Supersize me

July 2023

By Christopher Birch

Entering Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay aboard Sundance, our 36-foot Morris Justine, I heard a security call on one-six as we sailed past Castle Hill. A tug pushing a crane barge was announcing its intentions for an inbound transit of Newport Harbor passing Goat Island and bound for Newport Shipyard & Marina. That’s where we were headed, too. I wondered what the heavy equipment would be working on.

The barge was easy to spot with her yellow crane towering against the blue sky, and once we caught up, her task became obvious: The barge had been called in to lift a heavy sail off the pier and lower it onto a boat’s boom. This was one jumbo sailing yacht; she made the neighboring 138’ J-boat look quaint by comparison.

You know you’re not sailing dinghies anymore when three crew members with hardhats are running around inside your boom assisting the crane operator on the hired barge to bend on the mainsail. I wonder how many sailboats carry hardhats aboard? I hope they remembered to put the battens in.

On this particular day, our boat was the smallest one at Newport Shipyard. In 1991, the year she was built, she was an average-sized cruising boat, but those times have come and gone. Nowadays, the boats are bigger. And Newport Shipyard is a place where big boats like to congregate. Some of the dinghies they carried were longer than the boat my wife and dog and I find comfortable to live aboard.

When I see one of these giant yachts, my first reaction is an outpouring of gratitude for not being the guy tasked with sanding her bottom. In Newport that day, several jumbo yachts were on the hard having their bottoms tended to. There’s a lot of square footage down there to sand, and the vertical development rivals that of a thunder cloud. From the sander’s vantage, the boot-stripe could be mistaken for an airplane contrail. Kicking a spare keel block into position to use as a step-stool isn’t going to get you there even if you play for the Celtics. Big boats require big boatyard equipment.

Teams of workers were wheeling around underneath the jumbos on motorized lifts sanding away at whatever convenient position they needed. These guys weren’t splitting off a single extension cord, fretting that the little red GFCI button was going to pop at the plug on the post over in the corner. This yard is different. Huge cables bring in the juice providing plenty of power for any and all projects. The sanders were the same size, though. There’s only so much weight a person can hold above their head all day. Even with all the equipment and electrical power and manpower, it clearly was going to take a while to get a job like this done. I watched as one guy spent the entire day sanding the port side of a rudder.

May in the boatyard: The warm sun fighting the cool sea breeze felt familiar. The projects felt familiar, too. In addition to bending on sails and sanding bottoms, people were waxing boats, and changing engine oil, fuel filters, and zincs. Those omnipresent guys in Tyvek ® suits were marching around huffing into expensive respirators with spray bottles of Awlgrip in one gloved hand and a gallon of acetone in the other. A completely familiar tableau, but at Newport Shipyard the scale of things is different.

Oil tankers, cargo ships and aircraft carriers are bigger than any yacht in Newport, but we like to keep our distance from these floating behemoths. They aren’t all that relatable, either. Aside from the fact that they float, they have nothing in common with the boat we live on. The large yachts, on the other hand, have all the same parts as the small ones. The massive nature of the individual components on the big yachts is what bangs home the truth of how truly large they are. In Newport you can get really close to these boats and study their details.

Jumbo yachts like to lower their anchors wherever they stop. They’ll even do this when tied to the dock or hauled out on the hard. I think it has something to do with admiralty law or perhaps it’s just superstition. Either way, the odd practice gives the passerby in the boatyard an excellent opportunity to get up close to some massive ground tackle. The exquisitely crafted and polished stainless anchors looked like they could be sculptures in a plaza fronting a Manhattan office tower. I wouldn’t want to have to deliver one there, though. A full-sized pickup truck wouldn’t be full-sized enough for that job. You’d definitely want to be wearing steel-toe boots, and the chain with its fist-sized links wasn’t going to be lifted by hand.

Vehicles of all types were scattered about the yard, including a shiny new Rolls Royce that was casually parked in the midst of all the boat work. Someone has to write the check for all this, after all. I’m willing to bet the checkbook sat in the glovebox of that car. It was a vehicle better suited for delivering checks than anchors, and I’m sure the driver wasn’t wearing steel-toe boots.

Eventually it was time to leave and we headed out into the busy harbor. A pair of chartered 12-meters were head-to-wind with large crews working large winches to hoist large mainsails in preparation for a day of match racing. The Volvo Ocean Race had just left town. The jazz fest and folk fest and fall boat shows were still ahead and this pair of 12s will tack through them all. And they’ll still be tacking out there next summer, too.

And so will we, on our own course and at our own speed. On Sundance, I can haul the mainsail aboard and bend it on all by myself. I can even pull it up without a winch. I thought there was something to be said for that as we sailed out of all the grandeur that is Newport.

Christopher Birch is the founder of Birch Marine Inc. on Long Wharf, Boston. He is now out cruising full-time with his wife, Alex, and his standard poodle, Bill, aboard their 36-foot Morris Justine. Follow their voyage at EagleSevenSailing.com.

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