It took about a week following the 2019 Wooden Boat Festival before I felt fully recovered from it. As our team learned in our 2018 attempt, it can be tiring to build a high-quality boat over the course of two and a half days. Yet in 2019, we took up our tools again to participate in the Edensaw Boat Building Challenge at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend.
In selecting a boat to build, a few key
factors figured in:
·
We wanted to build the
most boat we could to the highest state of completion possible within the
allotted time. Our goal wasn’t to be sure of finishing with a mediocre
boat, but stand a chance of finishing with a robust, useful, complete product.
·
We wanted a boat that
would be fun to have after the competition. The boat had to sail well, and also be versatile enough to be used for fishing in Puget Sound, exploring
up rivers, or short expeditions poking around the San Juan Islands.
·
We wanted a boat that
was attractive.
· We wanted to go with stitch and glue construction. The was partly because you get a strong, tough, light boat in the end. It was also partly showmanship—it is flashy and crowd-pleasing to have a boat-shaped object within a few hours of starting.
The Jimmy Skiff 2 design from Chesapeake Light Craft turned out to be a no-brainer, as the design really seemed to nail all of these attributes.
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| Headed to Port Towsend with a Jimmy Skiff mast on the roof, a PocketShip in tow, and a CLC Teardrop camper in the background. |
The competition requires that you start from pile of raw materials, so we built our Jimmy Skiff from plans. We were allowed to pre-scarf the plywood and lay out the parts ahead of time, so when the starting whistle sounded, we fired up our saws and started transforming plywood into boat parts. Time really flies at an alarming pace during the competition, but I think we had the boat stitched together a little after noon on the first day. After lunch, we did our tack welds with superglue, pulled the stitches and launched into a flurry of filleting and fiberglassing – on the interior of the boat, we pressed the 3-in glass tape that into the wet fillets and then laid up the fiberglass cloth that lines the interior over the wet tape. Due to compressed timetable we were on, we were working with “Fast” epoxy hardener, which, as you can imagine, made this a terrifying race against time.
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| Plywood parts, cut out and ready. |
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| Preparing to stitch the bulkheads to the bottom |
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| Just over an hour later, a boat appears |
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| Fiberglassing late in the evening after stitching and filleting. |
When you are working full-bore for 14 hours
each day, you have to fight some exhaustion. Day 2 was very slow. We
didn’t have much to do—install the flotation, carlins, seat tops, quarter
knees, and rub rails – but everything we did seemed to take forever. On
the bright side, there’s no time for the typical “sit down and think” problems
that often bog down an amateur boat build. When our seat bottoms didn’t
fit quite right (probably a misaligned bulkhead), we did not have time to
debate what the best solution was, we just had to commit to a course of action
and hope for the best.
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| Day 2 -- Seats are in and rubrails are glued on and drying. |
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| Day 3 -- The boat emerges from the tent for a rigging session |
One thing that we were generally blissfully unaware of (i.e. too busy to take notice) were the crowds gathering around the Boat Building Challenge tent. Every now and then, an inquisitive bystander would get our attention. We did occasionally catch a glimpse of the always-heartening sight of some our friends from CLC coming over to check on us. The crowds became unavoidable, however, on the last day on the competition, when the hull was done and we had to pull her out from under the tent (and the protection of the ropes that had kept the crowds at bay) to rig her. The manual suggests a leisurely driveway rigging session. We had a pressure-cooker rigging session, with Festival-goers wandering through and trying to get an up-close look at the boat. It turns out that Festival-goers are hilariously unaware of their surroundings, and more than one nearly got beaned by our boom, slapped by our sail, or skewered by our mast as we worked.
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| The crowds gather as the sail goes up. |
Our competition was tough. To one side were four soon-to-be graduates from the Northwest School of Wooden Boat Building. On the other side was a well-practiced team (they apparently had done practice runs on their boat already), led by a professional shipwright. The guys on those teams were real pros and true craftsmen who ended up building truly beautiful boats. In the end, we finished the boat* about an hour before “tools down”. While we broke for lunch, our Jimmy Skiff 2 sat proudly in front of the Boat Building Challenge tent, sail raised and trimmed in the gentle breeze. Even on the hard, she was a smart little boat. When the other teams finished and the whistle sounded, we all lugged our boats across the festival grounds for a trial-by-water.
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| The launch |
Two of us took our Jimmy Skiff 2 out on her maiden voyage. She cut a fine form on the water and rowed well. We raised sail, but the wind would not cooperate. We rowed around a little bit and had fun, enjoying being on the water. The other teams, though, really pulled out the stops when it came to showmanship. One team brought along a girl in Victorian garb to be rowed about in their lovely clincker-built rowboat. The Wooden Boat School team went even farther, loading all four team members, a cooler, and some fishing rods into their drift boat – those guys knew how to have fun! We all had a brief, but successful tour of the harbor, before returning to be judged.
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| Jimmy Skiff |
Launching area
*There is still a ton of sanding, varnishing,
and painting to do.
