Saturday, July 23, 2022

A Project Named Clancy - Finale

It floats! 

Only the lightest of airs were present for the maiden voyage, but even that sufficed to move Clancy through the water.  The boat was stable and well balanced with some slight weather helm.  There's a joy to sailing a yar lil' dinghy, even if ghosting about.

Rich Kolin and Bob Pickett set out to enable amateurs to build a fun and capable sailing dinghy in their garages and boat that was "the most sailboat you can squeeze out of a 10-sheet of plywood."  How did reality stack up against Pickett's claims?  Constructing the boat was indeed straight-forward and something a first time builder could easily contemplate.  Of course, the technology of amateur built boats has advanced massively since the Clancy came out.  Kits and plans have become more complete and even easier to build, and the hull forms that now grace plywood boats can carry so much shape as to defy the medium.  Still, Clancy is a purposeful little boat that fulfils its purpose admirably.  
  





Saturday, May 7, 2022

Edensaw Boat Building Challenge 2019: Building A CLC Jimmy Skiff 2



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. 

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.

Plywood parts, cut out and ready.

Under the rules of the competition, working hours were limited to 9am-11pm on Friday and Saturday, and 8am-1pm on Sunday, for a total of 33 hours of working time.  With a team of four, that meant we could put in around 132 man-hours, pretty much in line with the 120-150 hours that these boats typically take.  Of course, that doesn’t tell the whole story.  With stitch and glue construction you have to work around epoxy curing times.  While we did a lot of things with Fast and Medium hardener, sometimes “Fast” wasn’t fast enough.  We got slowed down at least once when the epoxy filling the exterior seams wasn’t quite set in time.  It was the end of the first day of the build and we needed to round over the seams so that we could fiberglass the hull.  There were a few spots where the epoxy would gum up when we tried to sand it.  We tried a few things: buying some time by breaking for dinner, adding a little heat, and trying to push through by clogging a bunch of sand paper.  We got there and got the fiberglass on the boat, but it was a long night.

Preparing to stitch the bulkheads to the bottom


Just over an hour later, a boat appears

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.

Day 2 -- Seats are in and rubrails are glued on and drying.

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.

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. 

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. 

Jimmy Skiff

Launching area


    


The Boat School guys were a blast, and built a great boat.

3rd Place


In the end, we took home third place, which was just fine by us given the level of competition and how good the boats the other teams built were.  Not that we made it easy for them; the judges were impressed enough with our Jimmy Skiff 2 that they upped the monetary part of our prize to equal that given to second place.  For a bunch of amateurs, that seems  pretty good, and is a testament to the Jimmy Skiff 2’s tidy look and well-thought out design, not to mention the quality of the manual, which was required reading for all members of our team.





*There is still a ton of sanding, varnishing, and painting to do.

 

 

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Edensaw Boat Building Challenge 2018: Building A Glen-L Tubby Tug

 

Whhhrrrrrrrruppp!   The sickening sound of thickened epoxy pulling away from plywood came as I watched the bow of our Tubby Tug split open, relieving the great stresses that had turn flat plywood into a pugnacious, three-dimensional shape.  In my hands was a pair of side cutters and the remains final wire that had previously held the bow together.  Building a boat in two and a half days requires some aggressive moves.  Trusting that beads of superglue would hold the bow together so that we could remove the wires before the structural epoxy fillets could set was one of the boldest we had to make.  Now that it had failed, we had to recover. 

Saving the bow (credit: The Peninsula Daily News)
As quickly as the bow had split open, my hands clapped it back together.  I squeezed with all my might as my fellow team members, Ron and Chris, rushed over and began to sink new holes in the sides and thread a multitude of wires stitches through them.  Over my shoulder, my dad kept the reporter from the Peninsula Daily News at bay.  The reporter, who had just dropped in to get a story about the 2018 Edensaw Boat Building Challenge at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, apparently did not fully pick up on the drama of a boat falling apart in front of her, sparing us from a “fake news” headline.  Soon, with the stitches once again holding the tension, we smooshed the big, still-wet epoxy fillet back in place.  The moment of crisis had passed, but there was no time to celebrate, we still had a boat to build, and this setback meant that we’d had to shuffle our build plan unexpectedly.

