One of my paintings

As you no doubt have noticed, my personal Wunderkammer extends well beyond weapons and weapon-related items. Since I don't have enough weapons to fill a year's worth of blogging, I am going to expand the scope of this blog yet again, to include other things that interest me, and that contribute materially to the space and state of mind I call "Flintlock's Arsenal".

This will include things related to odd musical instruments, nautical items, items related to voodoo or other "primitive" religions, odd finds from my travels, etc...

To this end, here is one of my original paintings, acrylic on canvas:

The boat pictured is the Ringgold Brothers on the rails at the old Dorchester Industries shipyard in Dorchester, NJ. I worked on the boat for a few summers doing fisheries surveys for the Delaware Division of Fish and Wildlife. She is a converted skipjack built around 1910, stretched to abotu 65'. She was reconfigured by the state to act as both a trawler and an oyster survey boat. She was retired a few years ago in favor of a more modern stern trawler. I understand that she's still in service as an oyster boat out of Bivalve, NJ.

Being a wooden vessel, she was a cast iron (well, wooden, actually) bitch to maintain. Most of my summers were spend at the shipyard, scraping, painting, and cleaning the oily bilge while wooden shipwrights replaced critical components. Once, we took the opportunity to remove an old 250 gallon oil tank from the engine room while the shipyard had her belly open to replace the rotten shaft alley and kelson. Imagine spending the better part of a few days on your back or belly on oil-soaked wood in a space not much bigger than that found under your typical pull-out sofa bed. Now imagine hacking away at an empty metal tank and its fittings with a Sawz-All in that tiny space - it was deafening. I had to hack the tank into pieces small enough to fit through the hole in the hull, you see.

Once, we had this doofus working with us, and he was tasked to paint the wheelhouse roof. The dummy began painting at the ladder in the stern, working his way forward to the front. Obviously, the couldn't back track to the ladder until the thick marine enamel dried. We left his ass there for a while and went out for lunch.