We Can Eat...

A long winter of (dis)content is nearing its close, and we are still above water, literally being 200m or so above sea level, and financially. Many small projects over the last few months, but nothing major, such as a new build, although we came close at times. Must be the economy.

And now it's feast rather than famine, with a boat to repair, oars to build, a redesigned rig for a Shetland boat and now that the drought has ended, a Caledonia Yawl is in build. I have to say that plywood is not my favourite material. I would rather build in solid timber and the restrictions imposed by Iain Oughtred - with good intent and the aim is for so-called amateur buiulders to produce a boat that looks vaguely like the plans - will be annoying at times.

I am going to treat the build as a lesson in building an Oughtred boat as it was designed, and stick to the plans as far as possible.

Seeing a boat arrive in kit form, rather than a stack of larch, was a novelty that is both reassuring and worrying. There is little room for error in setting up, with tolerances to mm, which is I suppose as it should be. There will also be no steaming of planks and riveting, as I shall be using Collano Sempoaroc to glue the planks together, not epoxy as far as I can help it.

I built a Nutshell using theb stuiff, and it was very successful: no mixing, no waste, one-pot with a long shelf life, cures hard and can be sanded without metling. Oh, and no hot knife scraping to clean the stuff off where you don't want it.

More anon. For the moment I am head in plans, trying to get to grips with Iain's incredibly detailed notes and dimensions. Whereas in a traditional build I would be setting up the moulds by now and eyeing up that larch. No, I can't see that this will be any easier, or quicker. We will see. Let's just call it an experiment.

Gosh, it's been a While...

... a month or so since I wrote anything; a month in which family took precedence over everything. Now that things are a little more settled it's time to take stock.

The Shetland boat was finally delivered to Northern Ireland where I met the owner, Bill Baxter, for the first time. Strange to put a face to a voice and delighted to discover he was just as pleasant in the flesh as he had been all along during the building. A real gentleman. To trust us to build a boat, well Mattis to be honest, sight unseen was touching.

After the hand over we all went out to dinner at the Royal Ulster Yacht Club, which is a treat in itself, the stairs and upper rooms packed with Thomas Lipton memorabilia from his unsuccessful five attempts to win the America's Cup. Now this, for all of us who are used to scruffy sailing clubs, is a proper club with history and all that, and a dining room with pictures of famous yachts.

And then, rather than turning left to head back to Ullapool, I headed south to my old homeland: The Purbecks, which were bathed in soft light, balmy winds blew sweetly etc, etc (which made a change from the bloody awful weather we often get up here and which, as I write, is heading our way this evening).

While in Swanage I looked up a boatbuilder by the name of Pete Sedgewick. That's him beside a superb Herreshoff sloop that has been in the building for a good few months and for which he is looking to find a buyer.

Now this is top quality stuff and as far from my boat building as is possible to go. Whereas this is gleaming carvel, under multiple coats of enamel and varnish, mine are sturdy (I hope) clinker work boats with a semi yacht-like finish that can be refurbished at the stroke of a brush full of linseed oil and Stockholm tar. We got on fine.

Back home now there is a shed to build and work to be done on the house, so the lack of boats to build could not have occurred at a better time.

In the shed, however, is a Shetland boat to re-rig and outside a Goat Island Skiff both of which are work in progress, so the wolf although howling in the distance is not yet slavering at the door....

As I was Saying...

...before the Summer intervened, it's been a quiet year for new boats but interesting one for new projects.Whereas the wherewithal to commission a new boat seems to have taken a dive, seems like a lot of folk are upgrading, or tweaking. There is, for example, that Mik Storer-designed Goat Island Skiff in the workshop (or rather outside it) at the moment, into which I have grafted a new mizzen step while moving the main mast step forward to balance. The owner wants more speed, (and I told him) more complexity. But, hey-ho, what's a boat for except to tweak.

I had never come across a GIS before, and at first glance was a little sniffy. Plywood, naturally, flat of bottom and slab of sides, and yet the more I looked, the more I began to see the elegance in her design. That chine, which looks so abrupt, turns into a V when the boat heels, and like all skiffs, adds to tracking ability.

This one was exceptionally built, if rather pernickety. The builder clearly loved making little gadgets out of aluminium, including a clever (and to my mind unnecessary) remote bailer control. A nice bit of engineering though, and an example of a number of little touches in a really well built boat.

One thing I was asked to do was make the tiller folding, and this was my solution. The owner also wanted a forward rowing thwart and I am making him some new oars with Gaco plastic spoon blades to a really clever design that takes a length of 2 x 4, parallelograms it, and then rips it from top edge to bottom to make two perfectly matched trapezoid looms.

More projects to come. Meanwhile here is how to make a pair of really nice oars...

More from Sail Caledonia

A shot from Chris Smith of Sail Caledonia, showing Jan's Class 2 winner Mallard, a modified Iain Oughtred-designed Arctic Tern, built by myself and partner Mattis Voss last year. Another of Chris's above.

Caledonia Raid: STOP PRESS

Just had this from Jan Sijpestein, fresh from winning his class at the Caledonia Raid, in which he entered an Arctic Tern we built last year.

Dear Adrian

Arctic Tern came up trumps - brilliant performance, much admired.

Kathy Mansfield took lots of pictures which should be on her website before long. I will
send a few a later.

