GLOVING IT!

You never know when a good idea for the boat is going to strike you. A few weeks ago I'm on a twelve foot ladder in TV studio thinking about Mike Rowe and his Dirty Jobs television show. I'm pulling out audio and video cables some of which have been lying in a cable tray for over fifty years. I think Mike Rowe would agree it's a dirty job or at the very least a dusty one. It's part of a project to convert the facility to High Definition TV production. Before starting this task I went to the Engineering stockroom and got me a pair of gloves for this grimy endeavor. As I was pulling cables I looked at the gloves and realize these gloves would be very useful on board the boat.

They are just basic cotton gloves but, have palms coated with a flexible red latex rubber compound. The coating grips the slippery cables and is waterproof making it perfect on board a boat for gripping wet anchor line or chain even a halyard. Some of the pluses of these gloves:

1) Good grip in both wet and dry conditions

2) The cotton back breathes and drys quickly making them good in warm conditions

I do have a pair of leather palmed GILL gloves that I sometimes use on board. But, these gloves would be better and much cheaper to use for those slimy, dirty tasks on board. In fact Gill sells a similar pair of gloves with their name on them for $5.95 a pair.

But, you can pick up 10 pairs of similar gloves for $8.99 here  without the Gill name stamped on them. You do the math. I think it would be good to carry several pairs of these latex palmed gloves on board to hand out to crew to protect their hands or to have as spares. I wish I had these gloves on board when I took BIANKA up the Erie and Oswego canals on a trip to Canada in 2002. At that time I used plain cotton gloves for grabbing on to the slimy lines hanging down inside the locks. These latex palm coated gloves would have been much better suited for the slimy task of holding the boat securely in position. They would also come in handy for painting and varnishing jobs, As an added plus the red/orange color of the latex palms could be helpful in signaling in emergency or man overboard situations because of their high visibility.

BLOG UPDATE:

So I was checking into Reid Stowe's 1000 DAYS AT SEA website and lo and behold there's Stowe using the exact same gloves I've been mentioning above as he goes over the side to clean the bottom of the Schooner Anne on Day 75 of his adventure.