A Very Penetrating Situation

Lately I have been purging my computer of many bookmarks and saved items that relate to other boats and stuff. I ran across and article that describes sealing deck penetrations in fiberglass boats with cored decks. It seems that there are innumerable instances where the wood core material used in the decks of most of the fiberglass boats that have been built, usually either end grain balsa or marine or at least exterior plywood, becomes wet and then gets mushy and will eventually rot. This phenomenon has been traced to poorly or even  unbedded deck fittings and penetrations. There are many products and procedures that are in practice in the workshops of many production boats, not all of them work as desired or proposed. Here is a link to an article that I have decided makes alot of sense, and I plan to put into practice on my Navigator build. Check this, ( Butyl tape deck sealing ) out, I found this when researching repairs to the Catalina C22 that I was almost going to get deeply involved with. It really made so much sense and knowing that several of the very very upper class of builders do it this way, why shouldn't I? Can't think of a single reason!!

With our little boats being almost all plywood, which presents so much end grain that will allow the wicking of even the smallest amount of moisture, let alone a splash or wave of water, to wick up into the ply and eventually wind up possibly anywhere within the entire boat promoting the beginning of rot everywhere. Well it may not be that bad but the beginning of rot anywhere in an all wood boat could become disastrous and it isn't something to be overlooked. We need to be extremely careful how we treat any hull, deck or bottom penetrations. I know it will add a great deal of time to construction, but hey, I'm retired, got nowhere to go or be except right here in the workshop with my boat.  Well, soon to be a boat anyway.

So the plan is that wherever I put a hole through the ply, such as for rudder gudgeons, or cleats, or turning blocks, oar locks, bowsprit bolts, cockpit drains, whatever, the hole will be put through oversized, filled with thickened epoxy then redrilled correct size, thereby sealing the edges of the hole in the ply from water penetration and then properly bedded with butyl tape.    I vow to not use "the Devils Goo" (3M 5200/ 4200/ 4000 or any other) on my boat !    If it needs to be attached that strongly then a mix of epoxy and silica and or wood flour will have to suffice. Also making sure that there is a properly sized backing block for support of items that will be under a load, such as cleats, blocks and such.

I am planning to start purchasing lumber to begin the building jig when paid at the beginning of the month, which at first will be used as a work table for things such as frames, bulkheads, spars, stringers, rudders and centerboards. Then after the majority of "small parts", as if a 14 ft long mast is a small part (!!!), the legs of the jig will be shortened to a comfortable building height. As a work bench I plan the legs to be 36" tall and cut them down to about 18 to 20" to build the boat itself. I believe that will be a height that will allow reaching where I need to above the jig and also reach under to fasten anything that needs it from below.  The reaching under is an important consideration as I don't get "under" very many things with any ease at all these days. Of course this is all just guess work at this point as I have not started building anything yet.

I guess I will find out soon enough. 

Geoff

Whew !! It missed us !!

Well how do you like that ? I don't mind saying, I like it just fine. For all the talk and first and second guessing, in the end hurricane Irma went where she wanted to go and we had no say in the matter. Although I am glad the we, here in Panama City, just barely caught the western edge of the storm, I feel terrible that the rest of the state wasn't so fortunate. I am relieved that there wasn't much loss of life, just property damage.  If people had not been so co-operative and obeyed the evacuation orders, there could have been an extremely high death toll. All those numbers and commentary can be found online and in local and national news stories, you didn't come here to find out about any old hurricane.

So after breathing a sigh of relief and thanking GOD that we only had a couple hours of light to medium rain and a few hours of light to moderate winds with gusts of only about 30 - 35 mph, it's time to start the clean up. We lost a few small branches but mostly it was leaves, lots of leaves, that needed to be raked up and put out in the street for the yard waste pickup tomorrow. Then it was time to mow the lawn as I had put it off until now anyway. Don't forget to blow off the sidewalk and driveway, there, all done. Whew, I'm whooped. Time to go inside and get some of that water we had bought in case we lost power and had to go into survival mode. At least we won't need as much groceries this week as we normally would. The best part of this whole business is that all the supplies we stacked up in the kitchen are the same that we would use anyway so they won't need buying again. That is unless there is another hurricane around the corner. Which I don't believe there is so now we just sit back and hang out studying our Navigator plans until we can start buying some plywood and lumber.

