Pump-out Week, March 9 to 13
Forty-seven vessels through the boatyard pumpout in five days. Two failed Y-valves. One tide we did not beat. The harbormaster's office logged 1,940 gallons total — an off-season record.
Department · Daybook
From the shop calendar
p. 41The Daybook is written week by week by the apprentice, in the present tense, from the shop calendar and the morning meeting. Four entries below from the quarter ending May 2026.
February cold snap, burst freshwater tank
Emergency haul-out of a 1971 Cal 39 whose 30-gallon polyethylene freshwater tank had split overnight along a baffle seam after three consecutive nights of 19°F. The owner had not winterized. The boat had taken on six inches of fresh water at the cabin sole before the bilge alarm.
Opening of haul-out season
The first week of the spring haul-out schedule. Six boats on the Port's Travelift list: F/V Cape Fox on Tuesday, S/V Lavandula on Thursday (deferred to March), the Hinckley B40 Orcas Lullaby on Friday. Jens's standing safety brief delivered three times to apprentices from three different yards.
A holding-tank hose permeation case
A 1991 Tartan 37 whose owner had finally accepted, after three seasons of complaint, that the smell in her cabin was not coming from the head but from the seven-year-old sanitation hose she had never replaced. The wet-rag test confirmed permeation along the entire run. Nine feet of Trident 101 went in over two days.
Older entries are bound in the back issues
The Daybook started in Vol. II No. 1 (May 2022) as a single page at the back of the issue, written by the editor. By Vol. III No. 2 the page had grown to two; by Vol. IV No. 1, to four. The current four-entry format was set in Vol. IV No. 4 (December 2024), when Lucia took over the writing and the apprentice's eye for the small detail started showing up in the prose. The editor has not written a Daybook entry since.
The Daybook is what the journal would be if it were honest about being a working shop's logbook rather than a journal of record. We left it in because the subscribers ask for it. We also left it in because, on re-reading, the Daybook entries from 2022 forward are the most accurate record we have of what the season-to-season character of the shop's work actually looks like. The features can be reorganized in the editor's mind; the Daybook cannot. The Daybook is, in that sense, the truth-teller.
To submit a Daybook idea: there is no submission process. The Daybook is the apprentice's column. The four entries each issue are chosen from the week-by-week notes Lucia keeps on the chart-table whiteboard. If you call the shop and describe a refit problem we have not seen, Lucia might mention it to the editor and it might end up in the Daybook two issues later. Or not. The column is hers.