Lower Ramu Bible Translation Ministry

Stap Isi resting on its mooring again.

On Monday I re-installed the prop shaft and reconnected all the bits and pieces.   Everything went back together about as easily as it had come out.  Then I sanded the areas that had been patched and gave those areas a coat of bottom paint.  The next day I and two of the PBT workmen gave the bottom a final coat of paint and lastly we let the rudder down so that we could give the rudder shaft a nice coat of grease.  At last, one week after we hauled out, Stap Isi was ready for the water.

Unfortunately the water was not ready for Stap Isi.  By the time everything was done on Tuesday the tide had gone out and rather than take the chance of not having enough water to launch, we decided to wait until Wednesday morning when tide was scheduled to be much higher.

Wednesday I got to the boat and clambered aboard.  The manager said that going down was much easier and faster than going up – that they just lowered the boat into the water and eventually all the blocks holding it up would just float free.  And that is exactly how it went.  The slip operator reversed the drum holding the spool of 1 inch wire and the cart on which the boat sat slid freely into the water.  Eventually I heard the sound of large blocks of timber bumping along the side and we were once again floating.  A couple of guys swam out and herded the blocks to shore, I fired up the engine, and motored gently back over to our mooring.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to finally have been able to make these repairs.  For awhile it looked like we were going to just end up with a derelict boat, one that we could live on but not much else.  But now, as an answer to many prayers, we have a functional sail boat, ready to take us back out to the Ramu or anywhere else we might need to go.

Yesterday was the big day, the day I had been dreading; the day I was going to at least attempt to remove the prop shaft and cutlass bearing from Stap Isi.  And as it turned out it was just about the easiest repair I had ever made on the boat.

What caused  my dread was the vision I had of couplings, bearings, and fittings, all sitting in and around salt water, corroding and fusing and generally becoming one with each other.  And then after five years, ten years, who knows how many years of such bonding, here I come with a mallet to take it all apart again.  All I could envision was me wailing away at various fittings while they cracked, shattered, deformed, and otherwise became completely unusable.

So with fear and trembling I arrived at Stap Isi at 7 AM on Friday, utterly prepared for the worst.  First order of business was to remove the front coupling from the drive shaft that connects the shaft to the transmission.  I remembered how difficult it was to pound the coupling on in the first place back in 2004.   Reversing the process was not going to be a picnic.  But nothing ventured …  I picked up the mallet and gave the coupling a solid rap.  What was that?  Did it actually move?  I rapped it again – it definitely moved that time.  About four more raps and the coupling popped off and fell into the swill in the bilge.  Ok, I can deal with bilge swill.

Next I removed a bearing from the middle of the shaft.  Came right off, and of course dropped into the bilge swill.  By now I was getting quite good at de-swilling the parts.  I went out to where the shaft emerges from the boat, took hold of it and gently pulled.  Out it slid.  Part one completed in about 30 minutes.

Now for the hard part.  I had to somehow get the cutlass bearing out of the tube in which it was fit.  I had read on the internet how various people got their bearings out.  Many of them involved constructing a home-made bearing puller out of esoteric parts available at any local hardware store in the states but completely unheard of here.  Some DIY boaters described having to carefully cut the bearing out with a hack saw.  Oh this was going to be fun.

Returning to the cabin of the boat I ran a long pipe down the tube until I encountered the inner end of the bearing.  Then taking up my trusty mallet I gave the pipe a sound rap.  Hmmm, that felt like something moved.  It could not possibly be this easy.  I rapped the pipe several more times and it definitely felt like the bearing was moving.  There was a small crowd of Papua New Guineans sitting around under a tree outside, no doubt hoping I would do something very entertaining.  I asked them if the bearing was coming out and they responded that it was.  Yee Haw.  Now I was inspired.  About six more solid raps with the mallet and I heard the lovely angelic music of a bearing hitting concrete.  The job was done.  And the whole thing beginning to end took only about an hour and a half.

This morning I returned to the boat with the new bearing.  Being the eternal pessimist I was concerned about how hard it would be to fit the new bearing back in the tube.  To tilt the odds a bit I had left the bearing in the freezer all night to shrink it a bit.  This morning I filled a cooler with ice and put the bearing in it, went to the boat, cleaned out the tube and put a thin layer of grease in the tube.  Then I took the icy cold bearing, said a prayer, and tried to insert it into the tube.  It went easily with almost not pressure required, then as the bearing warmed up it expanded and within a few minutes was fitted beautifully in the tube waiting for the return of the prop shaft.

Not all boat repairs go this easily. OK, in reality, no boat repairs go this easily.    From now on I think that we are on the downhill slide as far as getting Stap Isi repaired.  There is still some epoxy-ing and fairing to do as well as finishing the bottom paint.  But I think that we should be able to refloat the boat some time middle of next week.

