The Plastic Classic Forum, your free and in-depth resource for information on re/building classic sailboats. ... Be sure to visit / join our sister site at sailFar.net! ... And don't forget to check out Atom's Virtual Home Port! ...
I thought you guys would like the note I uncovered when I removed a "charlie noble" from the cabin top that had been used for an on-demand water heater.
On the bronze fitting it's self is written:
"Your Dame American. This boat is very bad built. You ("are" crossed out) have been falt (which I think they must have meant "told"). HA.M"
I had a good long laugh about it - 30 years later the only problem with the construction of the boat I could find was it being over built. I'm assuming they got into the aquavit a bit early one day and he let me have it - probably thinking no-one would ever find his note. The hole in the cabin top was through a plywood insert, and the plywood looked like it did the day it was cut.
When I was crewing on a submarine support ship stationed out of Oslo, I had the chance to hear a tale of a woman who used to haunt the docks and boat yards of Sweden. My chief at the time was a guy by the name of Chuck Nobel. He was drunk when he told me this story but he always lied when he was sober so I guess I should believe him. It seems that this American dame would lure unsuspecting swedes to their tragic ruin with hopeful stories of Arizona lake sailing and Florida sunsets, that kind of stuff. She would tempt them with tastes of the early micro brew beers from San Francisco and Boston and regale them with the exploits of her best friends, Porter and Hefeweisen. She would tell them if they built a boat for her, she would sail off with them and together they would spend her vast fortune on sunscreen, high tech ropes, and adult personal hygiene products. In the end she would always deny the ship builders their pay for petty concerns about quality and workmanship. Sending fax after fax of complaints till eventually she sent several freelance layup boys completely bonkers. Each of the 14 boats she commissioned were eventually towed to sea and burned. Total losses and smelly too. Tough times, eh? It seems that this HA M. writer fellow has met this woman. You are lucky Noah, your boat didn't get towed to sea and burned. It would have smelled bad. Must be your captain like name...but then again maybe I am mistaken, this story could be from a book I had thought about reading but never got around to. Anyway........
I imagine this post has been mildly tangent or at least distantly convergent to the original idea that was under discussion, what ever that was.
"Around 1850 A.D., a British merchant service captain, Charles Noble, upon discovering that the stack of his ship's galley was made of copper, ordered that it be kept bright. Then onwards, the ship's crew then started referring to the galley smokestack as the "Charlie Noble"
In a pathetic attempt to make my spewing relevant I made up the fact that I was familiar with Sweden. I was in the Navy SeaBees and stationed in Guam and Sicily. So my foreign language skills include several useful construction expletives in Italian, Tagalog, and Chamoro, but alas no Swedish. I was trying my hand at the Tall Tale style.
