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Tom Rath: next book

Having just gotten the copies of his revised KittenCat book, Tom has just sent me a draft of his next children’s book (or series, perhaps) about a donkey. In the first one the donkey (I believe his name is Don-key Oatie, groan) wants to be a cow but discovers he has a very useful role protecting the young calves in the pasture from coyotes. 

An outstanding feature of this new book is the illustration work by Gregory MacAdam…a student at UPEI, I believe. He has used pen and ink line drawings filled in with water color and has captured the nuances of the story with great clarity and appeal.

As a publisher I face the usual questions about format and layout. Tom would like landscape format but none of my small-batch or POD printers seem to support that except for a one-at-a-time photo-book printer (Photo Book Press) who begins at a price of about $56 per book…not a price to capture the children’s book market. I hope I can talk Tom into the 8.5 x 8.5″ square format from Lightning Source or else a severe post-printing trim on vertical height from Instant Publisher. 

As the final test of the potential market, seeing the draft, my wife says we will have to buy a copy to take to the grandchildren.

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Welcome to Duckworks

Some time last month I sent an email to Chuck mentioning my new, almost-never-visited web site about sailing here around Prince Edward Island. I am totally amazed to see that I had had over 150 visits in the last day or two! Apparently last Friday my note included a link to this site and appeared in ‘July Letters’ (I could never figure out why the title is always off by a month). I have been part of the Duckworks clan for about a decade and written several articles for the magazine (radar reflectors, review of his LED running lights and stern light, and building bow pulpits, lifelines, and a mast). I hope some of you will come back in the future.

To a few of you who posted comments, I want to sincerely apologize…I deleted several of your comments as spam because I have gotten so cynical of the endless Viagra links and vague comments that had nothing to do with sailing. In my sleepy condition this morning I somehow assumed the spammers had developed a new strategy to copy in longer text blocks from other sailing sites to make them look legitimate…I regret to say I dumped several that were sincere comments and can’t recover them. I also can’t say why my  WordPress settings seem to classify all comments in as spam. I promise to look more carefully at any incoming comments from here on out!

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The outboard is back!

My friend Graham finished what was to have been a quick glance at my outboard motor. It is an old 9.9 HP 2-stroke with an extra long shaft (25″). My concern was the play in the gear train from the motor to the propeller.

“No problem, completely normal”

But then I had the bright idea he might fix my rusting-out remote throttle cable (based on a bicycle shifter!) and perhaps add a remote shifter and shutoff so I could come into port without having to have one arm down in the smoky engine well.

Its always gratifying and dangerous to turn Graham loose! The remotes got built…using marine, lubricant-enclosed cables… and he went on to investigate what had trapped water and pushed out the lower wall of the drive, as well as the source of exhaust building up in the engine well.

Turns out there are 3 exhaust outlets on this motor: one through the prop, one just above the prop under water, and one up near the top, above the water. When the outboard is truly out-board this third port is no big deal, but when it is fully enclosed it makes the engine well an enclosed trap for exhaust…no wonder I had to devise an external air input to the motor.

Then, attacking the lower unit, he discovered there is a compartment that takes on sea water through a small port which was TOTALLY full of barnacles, mussles, and crud. It had trapped water over the winter, accounting for the burst housing, and had built up to where shifting was difficult. Being Graham, with his skills he repaired the broken housing, taking 4 hours to complete the aluminum welding back to the point where there was sound metal…something about hairline cracks indicating deterioration.

“Good as new”

So now it is back and I can use it with peace of mind.

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Enjoying the process

— In dwforum@yahoogroups.com, Dean Herring wrote:

Thanks Jackie—yep spending 200-400 hours with a boat…building her is better than actually sailing for me. I’ve come to grips with that now and started to enjoy the process—it’s actually a chess game to build and epoxy everything in the right sequence … Dean

Reading Dean’s comment it struck me that I am not rushing to get my boat in the water either…it has been ‘finished’ for several decades but every Fall I start a list of improvements which usually cannot be completed until it gets warm enough in the Spring (actually here it is almost Summer before that happens) for paint and epoxy to set/dry. I find I have been revelling in carefully and slowly doing the following modifications:

  1. Mounting the new speed and depth transducers including a wood block to allow ropes to slide past the latter where it pokes about 1″ below the hull near the front (where it can give a slight advance warning as you approach a shallow spot)
  2. Cutting and fastening wood strips to hold the new solar panels on top of the cabin
  3. Cutting and fastening reinforcements for the bow-roller assembly I built several years ago which split when the boat anchors slipped and it weathered a hurricane sidewise (that also led to slide pins to hold the side hatch covers down)
  4. Cutting and fastening a 4″ x 10″ tapered block which will take the new remote shifter/throttle controls being built for my outboard
  5. Painting everything: white decks, green sides and red bottom paint
  6. Replacing the corroding lifeline wires
  7. Replacing the wind gauge and sensors with a cheap wireless speed unit and a Davis wind vane
  8. Hopefully replacing the backstay with two cables so there is redundancy on all 4 sides of the mast.

