Life boat
Where others see a skeletal shipwreck, Les Lathrop sees the home of his childhood, a piece of shipbuilding art worthy of years of plank-by-plank restoration.
By MARINA BROWN
Published February 7, 2005
"We've got the gudgeons for the pintles. They're a perfect fit. All that's left is the keelson and its worm shoe."
Les Lathrop, sandy-haired, suspendered dockmaster and director of yachting at the Treasure Island Yacht and Tennis Club, stares adoringly at the bleached carcass of his wooden behemoth. Others might call it a shipwreck - no hull, only exposed ribs and a beaten-up keel propped beneath blue tarps in an industrial yard.
But others wouldn't be looking through the prism that has driven Lathrop over the last six years.
Timber by timber, nail by nail, Lathrop sticks to a mission of reincarnation. He says he intends to "save the life" of his wooden boat, a 39-foot Bahamian island "smack" called Ask No Quarter.
The sailing vessel has been his mistress and master for 41 years. But time, water and "iron sickness" have made the boat structurally unsound. Plank by rotted plank, it has fallen apart.
Is a nearly 60-year-old wooden boat worth saving?
You bet, says Lathrop. But forget fiberglass; forget anything made before Ask No Quarter was launched. "Yeah, I'm doing it the old-fashioned way," Lathrop says. "She'll be like fine furniture when I'm done. Look here, see how nice the garboard strake will fit into the rabbet." In 1946, about the time Lathrop was born, a master boat builder called Bunyan Key was cracking a bottle of rum over the bow of his new ketch, Windsong. In the Bahamian Abacos Islands, just after World War II, elegant, raked-mast "smacks" were still used for hauling conch and lobster from the empty outer islands into the markets of Nassau.
With its soaring bowsprit and shoal draft, Windsong was built like a tank from the straight, hard wood of Abaco pine and the tough, red-grained tree called "horseflesh."
Following a design used by Loyalists who had fled from America to the Bahamas during the Revolutionary War, Key had fashioned the graceful, double-masted boat using adz and jack plane. But even then, it was a vanishing breed.
Lathrop remembers the first day he saw it. He was 10. His father, a World War II fighter pilot, had bought the boat, then called Jolly Roger, on a whim while it was tied at the mouth of the Miami River.
"It was the biggest, the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen coming up the river. I thought it was a pirate ship."
The name Jolly Roger was exchanged for Ask No Quarter, and the Lathrop family of four moved aboard.
By the time Les was 13 and his father's military career completed, the family was living fulltime in the Bahamas. "They don't make childhoods like mine anymore," reflects Lathrop. He learned to dive, surf, fish, and most of all love the life of a live-aboard cruiser.
"For years, I could never sleep in a house," says Lathrop, who currently does. "But I still sleep better when my bed is rolling slightly."
Lathrop came of age just as the Vietnam War was escalating. Joining the Air Force in 1967, Lathrop did two tours in Phan Rang, surfed the South China Sea, became a diving instructor and raced sailboats with the Australian Task Force.
But all the while he was making plans to take up where he had left off on Ask No Quarter. It was "pretty much all I ever wanted."
Ask No Quarter became home and office to Lathrop after he re-entered civilian life as a charter captain in 1970. For the next three years, he squired international guests, including Britain's Prince Charles.
These outings featured the usual lack of accoutrements of a native boat: No air-conditioning. ("If you use air-conditioning, you might as well live in a house.") Mostly kerosene lights. ("Cuts down on battery drain.") No shower. ("A cup of freshwater. Joy liquid soap. An overboard dip. And a final two-cup fresh water rinse.") And for the chill, Lathrop heated upside-down flower pots on the stove. ("They're like little space-heaters.") But fancy isn't everything. Prince Charles wrote in the ship's log: "A very beautiful day and a most enjoyable time."
In 1973, Lathrop brought his boat to the Treasure Island Yacht and Tennis Club. Excluding a five-year stint away from Treasure Island when Lathrop worked at the Tierra Verde Yacht Club and helped build Sampson Key Marina in the Exumas, he has remained dock master at the Treasure Island club for nearly 28 years - most of that time living aboard Ask No Quarter, docked like an aging matron amid the Treasure Island club's yachts.
