Satiny Spars Shakedown

Varnish is dangerous.  When you undertake a varnishing project, how do you know when to stop?  Three coats is enough.  But, five looks better.  And wouldn't you love to be able to point out the 10 coats of varnish on you boat?  A musing by blogger John Vigor really provide illumination on the dangers of varnish.

I don't know how many total coats of varnish now ensconce Solitude III's spars, but enough.  The final coat was satin-sheen, to help mask the bumps and bruises that are a spar's lot in life.



Reinstalling the spars

Upon declaring varnish victory, it was time to restore the boat to operational status.  The sticks and sails made their way back out to the boat, and about an hour of re-rigging followed.  In the course of things, the fix to the previously sticky tabernacle way tried out for the first time, with much success. 



On the water again

The early winter darkness was approaching fast, but since it wasn't raining and the boat was back together, I couldn't resist dropping her in the water.  The cruise was short.  The wind was actually cooperating, and the plan was to actually use the sails for the first time in many moons, but in the rush to re-rig, I had got the manis'l halyards fouled.  So, the first leg of my shakedown cruise ended after a three minute motor over to Jetty Island, where I tied up to sort out the halyards. 

By the time the halyard situation was resolved, the wind had dropped off, and any remaining cruising was going to have to be under power.  They are currently in the process of dredging the river channel, so I circumnavigated the dredging barge and then, on account of the fading daylight and my lack of navigation lights, I turned back home. 



Dredging Rig



In all, I doubt I was on the water for more than 30 minutes, but 30 minutes on the water is better than nothing.  Hopefully, there will be a confluence of free time and good weather in the tolerably near future that will permit a longer excursion.  Maybe even sailing.



Still a Boat Building Blog After All

Yes, this is still a boat building blog. Since stripping Solitude III of her sticks, I have slowly been making progress on the items that I had...umm...postponed...in the rush to launch.  Once again, I'm sawing wood, mixing epoxy,  slathering on varnish, and yes, SANDING! 

One of the first things I decided to tackle my overly-snug tabernacle.  When I installed my "load reacters", I fit them snugly up against mast-less tabernacle.  Well, turns out I may have fit them a little too snugly, making it a minor battle to raise the mast.  Some work with a saw and chisel helped out with this. 


My new, temporary boom gallows



Re-shaping the "load reacters"

  Another unfinished item that has been driving me crazy forever has been my boom gallows.  The gallows was originally cut out the day of Solitude III's maiden voyage and was raw, unfinished wood at the Wooden Boat Festival.  At some later date I was able to get one coat of epoxy on it, but then...well, that was it.  So, finally, I whipped up a temporary gallows (mainly to hold up the ridge pole for the boat cover), and set to work with the real gallows, including making modifications to mount the stern navigation light, adding more coats of epoxy, and for the first time in months, sanding.  More sanding and a zillion coats of varnish will be coming soon.

Speaking of varnish, the spars now have so many coats on them that you can see your reflection in them.  Ironically, now that they gleam, I am pondering whether to apply a topcoat of satin varnish.  The spars get beat up a lot and a satin sheen will help mask all the minor dings and divots of a spar's life. 

While not explicitly a boat-building project, after the hydrolock incident, I decided it was time to stop fooling around and start storing my outboard in the full upright and locked position.  It only took about five minutes to whip up a wall mount for the little noisemaker...much less than the amount of time that I spent clearing out oil from the cylinder!





So the projects resume.  I still have quite a bit of work I'd like to do on Solitude's interior, and I still have to make a set of permanent drop boards.  Actually, the drop boards will be more difficult than I thought.  A search of the shop revealed that I do not have any bits of 1/4" marine plywood remaining that will be large enough to construct the drop boards from.  What to do?  'Tis a quandary.

It Really Wasn't a Nice Day, Really

The other day I as at the local waterfront coffee shop.  It was a typical NW winter day.  Cool, gray, rainy.  No wind to speak of.  I overheard the guy in front of me say that he was about to meet his friends to go sailing.  I have to admit, my soul stirred...sailing, yes, sailing.  But then I looked at look at the weather.  It wasn't a nice day, it really wasn't.  This guy had to be nuts.  Sailing? In the rain?  With no wind?  But, still....mmm...sailing.  I couldn't help but wonder if maybe I am a wimp after all.

In other news, things are happening in the shop again!  I have done some touchup epoxy work and have started applying more coats of varnish to the spars.  I also got the outboard running again.  When the weather gets nicer or I become less wimpy, I may have a properly finished boat ready and waiting.

Failure to Launch

Sun, wind, weekend.  The boat cover came off and the sails were bent on.  The boat even made it into the water.  This should have been a sailing story.  But it was not to be.

