The Family Love Tool Box Top

We are working very hard trying to repair the schooner and make her seaworthy again and strong enough to live indefinitely into the future. This takes hours of nitty gritty difficult work. One might think I should save all my energies only for that which is necessary to make the boat seaworthy. But what is making a boat seaworthy? I always give the example of the dragons on the bows of the Viking boats. I am sure the men would not have thought the boats were seaworthy with out their figureheads. I feel the same way. I don’t even think about it, I have always sculpted creations for the Gods since I began building my boats at twenty years of age. I have always seen my tools as sacred and carved on them and communicated with them as if they had their own lives. Several of my tools have been with me for 40 years. They deserve to live in boxes that are treasure boxes. We love to live with treasure boxes and sit on them and open and close them. My Dad built one of my tool boxes out of wood we collected in Dominica in the 70’s. The carved turtle top has found a new home and now we are making a new top. The title of the top is Famly Love.

The tool box is made of heavy hardwood, but the new carved top is made of fairly light wood so it is easy to lift and not too dangerous to drop on fingers. The Family Love carving shows my hand with Soanya’s hand and Darshen’s reaching up between ours, all together reaching above the sea and up to the sun and the moon.

Many of the doors on the schooner are made of wood so beautiful that I appreciate them as much on both sides, so I finish and carve them on both sides. The toolboxes spend a lot of their time open, so I thought they deserved to also be carved, to make opening them all the more beautiful. The inside of the boxes are carved with floating lotuses. Their timing and magic was affirmed as we took a walk on the beach and looked behind the seawall to see the biggest and most gorgeous violet lotus flowers growing out of the canal.

We have several more carving projects around the schooner and even in the cockpit with us. Through the geometric cut outs in old purple heart wood the bamboo leaves flicker and wave in the wind. Tropical green shades shift through the day. Monkeys run through the trees and the river carries fallen trees downstream to the sea. Once on a rising tide the current carried a huge tree upstream past us. I worried that tree would land on us when it came back down stream, but we never saw it again. A huge tree snagged on our bow anchor line and it took five of us an hour to saw and break it and push it off. Then it went under the boat. We walked to the stern to watch it come up, but it never did. At slack tide I swam under the schooner to see if it snagged, but it didn’t. I wondered if it got caught in our stern anchor line. By the way, we had some pretty big barnacles on our hull, but it seems the fresh water has washed them all off and now we have a clean bottom and we have not hauled the schooner out of the water in seven years!