Wooden boats have both a symbiotic and an antagonistic relationship with water. When wood is immersed, it swells. Joints tighten and the ship stays dry. The wood remains supple and has a resilience that survives in heavy seas that might cause a more brittle fiberglass boat to come apart.
But water carries the potential for big problems as well. Ask No Quarter had been ravaged by rust. Half-century-old iron nails had created a halo of ruined wood around each nail head. Down each of the ribs of the boat's interior, and along each of the 1,000 board-feet of outer planks, blackened and rotted wood circled thousands of decaying nails.
This "iron sickness" entailed much more than a simple refit or restoration. The entire hull of Ask No Quarter needed replacing. But the old Abacos pines were all gone. "Horseflesh" could not be found.
Ask No Quarter was hauled to St. Petersburg's Salt Creek Boat Works in 1999. What was needed was a large quantity of just the right wood and a master boat builder as a guide.
Enter carpenter Charlie Mitchell, who would work on the boat for the next five years, along with shipwright Scott Deady.
If marble spoke to the sculptor, then wood sang to Mitchell. Tall and crew-cut, he wore the thick glasses of a man who studied things. In the vast field at Axley's Sawmill in Pinellas Park, Les and a few disciples followed Charlie as he surveyed acres of logs sprawled like fallen monoliths on Easter Island.
He spoke little, only stopping occasionally to stare at a 30- or 40-foot pine or a mammoth cypress. Some of these are more than 1,100 years old and now nearly extinct.
Charlie had his eye on a magnificent 30-footer, its outer bark long since disintegrated in the mud along the Suwanee River where Depression-era loggers had abandoned it. Now all that was left was the exquisitely hard, fine grain of the heart of the cypress.
Next, he bought oak. Oak cut into narrow strips would be glued or laminated together to make 20-layer floor timbers and form the bottom curve of the hull. And later, on a very lucky day, he would come across a tree service ready to pulverize a 150-year-old heart pine into garden mulch. He would buy it on the spot, knowing that this rock-hard wood would form the powerful frames of the boat upon which to nail the outer planks.
To date Lathrop says he's spent about $40,000 on the rebuilding of his smack.
"But I figure I've saved $200,000 in labor - my own."
The $10 a foot for bronze rods that he has hand-made into new, nonrusting bolts he considers a bargain. Then there are the thousands of special boat nails that he has counter-set and the thousands of wooden bungs to cover the nailheads, which have been sanded smooth.
Later when the deck is rebuilt, Lathrop knows there will be hours "at prayer," on his knees caulking the old way - driving cotton bunting and red-lead caulk between the narrow spaces of the planks.
Ask No Quarter moved to another yard near Bay Pines VA Medical Center in 2002. It's a little lonelier, a little farther from the water. Only one other peeling boat keeps it company. Charlie Mitchell has quit the undertaking, and now Scott Deady handles the steaming and bending of the hull skin and removal of the last piece of Bunyan Key's work: the disintegrating keel.
On a recent winter afternoon, the little work yard is empty. Looking at Ask No Quarter, dismasted, gutted, its skeletal physique more scaffolding than boat, is dispiriting. Then Lathrop pops from under the blue tarp.
"So I just got lucky," he says. "Hurricane Jeanne was bad for some, but, hey, she blew down two 70-foot pines in my neighbor's yard. I'm going to get about 30 feet each of the best darn heart pine I've ever seen!"
Lathrop's hands run up and down the wood, and up and down the wood again.
"I figure I've got about two more years of work ahead. Then . . ."
Six years, tens of thousands of dollars, and an endless, detectivelike quest for huge quantities of rare, ancient wood. Is the fun growing thin? Is he bored yet? With a quizzical stare, Lathrop states flatly, "No!"
He says Ask Know Quarter belongs in the water where it was created, and so does he. Currently, he and his father, who lives in the Bahamas, are developing a stretch of Abaco waterfront 20 miles south of Marsh Harbor that will eventually become the boat's hailing port.
As for now, with his hair and skin the scent and color of the wood that Lathrop has transformed into a new Ask No Quarter, the boat and man seem like comrades. The man has made the boat and the boat has built the man - as organic an interplay as that of wood and water.
Marina Brown is a frequent contributor to Floridian.