It Seems Like an Ignominious End

"Narrow Escape" was powered by a two-cylinder Swedish-built Albin gasoline engine for 39 of its 40 years.

Serial No. 1 of that engine was built in 1925, according to the parts manual. Mine was serial no. 47542, built in 1967. I had lavished several thousand dollars and a lot of time resurrecting it to service. And I succeeded, for awhile. For 110.6 hours to be exact. That's better than the last two prior owners of the 1968 Ericson 30, each of whom spent a lot of effort and money trying to get it to run reliably.

My motive was partly nostalgic. It was a funky engine, huge flywheel, 12 hp at 1500 rpm, magneto ignition. And a factory parts distributor from whom I was able to buy a brand new cylinder head in 2006. It reminded me of the single-cylinder two-cycle Stuart Turner engine in a native-built fishing boat I owned years ago during a sojurn in Grenada.

My effort was misplaced. If I combined the money I spent on the Albin with the money I've spent on the new Tohatsu outboard and mount, I would have a new diesel in the boat now.

Still, there was a pang of regret when I had the engine block and transmission lifted out at the boat yard last December and then walked away leaving it lying there like the corpse it was. One of the yard crew admired it, calling it a classic looking engine. In different circumstances it could have become a museum exhibit. But the guy in San Pedro who has a small display like that, didn't want any part of it.

There were two plastic containers of parts that I had stripped from the engine prior to having it lifted out. That was necessary for me to be able to muscle and lever it off its mounting rails and into the companionway from which it could be lifted.

I put the containers in my storage unit and have spent the intervening months moving them out of the way every time I needed to get something else out of or put into the unit.

The other day, knowing I would have to move them once more to put my 11-ft inflatable back in storage after it served as a potential liferaft for the Ensenada Race, I finally called a scrap metal yard to find out how to sell the remains.

The containers were heavy. One contained the thick cast iron flywheel and its guard. The other contained the manifold, exhaust riser (aluminum, $175 in 2005), the irreplaceable French-built magneto, and various brackets.

Together, the two containers sat in the backseat of my Mustang convertible and I drove them to the scrap yard. It turned out to be a big industrial facility. I sat in a line of box trucks and overloaded pickups awaiting my turn on the entrance scale. While waiting in line, I had to move to make room for an exiting 18-wheeler tractor-hopper trailer rig that needed the whole street to turn out of the yard, having emptied its load.

After getting the weight ticket at an office window, I was directed "over there" and cautioned to watch out for damage to my car. "Over there" was an area where a huge electro-magnet on a crane was lifting junk off the asphalt and dropping it on top of a 25-foot tall pyramid of junk.

I looked at the pavement carefully for things that could puncture my tires, parked quite a ways out from the magnet machine -- it could easily have lifted my car -- and put down the top of my convertible. There was no way to get the heavy containers in or out of my backseat without having the top down.

I didn't bother trying to lift the containers out. I just opened each one and took out the pieces one by one. I laid them in a haphazard pile that was ludicrously small given the surroundings. Then I drove onto the exit scale, which could easily have contained five Mustangs, and went back to the office window.

"What name do you want the check made out to?" the clerk asked. I said it and spelled it. He knew what an apostrophe was, which puts him in the best-educated half of the population in Southern California. But I had to repeat the rest of it twice while he retyped. Those vowels, the double L and the Y give lots of people trouble with my last name.

He handed me a letter-sized sheet of paper. The bottom portion was my check for $7.10. At the top I learned that my car weighed exactly 3600 lbs when I drove in and was 60 lbs lighter now.

I drove away sad, yet happy that I would be able to tell my wife that I had finally gotten rid of that "junk".

Sailboat Story

This is an ongoing story about a sailboat, a 1968 Ericson 30, which I named Narrow Escape. Sometimes the story will be about day sailing, or trips to Catalina Island, mostly single-handed sailing. There will be a little bit about cruising class racing. There will be a lot about restoring an old boat, including making an old Albin gas engine reliable once more. Replacing and adding hardware and electronics will also receive some attention. So will refinishing cracked and crazed gelcoat. And sometimes it'll be about just hanging around the boat and the marina, special places both.

The story will not be about crossing oceans or planning to sail around the world or even to Baja, not that this boat isn't capable of all those things with some preparation. Voyages don't fit in with everything else that is part of my life. Narrow Escape provides my principal form of recreation, but not the only one. That probably makes me a lot like a lot of other people who own and enjoy boats.

I don't know the former name or names of this vessel. It had none when I bought it in September 2005. It is hull number 57 of the Ericson 30 line, which was the first of many boats that Bruce King designed for Ericson Yachts. The company and the boats enjoyed a fine reputation from the sixties into the eighties, when the Southern California yacht-building industry withered. Pacific Seacraft bought Ericson's assets and built a couple models for awhile. But it stopped doing that in the early 1990s to focus on building its own lines of cruising sailboats which have earned their own fine reputations, among them the Crealock 34. Pacific Seacraft used to have an Ericson section on its website. But at the moment the company's website is undergoing reconstruction, with no link to Ericson material and no indication if there will be one in the future.

What I know of this Ericson 30 is that it was based in San Francisco Bay until about 2003, when it carried its owner and family south as far as Avalon on Catalina Island. I could make out the shadow of its former hailing port, Redwood City, on the transom. Apparently a voyage to Mexico was the plan, but engine problems and perhaps other issues prompted the owner to call a Long Beach boat broker from Avalon with a plea to sell the boat -- immediately!

As luck would have it, the broker had a friend looking for a sailboat. They went to Avalon, struck a deal on the spot, and motored and sailed home after somehow starting the engine despite a dead battery. The broker recalls being able to hand crank it. But by the time I acquired the boat nearly two years later from a successor owner, no crank was aboard. Nor can I see how it ever could have been done.

What I do know is that when I bought the boat the inboard engine was not working, although the seller assured me that it had been rebuilt and had some parts receipts as evidence. Meanwhile he had invested in a Nissan 9.8 hp electric-start outboard, and a transom-mounted bracket.

The inboard did, indeed, look rebuilt with a good coat of paint, a clean engine compartment, and a plausible story about a problem with the carburetor that seemed like an easy fix to me. Besides, the outboard worked fine.

As I was telling the seller that I would buy his boat, I thought back many years to the time when I bought a VW Squareback that would barely run. That seller gratefully accepted my lowball offer. Then I drove the VW a few discrete blocks away, opened the engine compartment, freed up the stuck automatic choke, and it ran beautifully thereafter for many thousands of miles. I had visions of similar good fortune with the Ericson.