Hornblower Hornblower me gotta go

author Cimino
published 20250213
repurposed 20250818

Louie Louie, me gotta go
Louie Louie, me gotta go
Richard Berry Jr. , 1955

One Decade on She Gotta Go: Her builders having sold 590 Mahurangi West Road to a considerably younger and more industrious couple, new digs were urgently sought for the Hornblower. In a perfect world, she’d have been renovated and restored as a community project, with the proceeds going towards establishing, for example, a capacious community workshop, handy to the beloved Mahurangi West Hall. image Cimino Cole

She was built for the elder, horn-playing son. Their mother, as a school­girl, rowed herself and her younger brother across and along the Mahakipawaof Pelorus Sound, Marlborough Sounds Arm and back, school-daily—her  mother shadowing her from the opposite shore. Michael Thorne’s diminutive, flat-bottomed Hornblower  was designed to venture no farther than the Pūhoi showgrounds, from her half-tide Huawai Bay mooring, and then  only in settled weather. Before commissioning his craft, Thorne had hired a variety of yachts, both power and sail, before confirming his suspicion that an ultra-shallow-draft oyster-punt-derived craft was his cup of tea.

Abruptly out-of-work oyster-farming brothers Cimino and his family’s pre-war first born had taken to building flat-bottomed boats during the mid-1970s Crassostrea gigas crisis. Their first such craft, the four-and-half-sheet Tigger , was built for Thorne’s Mahurangi College teaching colleague and drinking companion. Although missing construction-time and budgetary targets by a mile, she was an unmitigated success—the family’s gypsy-caravan estuarine idyll for golden years of serial school holidays, and with sleeping room for each child to invite a friend. At a subsequent launching, of the Charlie Chan, by-then-marketing-manager Thorne perceptively and astutely pitched:

Cimino, I know you are only building boats until you can afford to build your own, but if you build one for me next, you can use mine whenever I’m not.

Including in the hands of her builder, for her first two decades, the Hornblower —rivalled, earlier, only the Tigger —was the best-used pleasure craft in the Mahurangi Harbour. Powered by her distinctive, dulcet-toned single-cylinder marinized Chinese-walking-tractor engine, she ranged from her half-tide Huawai Bay mooring only ever as far as Warkworth—the ultimate way to do the Christmas shopping, with frequent tea breaks back aboard—Saddle Island for never-to-be-forgotten grand­children’s birthday parties, and to Pūhoi for its sublime annual agricultural show, at any and every state of the tide.

Publishing Adviser, Regatta Commentator, Musician, and Hornblower  Owner: With historian Beverly Simmons vouching for its authenticity and print executive Michael Thorne identifying an economic route to its printing, the circa 1993 annual general meeting of the then Friends of the Mahurangi was given the confidence to commit to publish meat scientist Dr Ronald Locker’s meaty, non-technical magnum opus, Jade River: A History of the Mahurangi. image Mahurangi Magazine

Designed principally form-follows-function—as opposed to, character-boat—the Hornblower, nonetheless, exuded timelessness. Fresh out of her Huawai Bay stocks, paint still hardening and epoxy resin still curing, berthed resplendent during her inaugural top-of-tide visit to Mahurangi Harbour’s tidehead townwhich, in any self-respecting, post-colonial world should usefully and proudly bear the name Mahurangi, in vast preference to “Warkworth”. Mahurangi, after all, is what its post office was originally named, a small boy called back to his barely trailing family:

Look at this neat old boat!

While delightful in many respects—from her John Cole-drafted trail boards to her duck-boarded transom, the inexperience of her designer–builder left the Hornblower  well short of best-of-class status, much less, masterpiece. For starters, she sat deeper in the water than her siblings, largely the result of a rushed redesign when the owner, anticipating relocating from city to harbour, opted for a smaller, dayboat, rather than the aquatic bachNew Zealand vernacular for the modest vacation cabin then on the drawing board. Sat deeper meant less stability, rendering the auxiliary spritsail suitable for deployment only in a zephyr, leading to the rig being abandoned, after years of free-loading. Also, the self-draining deck and was only mar­gin­ally so, meaning that with any sort of load the bungs needed to be hastily deployed, putting her in open-boat mode and at risk of sudden destabilisation, was green water to ever overtop her freeboard.

Fortunately, the remedy to the Hornblower ’s most grievous design defect—her deck’smore correctly: welldeck’s vulnerability to free-surface-effect-induced loss of stability—would instantly become her most attractive feature: generous side decks—the result of giving her buoyant bulwarks. A further hazard would also be eliminated: Slab-sided flat-bottomed craft—famously when beam on and boarding or landing personnel at shelving beaches in a slight swell—can all-too-easily deliver a crippling crush injury to the incautiously positioned foot, as the full tonnage of the craft crumps onto firm sand. Gently radiused chines would be the perfect solution, particularly if they were to be fashioned from forgivingly deformable material.