Thought it might be interesting to make a regular post on the progress of repairing Stap Isi.  Right now, since it is costing us about $US 20 a day to have the boat in the slipway, I am pretty much fully engaged in getting these repairs done as quickly as possible.

This morning I picked up a couple of the PBT workmen and we got over to the slip at about 8:30 AM.  There were two workers from the slipway waiting for us so I handed out a bunch of sandpaper and we all got to work sanding the hull.  Since I had just scrapped off the hull a few days before it was really in pretty good shape.  But there was still quite a bit of residue from barnacles and mollusks to be removed. 

Areas where I had to grind off the blisters. We painted around these areas until I can get them filled.

One of the problems with fibreglass boats is that water can get under the outer layer (something called gel coat) and make blisters.  There were several places on the keep and rudder and a few on the hull itself where I found those blisters.  So while the guys were sanding, I took a hand grinder and ground out the gel coat and fiberglass until all the material over the water, and the water itself, was removed.  Tomorrow I will fill those areas with epoxy. 

By lunch time we had finished the sanding and were ready for the first coat of paint.  I wanted to get the painting done so that we could reposition some of the blocks that were holding the boat in place.  As it is now, there is no way to get the prop shaft out because there are some blocks in the way.  My idea was to get a coat of paint on Wednesday and one on Thursday morning, and then Thursday afternoon when it had dried we will reposition the blocks.

After lunch we brought out the bottom paint, rollers, and brushes.  The bottom paint that we use has a high concentration of copper.  It is the copper that keeps the critters at bay.   With two guys using rollers and two using brushes it took only about an hour to put on the first coat.   We left bare the areas I had ground off until I could get those areas filled with epoxy.

The bow with its nice new paint job.

By 2:30 PM the boat was actually looking nice, at least below the water line.  The shiny red bottom paint contrasted with the blue topside paint and made for a good looking boat.  About the time we were getting ready to leave, the manager of the slipway ambled over and looked at the new paint.  Now just to bring you up to speed, I had told him on Tuesday that I intended to put a coat of bottom paint on before we finished work on Wednesday.  Then this morning while we were sanding I told him again that we were going to put the first coat on today, the second on Thursday, then we would move the blocks, and I would have all of Easter weekend to work on the bearing.  He said fine.

But this afternoon as he was looking at the new paint he said, “In this climate we have to get the boats back in the water within 48 hours of putting on the bottom paint or it all bubbles off in the heat.”  I was flabbergasted.  I had told him at least twice and maybe more of our plans and my time schedule.  It was going to be at least a week before we would be ready to put the boat back in the water.  But he waited until the paint was on before mentioning the problem with the heat.  Anyone who has worked with Melanesians knows the feeling.  For some reason it is indelicate to mention potential problems before action is taken.  But it is perfectly OK to bring them up after the die has been cast, so to speak.

The newly painted stern.

Later I checked the specs for this paint and it showed that I had a month to get the boat back into the water after painting.  I felt better after that but I suppose we will have to wait and see who is right, the manufacturers or the slipway manager.

Otherwise, I feel good about the progress that we have been making.  If I can get the prop shaft out and the cutlass bearing changed before Tuesday, we should have the boat back in the water by Wednesday.  Pray for our progress if you will.

Back in September 2006 when we sailed into Madang harbor one of the first orders of business on our agenda was to get the boat hauled out of the water for some repairs.  The bottom paint needed refreshing and we needed to replace the cutlass bearing (where the prop shaft emerges from the back of the hull.)   There is a small government-run slipway in Madang where small boats can be hauled out so I approached the manager to arrange to schedule Stap Isi into the slip.  Thus began a two and a half year wait.

It seemed that there was always a boat in the slip and often they were in there for months at a time doing major repairs.  Every month or so I checked in with the manager and was told to check back in another month or so.  I would check back and often would find a different boat in the slip starting in an a lengthy repair.  And so it went.  In the meantime the bottom was getting worse and the cutlass bearing was becoming more critical.

Coming into the slipway

Last Saturday I took the boat out to a nearby anchorage to scrape the critters off the bottom and check the bearing.  The bottom paint was almost gone and I found that the cutlass bearing had completely failed.  Stap Isi was not going to be going anywhere until I could at the least get the bearing fixed.  Then on Monday I happened to drive by the slipway and found it completely empty.  I went in and found the manager and asked if I could put our boat in.  He said yes, be there Tuesday morning at 9:00.  What a relief to finally get a chance to make our repairs.

Tuesday at 9 AM found me doing small circles outside the entrance to the slipway, waiting for the workers to complete their preparations.  A slipway is a small rail system with side braces.  The car is rolled down rail tracks into the water, the boat is driven into position, and the workers use timbers and the side braces to brace the boat in place, and then the car is pulled back out of the water with cables.  It is somewhat low-tech but it works very nicely.