As I recall, it was my dad who first became enthused about the idea of participating in the boat building challenge.  The challenge has taken place annually for several years at the Wooden Boat Festival, is and sponsored by Edensaw Woods, Ltd. of Port Townsend, Washington.  Teams of four have two and a half days to turn a pile of raw lumber into a finished wooden boat.  Each team chooses their own model of boat, and there can be a great diversity in the finished products.  The final boats are judged on a wide range of (highly subjective) criteria, from workmanship, to fulfillment of intended function, to the teamwork of the individuals. 

Our team consistent of a bunch of rank amateurs: my dad and myself, Chris, and Ron on the first and third days.  Ron had built a Pygmy kayak before.  Neither my dad nor Chris had ever built a boat from scratch before.   Due to prior commitments, Ron was unavailable on the second day, and another total novice, Ian, stepped in for him.  We selected the 9-ft Tubby Tug design from Glen-L.  A review of the study plans had convinced us that the scope of Tubby Tug was such that, if nothing went wrong, we could achieve a nearly complete boat, less any sanding or finishing, within the allotted time.  The boat also has a ton of character, and our reckoning was that the charming looks of the boat would go a long way toward the winning the prize.  

Glen-L Tubby Tug

Each step of the build was carefully planned out in sequence.  Much of the plan was built around keeping the work going while working around epoxy drying times.  As a result, the choreography often differed from the Glen-L instructions.   To be successful we had to have a completed hull, with fiberglass on the exterior by the end of day 1.  Day two would be focused on building the pilot house and making incremental progress on the hull, adding items like rubrails.  Day 3, hopefully, would revolve around bringing it all together and adding finishing touches.  While no wood could be cut prior to the starting gun, a large amount of prep work is allowed.  We pre-marked all of the plywood parts on 10-ft long sheets of okoume.  Knowing that there would be no time for painting the boat, we chose to apply stain to many of the parts, so that in the end we would have a doughty little green and red, and yellow tug.  The surfaces of the plywood that would not later receive fiberglass were presealed in two coats of epoxy.  The timber that would later form the rubrails and trim were also premilled.

We were allowed to set up our work area the day before the competition.  A total of five teams were competing, and Edensaw allocated each team a 10’x20’ work area under a large tent.  The front 10’ span faced the festival crowd, and was roped off to prevent lookie-loos from wandering into the work areas.  We were wedged between team from the Wooden Boat School and their plywood pram, and a team of semi-pro boat builders and their carvel-planked rowboat.  We set up a tool box and epoxy-mixing table at the back of our work area and laid the first piece of plywood that we would cut on sawhorses in the middle of our area.  Edensaw provided communal bandsaws and waste bins.

Set up and ready to build

The starting whistle sounded at 9am sharp on Friday morning.  Our saws plunged into the plywood, liberating part after part of Tubby Tug.  At times we had four saws running at once: two circular saws working on the long, sweeping curves, and two jig saws cutting the tighter radiuses.  Once the bottom and side panels were free, I grabbed a drill and began drilling stitching holes.  The bottom was set up on a folding table and parts straight from the saws were delivered to the table and stitched in, first the bulkheads and seat sides, then the transom and hull sides.  By lunch, the lower hull was stitched together. 

The bottom of the hull is visible in the center
We quickly checked the hull for twist, removing what little there was with a few swift chiropractic moves. Then it became time to set it in stone, or in this case, superglue.  The use of superglue was a key enabler for us to complete the boat, allowing us to skip the time-consuming “tack weld” epoxy mini fillets.  A short bead of superglue, a spritz of accelerant, and parts would be held together well enough that the stitches could be removed.  Big epoxy fillets followed on all of the joints, with a layer of 9 oz fiberglass tape laid over fillets on the side-to-bottom joints.  In the bow, we held off removing the stitches until later, since it was not clear if the superglue would hold it.  We, of course, later found out it did not.

 
Stitching the hull
After dealing with the aftermath of “the bow incident,” we reviewed our plan. Over the next several hours, we added cleats for the foredeck and seat supports, and installed the foredeck and bulwarks, again employing the superglue, wire removal, fillet-and-‘glass act.  By this point, it was getting pretty later and we were all pretty knackered.  We broke for a late dinner.  Returning to the boat and hour later, we found things setting nicely.  The hull had a robust, solid feeling to it.  Technically, we could have launched it then with little ill effect.  We briefly contemplated flipping the hull and trying to fiberglass, which had been our goal for the day, but were too zonked to do it.  Waiting until the next day meant giving up on having the three total coats of epoxy on the hull by launch day, but we had been working nearly nonstop since the beginning of the day, and were likely to make a mistake out of fatigue. 
Fiberglass.  The tumblehome was a particular
pain to wet out.