We did the Lochness Challenge in 12 ½ hrs - tacked all the way in light winds. Roughly 60
km of sailing.

We won our class (2)!

Regards

Jan

Forty-five Hours Later...

Lobie II's mast had a final sanding this morning prior to the start of an intensive period of sealing and varnishing, which I will leave to the owners.

The top 10ft of the mast was scarphed and glued a few days ago, followed by a long day of shaping and fairing first with an electric planer (I warmed to it, after having been so rude once) and a variety of planes, both block, No 5, Jack and Jointers.  And finally the miraculous Veritas block plane, given to me by my American friends Turner and Nancy Matthews. Like holding a Bentley in your hand (or more to the point the wheel of a Lotus Elise).

Then came a spate of electric sanding, a great deal opf squinting and constant checking the taper with a straight edge. The old and new are now as seamlessly bonded and blended together as I can make them. Once varnished to within an inch of its life, it should stand for a good few years.

Thanks are due to Jeremy Freeland at Collars for providing a flawless and extraordinarily close-grained 20ft x 7.5in x 4in lump of Douglas Fir, which was so close to the original spruce as to be almost identical. The dimensions, by pure chance, were almost to the millimetre the same as those of the old section. Maybe Moody's made the mast to match a standard piece of timber. Whatever, the wastage was minimal.

A New Topmast

When Lobie II, a Laurent Giles 43, lost the top of her mast off Lowestoft, most skippers would have decided to abort the circumnavigation of Britain. Not Neil and Maddy Scobie. Rigging a jury, they continued by France and Ireland, arriving back in Ullapool with the jagged stump and a cut-down sail plan. Intrepid stuff.

This is what I wrote at the time:

Copyright Charlotte Watters

John Ridgway – a near neighbour to us, as it happens – may have been the first to row the Atlantic, and Sir Ranulph Fiennes is about to trek to the pole in winter, but no-one to my knowledge has until now sailed around the British Isles with a broken mast, surely an achievement that ranks with the best of them, and more laudable for the fact that it went largely unrecorded, save for a brief note in the (Royal) Loch Broom blog**

This is the stuff of legend; the kind of stiff upper lip in the face of adversity we associate with our great country. What made an empire and won the war. Many a yachtsman with full and detailed preparation has circumnavigated our shores, some of them in astonishing times, others in a variety of craft both suitable and frankly ludicrous. There has probably been a fellow who did it in a bath tub, or  in a Citroen 2cv fitted with sails. Neil and Maddy Scobie with little on no preparation, save a trip to Costcutters for provisions, did it in a classic 43ft yacht designed by the Jack Giles called Lobie II. And for much of the voyage they were lacking a vital part of her, namely the top 10ft of her mast.

It was off Lowestoft that it all came crashing (literally) to the deck. One minute hard on the wind in a lumpy sea; the next a sharp report, more like the cracking of splintered spruce, and a chunk of it landed at Maddy’s feet, narrowly missing her head.

That was when the phone call came. “Hi, it’s Maddy. We’ve broken our mast,” rose a disembodied voice out of the North Sea. “What do you suggest?”

Well, I thought quickly, best get into a safe haven as fast as you can, call the local boatyard, have the rig pulled and Lobie transported home on a trailer. With barely a quarter of the round trip completed there was not much of a case to be made for continuing.

And that is where I left them: joggling about in the North Sea with the top of their mast on deck, no doubt swathed in a welter of sailcoth and stainless steel rigging.

A few days later their daughter called. “How they getting on? Have they pulled the mast yet? How are they planning to get her back home?” The answer was surprising, but typical of the spirit of adventure you would expect from a couple steeped in the old ways of doing things. Typical of a man who wears shorts in mid-winter and once worked with Ridgway. To borrow Henry Paget, 1^st Marquess of Anglesey’s remark to Wellington at Waterloo when a shot took off his leg: “We seem to have lost our mast,” says Neil.

“My goodness,” says Maddy. “So we have...” And soldier (sailor) on.

It was fully in keeping with  Blondie Hasler’s view, who famously suggested that those who sailed alone and got into trouble should be prepared to drown like gentlemen. In this case drowning was not a serious prospect; more like a huge repair bill and a low-loader up the M1.

“Oh they never mentioned the mast,” says the daughter.  “They’ve have found a tree surgeon.They’re in France now up some river having a great time. Apparently I’m to send out a smaller jib. And some Oxford marmalade.”

Next thing, Lobie was back on her mooring with the jagged stump above her top spreaders an unlikely perch for a herring gull. Maddy and Neil were rowing ashore. They had enjoyed a storming sail up the Irish Sea, too fast to stop, they said. And the mast? They had kept the pieces and reckoned it could all be glued back again.

Of course the mast would need pulling, but they would do that alongside the pier and Neil would strap it to an old Massey Ferguson, with no brakes, tax or insurance, and drag it 10 miles up the glen to their lodge in the hills. After all, if you’ve just sailed round Britain without an important section of what drives you then getting the rest of it, all 60ft mind you, up a potholed, single track, unmade road in the Highlands is really no big deal.

**www.lochbroomsailingclub.blogspot.com, for those curious to read the full story.

And here is what's been going on in a barn, 10 miles up the glen over the last few days:

Two lumps of flawless Douglas Fir, 10ft x 6in x 7.5in and a hell of a lot of planing later and the new topmast is ready to be epoxied to the stump.