It was a cold, cold day.  I arrived at the boat launch, paid my fees, and set about raising the mast.  Solitude III's tabernacle has always been a fairly tight fit, but with the added cold no reasonable amount of force could get the bottom of the mast to seat all the way into the tabernacle.  I pushed, shoved, kicked and pulled.  Nothing doing.

So, I gave up. Well, all was not lost. I could still drop the boat in the water and have a motorboat adventure. Except the motor wouldn't start..the starter cord would pull through. No reasonable amount of force could get the motor to turn over. As best as I can figure, despite being laid down on the proper side, some oil had made it's way into the cylinder and gave it a bad case of hydrolock.
 


It was so cold, there were icicles on the rubrails

I once went to a kayaking class where one guy said he had a three strike rule.  If any three things went wrong on the way to a kayaking trip...malfunctions, forgotten items, weather...he'd turn around and go home the trip.  I only had two strikes, but since they were propulsion-related, I decided to call it off.

Sparless in Seattle

I loaded up the boat and took her home.  When I got home, I took a deep breath and decided that the time had finally come to start working on my winter to-do list.  So, I stripped her of her sails and spars and prepared to start a varnish-a-thon.  We're in the middle of a cold snap right now, so the varnish hasn't started flowing yet.

I also pulled the spark plug on the motor, and eventually was able to get the oil cleaned out from the cylinder, so that is good news.

On the bright side, after all this nonsense, I happened to have a crockpot full of jambalaya waiting for me in the kitchen.  Back into construction mode!

Fern

There are three questions that I am asked most when I'm out and about with Solitude.

1. Did you build that?
2. How long did it take? 
3. Is that the first boat you've built? --or-- How many boats have you built?

 

Name on my first boat, Fern

Readers of this blog know the answer to Questions 1 and 2. As for Question 3, Solitude is the fourth (and a half, if you count the cradle boat) boat I've built. Boats 2 and 3 where a Redfish cedar strip kayak and Pygmy Opsrey double kayak. My first boat was a small rowboat that I designed and built over the course of a lazy grad-school summer.

I had not set out to build a boat that summer. I had just taken a really class in Computation Fluid Dynamics, and I decided to apply my learnings from that class to write a simple 3D grid generator and inviscid solver. What a way to spend a summer...

  

I actually started writing the grid generator and was getting some good results. But the weather was getting nicer and nicer, and I felt an itch to be doing things outdoors. At the time, I lived about 1/2 mile from the boat launch at Magnusson Park. I thought, gosh, if I only had a small boat, something that I could transport down to the water and just float around on a nice day. I could build a boat!

  

In a confluence of events, earlier that year, I had been doing a lot of reading about the War of 1812, and that lead me to some books by Howard Chapelle, which lead to to Chapelle's Yacht Designing and Planning. Also, the Aero department's wood shop was under-utilized. I had the motive and the means. Time to get started.

Despite having read through Yacht Designing and Planning and a few other yacht design books, I really approached the design like an engineer. The design brief was something along these lines: A small row boat capable of carrying two people plus one medium dog, light enough for one person to carry, short enough to be build out of 8' long sheets of plywood. Don't ask how I came up with two people and a dog. Anyway, that was the mission to which the boat was point-designed.



The strongback/mold, with fairing strips



The next step was to draw up some plans. Being summertime, TA office was largely deserted, so I cleared out a large workspace amongst the desks. I didn't have a good feel for the correct dimensions for things, so, using assorted scraps of paper, cardboard, and whatever other office supplies I could scavenge, I started working on a mockup. I'd iterate between figuring out "ergonomic" assessments on the mockup, doing displacement calculations on the computer. After a couple of hours, I finally converged on something that I figured would work. I spent another day working up a lines drawing and drawings of each station.

  

That weekend, I went to the lumber store, and bought a bunch of materials with which to build a mold/strongback, mahogany timber for the frames and epoxy, bronze fasteners, and Gorilla glue to hold stuff together. Marine plywood for the sides came later.



Bending the gunwhales and chine into place



I figured the best thing to do was to build the boat upside-down on a mold. I'd build a keel and a traditional frame, and then sheath it in plywood. Beyond that, construction was a learning process. I hadn't really internalized any of the information I had read in any of the boat books I had read. Fancy structural element like knees, floors, keelsons, and rabbeted keels were unknown to me. For the most part, I was making it up as I went. I'd drive screws and nails in non-traditional places and if I lacked something to drive a fastener into, I'd invent whatever structure I decided was required.

I did pick up a few tricks from Brad, a fellow student who would occasionally drop by. He had built a boat with his dad many moons before, and shared some skills with me. For example. my first attempt and bending the gunwhales into place resulted in a broken gunwhale. For Round 2, Brad dropped by and gave me the idea of soaking them in water as I went to help them take the shape....a trick I'd use some time later on some of the more stubborn parts of Solitude.

