In January, we have time.
On the mantle in my family room, there are two pieces of teak. This wood might not be teak, but it looks like teak, which is to say it looks like wood. And since I put teak oil all over it, if it was not teak before, it is certainly teak now. That piece of teaked wood is the platform part of my swim platform from my boat. It was in sad shape when I bought the boat last spring, and over the summer I neglected it as much as did the previous owner. In December, I committed to do something about that situation, and I removed roughly seven thousand screws and bolts from my swim platform. The platform was then in pieces, several of them. I took the wood pieces home. I poured the screws and bolts into a large bag, and left the metal braces and rail at my office. Then I washed the dirty swim platform in TSP, dried it for days, then sanded it for many more. Soon after, I went to WestMarine and purchased some teak oil, and then I doused that platform in that oil. I did it again and again, and then I sanded it some more and ladled oil over it again.
When I was doing this, I was careful to leave the varnish rags no where near my home. Remember the big house in Geneva National that burned a few summer’s ago? Varnish rags. I will not go down the same way. The teak platform has been transformed from a dull gray to a smooth shiny brown and now it glows from the top of that mantle. I might have been yelled at for sanding it down on the island in my kitchen, but this is the way tinkering is. It can inconvenience others, it can steal previously vacant spaces from garages and stain granite counters, but this isn’t really about others. It’s about a boat.
When you go to WestMarine, or Overton’s, it’s best to look like you know why you’re there and what you’re after. I do not look like this. I look confused, like I was left behind during a third grade field trip next door, and I wandered in looking for an adult who might call my mom. I walk the aisles anyway, intent on finding something that my boat needs. I usually don’t know what it is it needs. I also regularly fail to bring in the faulty or ugly part that I’m looking to replace, instead resorting to a long winded explanation as to what the part looks like and what I think it is that it does, and then I hold my hands out to show the size of the part like I’m describing the catch that got away. I’m usually wrong. Do you have any idea how much a handful of shiny boat screws cost? Neither did I, but it was more than we both thought.
At my office now there is a desk covered in bits and pieces from my boat. I am a masterful remover of parts. I can unscrew just about anything. I am no good at screwing those parts back on, what am I, an engineer? But that’s a project for February, not for January, so I won’t jump ahead unnecessarily. I’ll tinker this month. I’ll drive to Westmarine to see what they have on sale, and then I’ll drive home with that circular part and try my hardest to force it into its new square home. I can do all of this because it is winter. And in winter, I can tinker and no one will tell me I can’t.