Saturday dawned, and we were all dragging out feet from the efforts the day before.  We decided to split our efforts, with my dad and Chris working on the pilothouse build, while Ian (feeling fresh since it was his first day) and I tackling getting the hull ready for fiberglass.  It turned out that there was more prep work than we anticipated to get the hull ready for fiberglass.   We used our sanders to round over the edges of the plywood joints. Some of the seams were not properly filled, meaning we had to apply more epoxy and wait for it to cure.  After this, we spread out the fiberglass and set to work wetting it out.  For such a little boat, the hull has a lot of surface area, meaning the wet out took a long time.  It was additionally complicated by the tumblehome of the bulwarks.  Ideally, the topsides would be ‘glassed separately once the hull was upright, but we had no time for that.  Still, it was terribly vexing and very time consuming to get the epoxy on and the fiberglass to lay against those upside-down surfaces.    

The pilothouse slowly takes
form.

If the hull was a challenge, things were no better on the pilothouse.  The pilothouse requires a good bit of fiddly carpentry, and the instructions and plans provided by Glen-L failed to give enough detail to readily sort it all out easily, particularly in the heat of the battle and when you are tired.  By the time the hull had its coat of fiberglass, the side of the pilothouse had barely come together.  It was 2pm and clearly time to break for lunch.  Exhausted, lunch took longer than usual.

The rain started shortly after we resumed working.  Historically, the weekend of the Wooden Boat is not particularly rainy, but this particular rainstorm was historically intense.  To make room for building the pilothouse at the back of the tent, we had pushed the still-drying hull to the forward edge of the tent, and the rain began pelting against the wet epoxy on the hull.  Epoxy does not like to get wet when it is drying; it has a tendency to bloom (turn white), get splotchy and gummy.  We had to spring into action fast to get the hull to safety.  The area aft of the hull was quickly cleared, pilothouse parts and all.  I moved to the bow as we prepared to slide the hull back to safety.  At that moment, the wind gusts, flapping the roof on the tent, and unleashing the tens of gallons of water that had been pooling directly over my head.  I was wetter than a St. Bernhard in a swimming pool, and the forward third of the hull hand standing water on it.  My teammates hooted at the hilarity of it.  I joined in, but remained focused on rescuing the hull from further peril.  We swiftly repositioned the hull and set to work with paper towels (not fun on the tacky surface) and a heat gun to try to remove as much moisture as possible.  It took a good chunk of time – me dripping through all of it – but eventually we mostly recovered, getting away with just a few splotches of bloom. 

I do not remember if I ever got dry.  I do remember most of the rest of the day being demoralizing.  Fatigue had set in hard, and everything was a struggle.  At one point we tried a dry run of assembling the pilothouse, only to discover that the roof of the cabin substantially underhung the sides.  We fought with a few more things, trimmed back the overhanging fiberglass on the hull, rolled on another coat of epoxy, and called it a night.

Close to the end
A good night’s sleep helped revive us, along with the return of a re-invigorated Ron.  We uprighted the hull, and did a little general cleanup on it.  There were a number of things we had to give up on in the interest of time.  We left the rubrails off entirely, and chose to fasten the gunnels with stainless steel screws rather than bond them on permanently with epoxy.  We had to sacrifice the most, however, on the pilothouse.  Our plan going in was that we would do no work that would have to be undone later (after the Festival) in order to properly finish the boat.  The pilothouse, however, was in such bad shape that we had to abandon this.  High quality, permanent, bonded joinery gave way to “Chinese construction,” littered with brads and screws.  Ill-fitting joints were covered up by decorative trim pieces, conceived and fashioned on the fly by Ron.  It was all made to fit and look respectable enough, but while the hull could stand up to a close Coast Guard inspection, the pilothouse was more of a twenty-footer.

Tools down!