Boat bones

Slowly, but surely, the boat took shape over the course of the summer. Soon the frame was complete, and to my delight it could even bee removed from the mold and not collapse on itself. Plywood sheathing came next. I cut some patterns, then cut the real things, did lots of dry fitting and final adjustments and then nailed everything down with bronze boat nails. At this point, the boat was in pretty good shape structurally, but certainly not watertight. So I mixed up some epoxy, thickened it, and proceeded to fill all of the seems with the stuff. I also added some lightweight fiberglass tape to the outsides of the seems. Looking back on it, I think I was on the verge of "inventing" stitch 'n glue!



I built my own oars too!





Sheathing the hull




  



Solitude III was not my first red boat!



A bunch of sanding came next. I did not coat the boat in unthickened epoxy as I would now. A the time, I didn't even know you could or would do such a thing! Instead, I applied a couple of coats of red paint and did the brightwork with a gloss furniture polyurethane (varnish, what is that????). I even painted her name, Fern, on the transom.

Bouyancy tests

At this point, I found myself in a quandary...I really wasn't sure of the best placement for the seat (or seats). What to do? Why, launch the boat and use a bunch of fellow grad students to figure it out experimentally. of course. So, that's what happened. The boat floated and the experiments worked, but things naturally erupted into mild chaos and tremendous fun, culminating in nearly losing both the both the boat and a fellow Fluids Labber out to sea.

I eventually installed the seats and hardware and finished the boat. I even used her a couple of times. She could carry quite a load, but had too little freeboard for comfort. She pulled easily and tracked horribly She was a little heavy to move around, but could be moved by one person...I'd say the difficultly in getting her to the water limited my use of her more than any other factor. 



The finished Fern



Like any wooden boat, Fern is a beautiful object, but she really isn't a good looking boat. Looking back on the design with more developed sensibilities, I would have given the design more shear, more freeboard, and moved the max half-breadth forward. Way forward. The biggest flaw in the design is that the max half-breadth is at the transom. No kidding.

  

Every now and then, I look and Fern's hull and contemplate its future. Sometimes I think about wrestling her onto the top of the car and using her, but generally cooler heads prevail and a more useful boat, like a kayak, gets a trip to the water instead. Sometimes, I dream about doing some major modifications to address her shortcomings. I can't get over the idea that I could add a deck, daggerboard and positive floatation, pull the rig off of a Laser, and have a pretty decent sailing dinghy. Actually, she'd probably be able to plane! But that's all a lot of work, and it changes the first boat I ever built into something other than what I designed her to be. So, for now, she sits in the garage, gathering dust.



This picture makes me want to take her out on the water again!







Under Wraps

In a final acknowledgement of seasonal defeat, I finally got Solitude III tucked in for winter.  I struck the sails and pulled a cheap boat cover over her.  In the coming weeks (or months), I am planning to strip her of her spars, add a couple of coats of varnish to them, and finish the long-delayed drop boards, gallows and companionway hatch.

Merry Christmas!

What Brings You Here?

One of the behind-the-scenes things that I have access to on this blog are some statistics about how many visitors I’ve had, which entries have been viewed the most, common search terms and referring URLs. Pretty neat stuff.

Most folks stumble onto this blog either via pocketship.net or Google. I really enjoy looking at the search terms that lead folks here. For the most part, the terms “PocketShip, “Pocket Ship,” and “Jon PocketShip ” are the avenues for people finding this blog. There have been a few folks who dropped by here looking for information about working with epoxy in cold weather or building a wooden mast. There have been some other queries that seem rather off topic, for example:

• "is preparation a good thing?" -> Preparation. It’s a Good Thing
• "christmas crafts using tiller paper rolls" -> Happy Rails to You, Un-Tiller We Meet Again
• "lady washington sailing" -> ...A Tall Ship

Glad I could help. 

The most viewed entry is, and has been for some time, “Re-Energized.” This entry’s enduring popularity. is puzzling to me. In looking back over the blog, I can pick out several entries that were better written (Lagging, Sole Man), more informative (Deck the Boat, Waiting for Epoxy), or more entertaining (Transform and Roll Out, Boatsanding Blues). I guess I don’t see what it is in that entry that others see. If anybody has any thoughts, please share them with me!

This all got me thinking about “audience.” I have been far from consistent in who I have considered my target audience in the various blog posts. Sometimes, I’ve targeted people who are actually building a PocketShip, assuming detailed knowledge of the design (e.g. what bulkhead #7 looks like). Other times, I’ve target more general interest boat building types. Sometimes, I’ve pontificated more on the human experience of building and sailing this boat. I guess the bottom line is that I really have been writing this for myself, and whatever mood I’ve been in at the time has dictated how I’ve approached writing a given entry.

But that’s not the point. What I what to know is, “why are you here?” What brought you to this blog, what information where you hoping to find, what would you like to hear more about??? Anybody want to share?