Big day arrives, the boat is rigged and our patron (Frank Blair, who commissioned the boats) is in town. The plan is to sail the boat to the Maine Homes, Boats, and Harbor show. Everything is perfect. A 10 - 12 knot breeze, a sunny day, and the boat sails away from the dock. Beautiful, until we haul in the mainsail to start pointing upwind and the gromet that holds the mainsheet to the sail blows out. Oh well. As they say, you get what you pay for, and the sails were donated.
Well, a month later, we got her sailing again. Not a great day for pictures since the wind was light, but I've sailed her in a good breeze and it is a blast.
Hopefully next week we'll do a little trip out to the islands on this beauty.
Meanwhile, we found a mermaid. If you remember, this boat was designed and built locally, about a 2 hour drive away. We called up the boatyard and it turned out they had 2 in the harbor and 3 on the hard, so we got to go inspect some boats. The blue and red boats are the mermaids.
Here is one we got to inspect up close, which was very helpful since the instructions, while better than what we had for the twins, still lack some of the detail we need.
We are making steady progress. Last time the boat was just a group of molds and a keel. Next step was to put in ribbands. These are all notched into the molds (beveled notches no less) by hand. About 350 notches. Again, these are not part of the final boat. They just provide support for the frames.
Finally. . . some real pieces for the boat. We can now bend the frames around the outside of the mold. This is a lot easier than bending them into the inside of the boat (as we did on the twins).
We did end up breaking a lot of frames though. This boat has a lot of twist in the back. Not only do the frames get bent over the curve up and down, you also need to bend them front to back to keep them perpendicular to the keel. Unless you have perfect grain, they tend to crack. We did the first 60 or so frames without breaking any. We did the back of the boat last and ended up breaking one or two frames for each one we successfully installed. But we made it. . .
The last piece we need before planking is the transom (back of the boat). This is a curved, raked transom. It is the hardest type to build. We are making it a little bit easier by carving out the curve rather than bending it to a mold, but it is still pretty tricky. It is even trickier when you do the patterns incorrectly. Here is a good picture. The left side of the transom is carved out to the patterns I took off the lofting board. The right side is after I carved away enough wood to get it to actually fit onto the boat. It took all day to get it right. It took all night to figure out how I was so far off. The lofting is drawn to the outside of the planking. The transom is located on the inside of the planking. Since the transom is raked (at an angle) this translates to a large error, as you can see.
