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 clinker-built boat

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.