 Why am I listing all this? both to show that a year when “there isn’t much to do” is not really that, and to show to myself that I am really enjoying this, taken one step at a time. I just ralized I am enjoying the process and will feel empty when it is done. I must have done 15 small batches of epoxy along the way, taken several days at painting, and always planning…planning…planning. You’re right: BUILDING…IS BETTER THAN ACTUALLY SAILING.

 

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Outboard motor woes and EBay

The boat is still in the yard…awaiting completion of painting projects as well as the departure of a family of young starlings that began life in my radar reflector at the top of my (horizontal) mast…I definitely have to cover the access hole in the ‘bottom’ before next year. Also, planting the garden has had an urgency with the very short season we have here.

Along the way I dropped off my outboard motor, an elderly 9.9 horsepower 2-stroke with an extra long shaft, on the doorstep of my machinist friend, Graham Jones in Brooklyn. He rebuilt part of the boat trailer last year and I wanted to have him tell me if the rotational play in the propeller was a sign of lower-unit gear wear (it wasn’t). While the motor was there I had the ‘brilliant’ idea to have him link in a remote throttle and gear shift. I don’t know the outcome of all this yet, but I fear for the declining health of the elderly motor. The lower housing split out one winter…best guess is that water got trapped down there by blocked intake screens and the winter freeze expanded it to break out the aluminum housing. It didn’t affect the oil reservoir and I filled the crack with thickened Epoxy, which seemed to fix it…and it has worked fine for two seasons.

My big fear is loss of reliability…true, the motor has always started by the third pull and has never given the slightest evidence of coming trouble, but in the background of my mind still hovers the fear of complete and sudden failure, leaving me to run the boat entirely by sail. Admittedly sail-alone is a very seamanly thing to do, but experience has shown me situations where the wind and tide are against you and there is little room to tack…moments to swallow pride and turn on the ‘iron sail’ as I think it is called. Efforts to come aside the wharf or pick up a mooring by sail alone have not been pretty to see, especially single-handed.

So just for information purposes I began a search on EBay for a replacement motor. New ones (extra long shaft, 4-stroke, 9.9) cost upwards of $2500, so I looked to see if old ones like mine show up for sale. I found a few currently bid at a few hundred dollars, but I have developed this doubt about prices on EBay–any time I have found an attractive price for something I want and placed a bid, the price seems to have kept on mysteriously and immediately jumping up. Either there is a concealed reserve bid mechanism or someone else has an automatic price raising tool until the price gets to a limit they have set; after all, why bid higher than necessary to get the object? All I know is the price keeps on being just above my bid  to the point where I don’t want to pay the price of finding out how high it would go; at the end the bid stops a price that is higher than retail list price. Every time a price looks too good to be true, it is. All that is to say there is an illusion of low-priced used motors out there, but I cannot attest to the reality.

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Artisans on Main Street

I have put in my first day ‘demonstrating’ at the Artisans Gallery in Montague (on Main Street, of course…next to the Post Office). The effort is to have an artistic presence in Montague and the planning has been going on for many months. There are three venues all within a block: the gallery which has mostly paintings and photography; the Boutique, which I believe will have mostly jewelry (but I’m not sure since it hasn’t opened yet); and the Studio, which is to demonstrate the ‘messier’ forms of art such as sculpture, jewelry making, and woodwork.

Be that as it may, I signed up a good number of weeks ago to be in the Gallery on Monday and Thursday mornings to help out providing manpower to sell stuff and keep an eye on things during open hours…at least that was what I thought I would be doing. Closer to time I find out that the ‘artisans’ are not burdened with something that mundane but are to spend their time being creative in an artistic sense. What on earth could I do that would allow observation by visitors? Wood Islands Prints entails lots of computer work: book design and layout for the publishing side and photo manipulation for the matted print and postcard side. A small computer screen is not particularly accessible to casual passers by.

Then it struck me…I could cut mats and assemble more matted prints. Since the matted prints–especially the large ones–long ago proved they don’t sell well in gift shops, I have let the stock dwindle. If they can actually sell well when surrounded by paintings that are asking up to 200 times the cost of one of my prints, I certainly want to be there with enough stock!

