Trying to prepare for storms

Sorry, but not much has happened with the dinghy recently. The main reason is that I have not been well and work has also been getting in the way. We will be on the case very shortly!

In the meantime I would like to thank a friend Andy, who very kindly collected a Storm Trysail in my absence. I bought second-hand for Roach. It is made out of cotton, and is circa 1950’s, but it is in very good condition and looks like it has hardly been used. Not something I would use very often, but a nice thing to have in the sail locker. As I don’t want to add a second track and gate to the mast, I was thinking of adding strong loops with toggles – a well known simple, if old-fashioned, way of attaching a trysail.

Another addition has been the purchase of 4 bronze stanchion bases. I am not fond of stanchions, but I think that if I do make a channel crossing or venture further afield, they will provide some added security. The idea is to have two either side of the cockpit and two more where the shroud plates are. That should protect me getting swept off deck when I am going to reef down the main. I rarely venture forward of the mast, so I don’t really see the point of stanchions further forward.

Dinghy Day Five

Well have not been doing much on the old dinghy of late as I have been quite busy. Well very busy infact. Anyway I managed to get some time on her today, Sunday and I have taped the seams of about half the underside of the hull. There was quite a bit of planing and manual sanding involved! Just thought I would let you know where she is at. Note my cheap peel-ply made from plastic grocery bags!

Tip: always pre-cut your fibreglass tape!

Today was around 4 hours work, so I reckon the total build time of 20 hours is not so far out of you do in stages like me and have everything set-up (total spent is 16 hours so far). I am sure there will be many more hours spent sorting the sil plan and rig, so the 20 hours I think refers to making something that floats and one can row rather than a whole sailing dinghy.

Dinghy Day Four

Well today I managed to get the dinghy stitched and taped. If working alone, then stitching is the only way to hold the thing together, but it is more work in the end as the stitches will need to be removed. I would recommend just taping the thing together with the aid of a few well placed screws; this requires a second person though. It will produce less work in the end as filleting around stitches is a pain.

I managed to finish filleting and taping half the boat with the help of a very interested 23 year old gardner. He wanted me to show him this new stitching technique and I let him muck in. The result are rather messy fillets, but hey, this is designed to get me sailing and not a work of art. If I can show locals a few new skills on the way so much the better.

The slow tropical hardner is not that slow. Three mixed pots exothermed in just a few minutes. I suppose over 30 degree heat and 100% humidity is not condusive to epoxy work. So managed to tape half the inside of the boat. Tomorrow the other half of the inside after work I hope. Then we flip it and start taping the outside.

Day Three Dinghy

Well it is the end of day three. The plans say that I would have spent three hours on the build till now and I am on three days. I am busy with other stuff though; Honest! Remember I have very few tools, so what resembles a flat pack boat above, is the culmination of lots of hand sanding as the jigsaw I used produced very wobbly lines!

Apart from having most of the sections sanded and marked out, I am making the daggerboard case. This is crucial before assembly of the boat as I will need to cut out a central sections from the middle thwart. In order to retain the sahpe of the hull this is done by partly cutting a space leaving tabs that can be cut at a later stage when installing the centreboard case.

Top photo shows the storm drain I am suring as a cutting surface; this is a very basic build and as I am not here for long, don't want to invest in tools.

Day Two of Dinghy Build

All the panels are cut out now, but as I have no power tools I am hand sanding all the edges and this will take me a day. The times in the plans are highly ambtious. 1 hour to cut out all the shapes is seriosuly ambitious. Anyway, we are forging ahead.

My only realy worry is that a friend donated an Acorn dinghy lug sail for the build as there are no sail makers in El Salvador. This sail is aroudn 50% larger in size than the design spec and as result I have worked out the the COE will be too far forward with this sail. The foot is 7ft long and the dinghy is only 7' 8" long! So trying to work whether I should build the daggerboard case a little bit more forward of its design position. Maybe add a bumpkin. I have decided on a deeper daggerboard and a deeper skeg too - the skeg is really small on the plans anyway. All these things should help her stand-up to her sail better.

Last Voyage of Lucette

Just finished reading the “The Last Voyage of Lucette”.
I have always been interested in reading this books it chronicles the voyages of Norman Dallimore’s first gaff schooner design. Designed in 1920 Lucette was cruised to the Baltic and her Amercian Skipper wrote a book about the voyage. It was quite a pioneering voyage for the times; up there with Falcon, Dusmarie and Recundra.