Preparing the bracing.

When the car had been rolled into the water, I drove Stap Isi slowly into place.  Then donning dive masks the men worked for about two hours in the water building up braces using heavy blocks of timber.  Once they were satisfied that Stap Isi was not going to topple over, they signalled to the winch operator to start pulling the car back out of the water.  It was a slow process with lots of stops to check the bracing, but by 11 AM we were out and ready to go.

The first thing to do was to use a pressure washer to wash down the hull.  Then we scapped off any remaining barncles with paint scrappers.  I removed the prop and started the process of taking out the cutlass bearing while the other men worked on cleaning the hull.  Today we will give the hull a light sanding and hopefully by this afternoon will be able to start putting on the first coat of paint.  We will paint everywhere we can and then the timbers will have to be moved so that we can paint under them.  If all goes well we should have the painting done and the bearing replaced in about a week.  Then we will reverse the process and slowly lower Stap Isi back into the water.  With the new paint we should not have to worry about barnacles for a couple more years.

Stap Isi High and Dry

With all that bracing, Stap Isi is not going anywhere.

Power Washing the Hull.

In the olden days of Bible Translation, development of a working orthography (aka alphabet) for an unwritten language was a long and drawn out process.  Having elicited several hundred words, the translator/linguist would do a phonological analysis, looking for how the different sounds were used and distributed in the language.  On the basis of this analysis a list of phonemes (the building blocks of the sound system) was developed and then symbols were assigned to each phoneme.   The resulting alphabet was then tested and refined and tested again.  The entire process could and often did take months to complete.

When we started work among the Lower Ramu language groups back in 2002 we were introduced to a new method for developing alphabets.   This new method relied more on input from the speakers of the language and less on the linguistic expertise of the expat translator.   Using this method, alphabets could be developed for many languages during the course of a two-week long Alphabet Design Workshop.  Here is how it worked in the Marangis language group where we conducted an alphabet design workshop in 2003.

Writing a story in their language for the first time.

The first day of the workshop saw about a dozen men and women ready to work on an alphabet for their previously unwritten language.   That morning we gave them the assignment that each of them would write a short story, using their knowledge of the english alphabet, in the Marangis language.  If there were sounds that they did not know how to write they were just supposed to make up a temporary symbol, or leave a blank.  We would work on finding a way to write it later.  At first they were a bit intimidated by the idea but most of the participants soon got into the flow of the assignment.

Once the stories were completed, each writer read their story out loud to the group.  When they had all read their stories the group selected one to put on the blackboard.  The author carefully wrote his story on the board and then the fun began.

At the top of the blackboard we listed each letter that had been used in the story, in roughly the same order as the english alphabet.   Then starting with the first letter on the list, we asked the participants to give us three words which start with that sound, three words with the sound in the middle, and three words ending in that sound.  These words were listed on a second blackboard.  This is actually harder than it sounds and it was often a bit of a struggle to find nine words for each sound.  And some sounds simply do not occur in all positions in a word.

Working on the Alphabet Book.

As we wrote out the words, occasionally a new sound would be found that had not occured in the original story.  Those sounds would be added to the alphabet on the top of the blackboard.    As the workshop went on the list of words and sounds grew until by the end of the third day we had covered all the sounds so the participants’ satisfaction.  Now it was time to decide how to write those sounds. 

Much of this was fairly straight forward.  Since english is the national language of Papua New Guinea, we use the english alphabet as the basis for the alphabets we develop for the vernacular languages.  And many of the sounds in the vernacular correspond nicely with the sounds in english.  So, for example, we write the “s” sound as s and the “t” sound as t.   But what about sounds that do not have a corresponding english sound?

In this case we try to find an letter in the english aphabet that is somewhat close to the sound in the vernacular.  Or if there is simply no good correspondence we might use what we call a special character.  A common special character in PNG languages is the barred i.  This is an i with a cross through it and it represents a central vowel that does not exist in english.

There is often a lot of discussion as the participants work to decide how to write their language.  Our role is to offer alternatives, show what other language groups have done with similar sounds, and help guide the discussion.  Since it is their languages it is ultimately their decision how to write it.

When they had made decisions for how to write all the sounds, we asked them to go back and re-write their original stories using the new alphabet.  These stories were published in an Alphabet Book for the language.  This book included a list of the sounds of the language and the corresponding letters and also all the stories that were written in the course.  This was the first book ever published in the Marangis language.

Charles reads a story in his own language for the first time.

Five years later, the Marangis people have published a large number of books in their language and have used this alphabet extensively.  And so far we have found no additional sounds and there have been no problems with the alphabet that they developed.  While this approach does not work with every language, in the case of the Marangis people it allowed them to quickly develop an alphabet and start writing in their own language.