Ukrainian National Heronautics: Apparently lacking an aircraft sufficiently powerful to tow it, Ukrainian national hero Dr Oleg Antonov had his otherwise smoothly-gliding tank cancelled—a pity perhaps that the 52-kW engine of the T-60 scout-tank component wasn’t deployed to assist the towing aircraft and/or extend the apparition’s glide range. Eighty years on, given the limited modern role for tanks beyond Russia’s costly, lumbering un-militarily-provoked, depravedly-indifferent, 2022 invasion of Ukraine, tanks themselves  should finally be consigned to military history, along with the military gliders before them, and for the same reason—all too easy to take down, and with weaponry a fraction the price. drawings Dr Péter Kaboldy
[To be relocated to barely begun chapter 15—Work like Helen b Happy —once adequate Charlie Chan image available.]

Contribution to anthropogenic global warming of the diesel burned by the Hornblower ’s 10-hp Dongfeng engine, compared to the contemporaneous motorhome would have been laughably derisory, given the few nautical miles amassed, even before her protracted sojourn ashore. That notwith­stand­ing, if she ranged as modestly as she did before her retirement, she could readily be battery powered by, for example, economic, fully recyclable agm batteries. Such a conversion would be a first, driving via the elegantly simple reefing-propeller-shaft system that practically designed itself for use in the oyster-punt inboard conversion circa 1976 that created the working oyster barge Brain of Pooh —long since use-shortened to plain “Pooh”.

With its builderthis writer terrorised into doing an Odysseus and seeking with urgency to relocate to where he might be mistaken for a snivelling winnowing-shovel-carrying Mainlander, hundreds of river kilometres from the coast, the Hornblower  herself, gotta go. During the decade she sat patiently beside Mahurangi West Road, above Ōpahi, the Hornblower  attracted a steady stream of admirers, all politely turned away on account of her strong sentimental value to those nurturing the lifelong memories made aboard. But built from high-grade, silicon-bronze fastened and epoxy glued tanalised construction ply, as decrepit as the Hornblower  undeniably appeared, she was still as solid as the proverbial… Speaking of toilet facilities, a distinct advantage of deep-sixing the Dongfeng, would’ve been, that a discrete but spacious, veritable changing room could have been created, civilising the vessel—particularly when in picnic-boat mode—beyond all expectation.

While the Hornblower ’s renovation might have made a sublime swansong for Cimino—even as a garden folly—logisticallyaside from any other practicality, proximity to navigable waterway, salt or fresh it would have made for a nightmare. Meanwhile, the upsides of being terrorised into relocating to “somewhere in the South Island” were almost embarrassingly positive, not least of which having time to devote to writing. Cimino had  hoped he and Sarah might buck the apparent inevitability of folk needing to forsake coastalmore universally: coastal/rural idylls for proximity to urban services. Switzerland, however, is one of the few countries with the courage and humanity to routinely service rural locations with public transport—with rail even. Relocation, to a private, parklike, edge-of-town setting—which none who viewed it could resist describing it as other than lovely —cried out to be justified, by every effort being devoted to the Light the Fuse moonshot, as vexing as Cimino found the challenge of exciting his peers to their unique involvement in civil­i­sa­tion’s greatest story to date. In selecting this chapter’s epigraph—in this leading-horses project plagued by a riptide of mis- and disinformation—Cimino didn’t initially appreciate the opportunity to include curious, 30-years-pre-internetAs measured between 1964 FBI investigation, and the beginning of popular internet use demarcated by Netscape’s founding, 1994, Louie Louie  misinformation sidebar, whereby the Kingsmen were in­ves­ti­gated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That a combination of ill-recorded, dental-brace-impeded last-minute-addedthe recording had been set up for a purely instrumental number lead vocals, would result in legions of teenagers circulating sheets of the supposed actual, highly pornographic, lyrics is testimony to how readily the human mind can cause and be caused to be quagmired—with the most ludicrous/tragiludicrouscoined 202508180738, initially spelled TRAGE… but judged pronunciation would prove more problematic of consequences.