She was found by the Robertson Family in Malta in 1970 and brought back to the UK specifically to fit out for an around the world Cruise which started in 1971.

Lucette, under her Robertson stewardship, sails across the Atlantic via Lisbon and the Canaries, Caribbean, Panama and then Galapagos. On day three of there departure from the Galapagos they were hole after an attack by a pod of killer whales and the 45ft schooner went down in under a minute. They managed to launch the life raft and the dinghy, which is just as well as after 17 days in the life raft they needed to abandon it. The floor came away from the edges. The six of them transferred to a 9ft cockleshell fibreglass dinghy and lives aboard that for a further 21 days. They were picked up 300 south of Costa Rica on the shipping track to the Panama canal from North America. Quite an amazing feat of survival. All the more poignant for me as I know the coastline and weather well around these parts, and the fact that they managed to survive the sun alone beggars belief.

It is a good book, but I can’t really distinguish who has written it. Although the Author is said to be Douglas Robertson, the text appears to be very much from the perspective of Dougal (the father). He has written a previous book called “Survive the Savage Sea” and some of the text from this is used in Douglas’ book, although how much it is hard to tell. The fact is that the family dynamic is very interesting. A very authoritarian father and skipper, who has spouts of violent rage on quiet a regular basis. The sort of skipper that I would imagine could endanger a ship in his own right! Interesting to read just to get a feel of how other sailing families work.
As far as the sinking is concerned, it is clear that their life raft was really not upto the job (It would be interesting to see what make it was). The fact remains, that the best way of surviving in remote parts of the world are to have means to sailing to shipping lane, some cover from the sun, a fishing kit, a means of collecting and storing water, some flares and a knife (not the life raft sort – one needs an open blade). Quite sobering really. I would also say that they would have fared better with a pre-prepared grab bag containing some essentials. Also, In this case a Claude Worth recommendation: a pre-prepared wooden frame over which some canvas is stretched, with copper nails readily attached, would have helped them quite a bit in stemming the ingress of water I would imagine. An abandon ship routine should have been practiced – and they recommend that themselves.

I don’t have space for a decent rigid dinghy aboard Roach, but I have to say that reading this book has made me really think what I would do in such a disaster. I will certainly make a grab bag of things I think necessary, and will also make a Claude Worth canvas frame just in case. Can’t afford a liferaft at present, but for longer passages I think it is worth getting one! If I had a bigger yacht, I would certainly get a rigid dinghy that had sailing rig, some sort of cover, compass, all ready stowed to go incase of emergency.

Day One of New Dinghy

Interpreting the plans

Lofting the dinghy on the floor. I managed to survive a sustained attack from mosquitos.

Look how damp the paper is! Here I am roughly marking out the nesting of the shapes to make best use of the plywood.

Well have started on my little pram dinghy here in ES. Day one of the build was spent running around town looking for the plywood. In the end, I found some Cedar ply, which is much better than the shuttering ply, but at $35 a sheet it ait cheap specially as it aint WBP – the hull will be encapsulated anyway so I am not worried. The dinghy should be made from 3 and ½ sheets of ply, but as they don’t do half sheets here we are talking 4 sheets.

Yesterday I managed to loft ¾ of the build onto the plywood. Well the plans don’t call it lofting, it is more like tracing, but as it is very damp in the rainy season here, and the fact that paper can expand by as much a 2% I decided I would loft the larger sections to avoid dimensional problems.

Having had a look at the lofted plywood sheets carefully I have decided against moving the dagger board case. The boat is simply too small to start making changes like that. I will make a simple false seat in mahogany that will hinge over the top the of the existing thwart, thus allowing a dry bum. Other modifications will include a wheel on the base of the skeg for moving it around, and I quite like the idea of making two holes in the bow in order to slot the oars in to make it a bit of a barrowboat. I will also redesign the daggerboard to make it much deeper given the extra 20sq ft of sail area of an acorn lug sail that I brought out with me.

The 20 hours suggested build time looks very ambitious to me. I already spent 3 hours lofting when the plans suggested only 1 hour. I am not worried though, we should speed up as soon as we have something resembling a boat.

Costs are slowly creeping up. Even on a budget, it is hard building a budget boat. The epoxy was $160, the ply $100, fittings and stuff brought from the UK a further $100. The plans were $50 and another $50 to make a set of copies on a architectural plotter. So we are at about $500 already – and have nothing the resembles a boat yet. The $1,000 Walker Bay dinghy that was for sale in Guatemala looks like a very good deal now – nevermind. It does not have the same sense of satisfaction as building ones own!