Around thirty minutes before the end of the competition, we had finished everything we could think to do.  We put down our tools and started to clean up.  The Wooden Boat School team was slopping latex house paint on their hull and hitting it with a hairdryer to speed things up.  The carvel planked team had given up the night before, when a few unplanned hiccups made it impossible for them to complete their boat on time.  The two other teams, an amateur-built 20’ catamaran, and a collapsible rowing pram built by a team of two, were also wrapping thins up quickly.

At 2pm sharp, the whistle blew, and the “building” part of the Boat Building Challenge was over.  That only left the “Boat” part – seeing how well the various small craft performed on the water.  Since Edensaw tent was positioned at the opposite side of the Point Hudson boat basin from the boat launch, this meant that reaching the water necessitated holding an impromptu parade of new boats through the Festival grounds.  Our little tugboat was clearly a crowd favorite, its cute little form garnering many looks, comments, and photographs as we carried it around.

The Boat Building Challenge is not just a competition, but also a form of entertainment at the festival.  The ropes across the front of the tent help keep onlookers at bay, though it is incredible just how far some people lean over.  Some really want to ask questions, something that can be a major distraction when you are working fully steam ahead.   Mercifully, the Edensaw staff would swoop in to rescue us if the questioning became intense.  On all three days, however, a bystander in a loud Hawaiian shirt slipped through the guards and the barriers, and stood in our work area, asking us questions and inspecting our work up close.  Not wanting to be rude, we did not throw him out, but were certainly short in our responses to him.   On reaching the water, we learned this interloper’s secret: he was none other than “Kiwi” Ferris, owner of Edensaw and chief judge of the competition.  That would have been handy to know earlier.

Stroke! Stroke!

One by one, the boats entered the water.  The Boat School guys had rigged theirs with a sail, furled since it was blowing half a gale at the time.  My dad and I clambered aboard our Tubby Tug.  Tubby Tug is designed to be powered with a small outboard, but the Challenge rules prohibit using anything other than human or sail power, so we seized up our canoe paddles and started paddling furiously.  We were paddling away from a rock-lined lee shore, and Tubby Tug has a huge amount of windage for such a tiny boat.  Our departure from shore was far from graceful.  We careened this way and that, first toward the rocks, then towards a pier, then towards the festival boats.  Meanwhile, the catamaran had taken off out of the harbor like greased lightning, and the guy in the folding pram was gleefully, and literally, rowing circles around us.  We struggled our way out maybe 50’ from shore, before letting the wind rocket us back from whence we came.

Sharing the water with a competitor
Judging came next.  The Wooden Boat School team, with their high quality build, (latex) painted hull, and sail rig, took home the gold.  The sleek catamaran came in second.  The judges then debated, debated, and debated further.  When they finally reached their decision, it turned out that had reached a deadlock, and to call third place a tie between us and the pram.  It was hard to be disappointed.  Most of the challenge is not a competition against the other teams, but rather a competition against yourselves to try to pull off something that is at the limit of possible.  And, while “there is no second,” it was still gratifying to make that good of a showing against teams of the caliber of our competitors.


Later that day, we hooked up an electric trolling motor to Tubby Tug and putted around the Festival waters.  I was immensely satisfied with how the boat turned out.  The boat was not done: the pilothouse would later have to be totally rebuilt, the hull needed another coat of epoxy, and rubrails and gunnels would later have to be permanently affixed.  But the hull itself was a really nice piece of workmanship, well-built, robust and fair.  In two and a half days, we had started a pile of wood and no guarantee of having enough time to finish, and finished with a functional boat with looks that delighted onlookers as we putted by.



Sunday, March 20, 2022

A Project Named Clancy - XII. Spars and Rigging

The plans for Clancy call for spars made of aluminum tubing.  This was probably done for a number of reason--ease of sourcing for the amateur builder, the ability to take the mast apart for ease of transport, the durability in livery fleet use, etc.  I could not bring myself to sully my new wooden boat with aluminum tubing, and thus settled building them out of Sitka Spruce.  Reading up on it, it I realized that sizing wooden spars for adequate strength and rigidity if more art and experience than science and mathematics.  After several efforts to figure it our myself, I lay the problem before a well-known boat designer friend.  Based on his input, I settled on a 2 1/8" square cros-section for the mast up to the top of the gooseneck, tapering to a 1" square section at the masthead; the edges of the mast above the deck would be rounded over with a 1/2" router bit.  For the boom, a 1-1/2" square section was used, with each end tapering to 1/2"x1" over the last 2 ft.  As mentioned in previous posts, the modification to the mast resulted in changes to the mast tube (square plywood "tube" instead of PVC pipe) and the sail (external sail track instead of a sleeve).