Several of the Hornblower ’s longtime and more recent admirers did seriously consider being her new master-and-commander. However, with dire threats made against her hull and that of her designer-and-builder, and—as her original owner put it—she having already served her anticipated working life, discretion prevailed and her remains were quietly interred, beside the heavenly harbour for which she was so lovingly conceived. As adored as she was, however, as close to perfection as she might have been with buoyant bulwarks running forward as wide, walk-around side decks, Cimino was left aware that she lacked the floating-conversation-pit magic of her predecessor, Charlie Chan. A modified Philip Bolger Cynthia J , the diminutive Chan was a simplified version of the Cape Cod catboat, of which the New Zealand equivalent is the mullet boat. Charlie Chan ’s commodious cockpit, as with those famously of her American brethren, was a revelation to all her experienced her—she was almost all cockpit, the cuddy subsequently having been sacrificed and only sufficient foredeck retained to brace the stupendously strong-but-springy, stumpy unstayed tānekaha mast, just abaft the bow-post. It was the right decision for the gregarious job at which Charlie Chan  excelled, but a larger and/or longer catboat would have corrected Bolger’s cuddy-half-the-length-of-the-boat misnomer—an openly oxymoronic, open, fore-lockerbeing short and fat, with too few crew seated forward, Bolger’s crude proclivity to rely on excessive bow rocker to reduce eddy-making resulted her bumping and slapping obnoxiously—unless sailed on her ear, where she all too readily ‘trapped’ crew under her high, sheltering topsides in a gust would always have been infinitely preferable, designed for crews more numerous than two. With her tiller-steering, the skipper and passengers were all readily in eye contact of each other, greatly encouraging conversation. Such was only achieved aboard the Hornblower  when the helmsman stood with her back to starboard, necessitating frequent torso-twisting—if she wasn’t to be dangerously compromised by converging vessels from that quarter.

Bent-Ear-Barkeep Connection: Richard Berry Jr. borrowed Johnny Mercer’s friendly-eared-set-em-up-Joe-barman device—renamed Louie—in his innocentonly to be serially, hilariously-horny-teenager mondegreenised, exegesis-defying, world’s-most-recorded rock song Louie Louie  standard, connecting two remarkably different masterpieces. Aside from One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)  Mercer’s lyrical genius meanders from Moon River  through I Remember You and beyond—Wikipedia lists 88. photographer William P Gottlieb

Formative to Cimino’s notions of the collaborative brainstorming called for in Light the Fuse, was a pre-The Big Lebowski  veteran paratrooper who enticed his accomplices along in his twice-round-the-clock Triumph Herald, to range around the cbd, to brainstorm most radical thinking. Left-turns caused the driver’s door to languidly open, which only after the g-forces lessoned did the driver deign to reach out and draw it back in. There was generally a vague geographic objective—such as Westhaven Marina, where an absurdly small and unsuitable double-ended motorboat was being sized up for a more than 2000-nautical-mile expedition to spring the 17 July 1973-impounded former Baltic trader, protest vessel Fri  from Moruroa.

Fundamental to the Light the Fuse  mission, Cimino believed, was a small fleet of vehicular-colloquium—vehicles conducive to discussion. Given that ice-cap-melting emissions were set to have their most graphic impact on coastlines, a successor to the Hornblower  and her instructive elder-sisterships The Brain of Pooh , Tigger , Charlie Chan , and Hawkeye , and her younger-sisterships Earwigo  and Cynthia J Warbler , Hornblower —not to mention profoundlytutor-ruddered rowing instruction and bow-steering dispelling, two-count instructive little-sisterlittle-sisters plural, if I’m honest: Humfri’s younger, twin sisters: Badger and Tuba. All three were two-sheet-plywood—in total not in length—Teal skiffs to Philip C Bolger lines, but jig-built-skiff Humfri . Such vessel, possibly self-launching, would form an indispensable vehicle for meaningful Great Mobilisation multi-metre-sea-level-rise littoral-zone-strategy brainstorming and story-telling—the aquatic counterpart to the terrestrial kerb-pitching staff car of eponymous chapter 6. As for the preposterous aerial, ultra-short-take-off-short-landing pair  pair of vehicles, they may demand an ironically, epically long, Work like Helen b Happy  chapter.

Memorability of soundtrack, but particularly its signature melody, is crucial to any Light the Fuse-style mass-movement instigating movie. Despite its mere-three-chord melody, Cimino surmised, Louie Louie  more than made up for with its arresting, ‘1-2-3 1–2 1-2-3 1–2’, 10-note rhythm—so auspiciouslytried fatefully, but seeking to also emphasise the beneficial… reinstated by the Kingsmen. Surely, he argued, in the service of saving humanity and salvaging a survivable climate, an original anthem combining sublime melody and arresting rhythm is worthy of the labours or divine out-of-the-skyBerry’s attribution for source of his Louie Louie-lyrics inspiration inspiration of some cinematic-soundtrack genius…

To be continued…

 

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