2009 Week 22 in Review

Still scraping bearings

This week in the Indian Grave Drainage District pumphouse, I measured the bearings for Engine One, then bounced from engine to engine lapping, scraping, lapping, scraping, lapping, scraping, and cleaning.

Lia flew out to visit and we had a real Quincy lunch with one of the pumphouse operators – a snapping turtle pulled straight out of the drainage ditch.

OTM Inc goes to Erie

Diana the Museologist went to a conference this week in Erie, Pennsylvania. The Council of American Maritime Museums is a professional group that’s been meeting for years to talk about how they’re trying to save old boats and stuff that came off of boats. This year, the themes were “Collaboration” and more importantly “How to weather the recession.”

She gave two presentations during the conference. The first was about the Lake Union Park Working Group that’s been meeting for a few years now to coordinate heritage programming at South Lake Union. Apparently, everyone in the country is really pumped up about collaboration and working together, but us Seattle folks are some of the first to really get a good idea of how to work together on a week-to-week basis. Diana said that the other people at the conference were really excited to hear about the work that we’ve been doing around here, especially the kind of teamwork that went into the Holiday Spirit event last December (back in 2008 Week 50).

Diana’s second presentation was on hauling out the Arthur Foss:

Sadly, we did that amazing project before OTM started blogging, but we’ll tell the full story soon. As a museologist, Diana wrote two huge long final reports for the haul-out (posted on Northwest Seaport’s website here, but had only twenty minutes to share it at the conference. The coordinators apparently were really interested in hearing about the “non-profit/for-profit partnership model” used during the haul-out. That basically means that Northwest Seaport, who own the Arthur, hired OTM Inc to manage the haul-out, rather than having their own volunteers and staff do it. This worked well for everyone, since NWS had experienced professional boat repair people working on the project, and OTM and the other boat repair people had a good contract on a great boat. The folks at the conference were apparently really impressed that the haul-out came out on time and under-budget – unheard of when the museum tries to negotiate with a shipyard. The “estimators” at a shipyard can smell inexperience in a project manager like sharks can smell blood in the water.

After the talks, the conference people also got to go sailing, in both smallcraft and aboard the museum’s replica brig, the Niagra. Here’s Diana and other museologists in a “dipping lugger”:

And here’s the crowd on the Niagra, a great replica of a 1913 naval brig:

One of these days, we need to send the entire OTM Inc crew to one of these conferences to show how we do it.