Courtesy of Capt. Michael Patterson
The Douglas-fir deck planking of the IRVING JOHNSON served well for 27 years in Los Angeles, California, and with a gentler cleaning regimen should survive for years to come.
A drive down any back road in America is likely to showcase vistas that often include gray, weathered barns—some once holding paint, now long gone, and others never touched by a painter’s brush. As these barns teeter on the brink of collapse, enterprising scavengers hover, waiting to secure and resell the weathered barn boards to the decorative-paneling market. The graying and surface roughening of barn siding is caused by ultraviolet (UV) sun rays and cyclical wetting and drying of the wood.
A similar process occurs on the decks of wooden ships to which no finish has been applied. Capt. Michael P. Patterson, director of operations for the Los Angeles Maritime Institute in San Pedro, California, recently wrote: “I am writing to ask some questions about preserving the wood decks on our tall ships, the EXY JOHNSON and the IRVING JOHNSON [see WB No. 176]. We are experiencing some delignification of the Douglas-fir decks that are approximately 27 years old. We are going to be reefing and recaulking these decks next year, but I need to be able to apply some sort of product to preserve the deck from the delignification (lots of fuzzy wood fibers coming off the deck).”