So I sat for almost 6 hours (I agreed to put my time in one full block to fill in where more needed) cutting mats and pairing them up with the prints I mentioned in an earlier blog. Between wandering around and chatting with the several visitors–Tom Rath stopped by to check on his new KittenCat book and Gary Gray, the keeper of the Library Writers Guild books, stopped by–I didn’t apply myself to the task full time. Still I did complete about 16 8x10s and engaged some of the folks in deciding which mat colour went best with specific pictures.

Next time I will come better prepared with snacks and drink. If the production catches up I can always set a table with my back to the room and with my computer oriented so fokks can see it more readily and do photo manipulation. As my wife can attest, talking is something I do quite readily, so I can expound on photo or publishing techniques. The one need I have identified is for a ‘tent sign’ identifying what I am doing and inviting questions. While I sincerely enjoy answering questions, I must seem intimidating (or else no one is interested)…the sarcastic side of me compares the sign as the labels they put in front of the cages at the zoo identifying the type of animal behind the bars…‘here you see the gray-bearded mat cutter…you can identify it by the tools it uses and the presence of the thick coloured cardboard material lying around.’

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How to do a children’s book?

I am preparing for laying out a children’s book with full-page illustrations. My investigation of Framemaker does not seem to offer much guidance. I have a feeling the best route to take is to use Photoshop with the text tool and layer the text right over the illustration and then paste the entire picture on the page. It rules out any later editing, but the book text could first be prepared in WORD with all of its editing features and then have the individual text pages copied into the text tool in Photoshop. While it seems the file might be quite large, since the printer, Lightning Source, requires all art to be 300 dpi, there is nothing lost haveing the text as part of the picture. Then the Framemaker or Acrobat software has no actual text to process at all…just page after page of pictures.

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Black’s prints

A quick update: ordered on the 9th and shipment notification on the 11th! I think it is 3-5 days to arrive by Purolator Courier, but it may be less. Stay tuned.

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Books and Sailing Dreams

The Dream

Reading can be dangerous! The more I read of nautical achievements (and most mariners seem to write books to pay their way around the world), the more I wanted to try it myself. Usually such cruising involves going between continents—off to Europe from the east coast or across to Hawaii from the west coast, for example. Even beyond that are the round-the-world circumnavigations and the single-handed trips that are the subject of many books. I recommend Tinkerbelle, an account of a single-handed trip to England from Massachusetts in a 13’ sailboat, or Slocum’s classic, Sailing Alone Around the World. I recently encountered a blog on the web posted by a 16-year-old girl sailing single-handed around the world from Australia in a 26’ pink sailboat.

I could imagine sailing around PEI or on down to the south shoreof Nova Scotia. Why not sail on down to visit my brother near Plymouth, Massachusetts? It should not be difficult to sail to Newfoundland or even up the coast of Labrador. After that, why not go on down to Bermuda or the Bahamas? It brings me to mind of Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings,

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.[1]

My “door” is the WoodIslands harbour, about two miles from our house. Just think! With the right preparations, I could sail to any coast in the world from there. With a sailboat, the fuel costs would be minimal. About then I began to see the need to divide my nautical travel and boat recommendation books into categories:

  • Tiny racing boats (tip them over and right them by yourself)
  • Daysailing (out and back to the same place within a few hours)
  • Weekending (short trip with one or two overnights)
  • Coastal cruising (for perhaps a week or two)
  • Bluewater cruising (far away from land)
  • Circumnavigation (around the world in a year or two)

When you dream, dream big! Then learn Wisdom and appreciate your limitations. Continue reading “Books and Sailing Dreams”

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Colour book looks good!

Just this afternoon I got to see the proof of Tom Rath’s new book. The initial impression is good, although in the 8 1/2″ x 11″ size with few pages makes it feel like an expensive magazine. The cover that was so much trouble looks fine (except I went back one too many iterations when re-doing the background colour to fit inside the bleed boundaries and missed a text re-arrangement.

I see that I should have put more white space in the interior. While the poem text doesn’t run off the page, using a very dark font and going out to fairly narrow margins makes it seem a bit too packed. A smaller font size and wider margins would have been better.

The positive bit about the colour interior is that the colors seem nice and bright. I had purposely increased the saturation to avoid the washed-out look of a sample book, but Tom R had said the pictures looked ‘a bit flat.’ I now understand that he meant with non-glossy paper the pictures do not look like in a glossy magazine.

Anyway, Tom is an extremely reasonable client and is in a hurry to have books to sell, so we went ahead and ordered without changes (not all clients are that reasonable and some have quite impossible expectations).

Tom R showed me the proof at the writers guild meeting, and the presentation was about the Espresso Book Machine at the University of Prince Edward Island. It was fascinating to hear him quietly bemoan the amount of support time he spends with authors to get the manuscripts into a printable file format. I walked away with a sense of restored confidence that Wood Islands Prints is providing a valuable service interfacing authors to a printer.