The mast is around 16-ft long, so one Saturday, I put the roof rack on the car, took the ferry to Port Townsend, and brought home a nearly 17ft long 6/4x6 chunk of beautiful Sitka Spruce from Edensaw Lumber. 

The first step was to run the board through the surface planer a few times.  Planing a 17' board is a bit of handful, and required taking the planer outside to find a space over 34' long; you need 17' on the infeed side and 17' on the outfeed side to avoid running into anything.  My garage can barely hand the first 17ft!  


I then marked the masts and booms on the board and roughed them out with a circular saw.  Yes, mast and boom were both plural.  In the coming pictures, you will find evidence of two Clancy's worth of spars being made at the same time.  Could this indicate that I'm planning another Clancy in the future?  Stay tuned.


Dressing spars is a delight.  Unlike the gooey epoxy and fiberglass work inherent in plywood boat construction, spars are all saws, planes and sandpaper.  After rough cutting the tapers in the spars, I used a power plane, followed by a belt sander and then a low angle block plane to bring them right to the pencil markers.


Next, the edges were eased with the router, using a big roundover bit.



After sanding smooth with 220 grit sandpaper, multiple coats of varnish were applied.  For Clancy's spars, I experimented with TotalBoat's Halycon water-based varnish.  Application was ok (I like the flow of the oil-based varnishes that I'm familiar with), and the final color after several coats was passable (not quite as deep amber as with the usual products).  On the bright side, drying/recoat times were closer to an hour, rather than a day for oil-based, so all 5 coats of varnish went on in an afternoon, rather than a week!  It is a good product, though I will likely stick with the old fashioned stuff on future projects.


With the spars shaped and finished, it was time to install the hardware.  I went with a Racelite small boat gooseneck that I bought from Duckworks.  I had wanted a 1/4" pin, but due to all the COVID-related supply-chain issues, they only had 3/8" pins. 



The boom end get a hole of the same diameter....


...so that it slides over the pin.




The sail track gets screwed into the aft face of the mast.  I was able to space the sliders on the sail just right to be able to get by with a single 12-ft length of sail track (sail track is devilishly expensive).



Since the sail must now be hoisted instead of slid over the mast, I had to add a block to the masthead for a halyard.


A quick test fit of the sail ensured everything was lining up properly.


I rigged the boom with a 2:1 outhaul.  The outhaul is deadheaded to eyestrap on one side of the boom, led through the clew, to a fairlead towards the end of the boom, and thence back to a jam cleat.


The boom also receives a pair of blocks, one at the clew end and one mid-boom to lead the mainsheet to the cockpit. 



The 2:1 boom vang consists of a block with a becket attached to a padeye on the mast with a stainless steel snap hook.


The block on the boom is shackled directly to a padeye.  The vang is tied to the becket on the mast block, run up through the block on boom, back through the block on the mast... 



... and then is lead through a fairlead to a jam cleat at the front edge of the cockpit.


This picture shows the details of the traveller.  The traveler is deadend at a fairlead on one side of the run, through through a fairlead on the opposite side and thence forward to a jam cleat at the aft end of the cockpit. The block for the mainsheet clips on to the traveller with a stainless steel snaphook.


Here you can see the whole path of the mainsheet.  The sheet led away from the cockpit via the two blocks on the boom, through the block clipped to the traveller, and then terminated on a becket on the after of the aftermost boom block.


The rudder is mounted to the cheeks with a big stainless steel bolt, with a wingnut on the end.  A pair of small boat pintles are mounted to the rudder and gudgeons are bolted/screwed to the transom.  A small tang on the transom keeps the rudder from floating off when the boat is in the water.


Two big deck plates seal up the area under the foredeck, while a thirds in installed in the aft bulkhead to seal up the transom compartment.  These watertight compartments provide flotation when swamped and can carry your lunch or be stuffed with foam for flotation, depending on your preference.



Rigged and ready....