So til then, 

Geoff

Avast maties, batten down the hatches!!

Back in the days of square rigged sailing ships, whenever there was a storm or bad weather, the Captains' cry was to "batten down the hatches!!" This involved actually covering the deck hatches with heavy canvas and then wooden strips of boards like firing strips crisscrossing the hatch and then tying it up securely with ropes to keep out water and debris. Well in our modern day we don't use canvas and wooden strips but we do use other methods. I won't be discussing those here today.

Here we are quietly halfway through the hurricane season (June 1st to November 31st) and suddenly we are looking down the barrel of hurricane Irma. With the enormity of this particular storm people are more seriously looking at preparing for the possible impact of this force 4 natural event. All of the home improvement stores are running out of plywood, batteries, and generators. Gas stations are running out of gas. Supermarkets shelves are empty of food and water and those who are in the possible direct impact areas are crowding the highways to get out of the way, turning four lane interstates into long lines of stopped/parked vehicles. Hotels and motels as far as several states away are booked up with reservations of those fleeing the storm zones.

We may yet be several days away from the actual hit of Irma, but with todays technology, weathermen have the ability to narrow down the possible paths of destruction as the storm gets ever closer. As it looks now, the storm may very well just go up the east coast of Florida and then up into Georgia or South Carolina. It could also make landfall in south Florida and go right up the middle of the state, but at this point it looks as if it might not turn into the gulf which means that there is a good chance that Panama City will be spared. That is important to me because that's where my sweet wife and I live. Of course we feel relieved but there is a nagging in the back of my mind that we are woefully unprepared, even if we didn't take a direct hit, for the devastation that could result. Those poor people, and I don't mean "poor" as in financially poor, but poor as in devastated by the storm, in Puerto Rico may be without electricity for as long as 4 months!!! How do you cook and eat or wash and live without power for that long? That's alot of scratching and scraping to get by and just stay alive. This even doesn't take into consideration injury and disease. Where is all that technology without electricity to run it?

With all our technology and advanced lifestyles, many, if not most, people don't have the skills needed to survive, let alone get by anymore. Those are the vague memories of our grandparents not of our own. With all of our societies advances we still are living at the mercy of nature. For all the fancy shining and glittering dodads and thingamabobs with their buzzing and whirring, we have thrown away the old ways of getting things done and the self reliance of our pioneer forefathers. There is a saying that was used around the turn of the century late 1800's early 1900's, went like this,"Keep the old as long as it is good and only take the new when it is better". I do believe there is an argument there for the old ways of survival that we seem to have cast aside in favor of the new fangled thingamabobs. Just my $.02.

With my hatches battened down as best I can, and keeping a weather eye out, ....

Geoff

WOOHOO!!! The new phone books are here!!!

Well not exactly, but I am excited as my Navigator plans have arrived!!!

Oooooooo, a very mysterious box. Could this be them?

Well I guess it sure is!! Boy o boy, am I happy to see you there.












And would you look at this .........

 Just what the Dr. ordered, a metric tape measure so I don't have to wrack my pea sized brain to convert those measurements from metric to fractions. My goodness what a pain that would be, and how many errors would be introduced as well? Far too many for sure, as I remember I wasn't all that good with fractions in school, of course that was at least 40 years ago so even that memory is suspect.

So now the hard work of trying to familiarize myself with Mr. Welsford's ways on paper. I plan on taking most of the month if not more to read and reread the instructions and put them together with the plans drawings to make sure I understand exactly what he wants to be done. I don't want to get out in the water and suddenly discover that I didn't quite get something right, ya know what I mean? I'm sure there will be questions turn up that will have to go to the forum to get a better understanding of something, and I'm prepared for that.

I'm also beginning to question the using of marine plywood as opposed to b/c exterior ply. Something Mr. Welsford wrote toward the end of the instruction sheets. "The more money you have invested in your boat the less fun it is". I kinda get that, it was something that I learned when I used to go weekend drag racing when I lived up in Connecticut back in the 70's. One of the guys I shared a garage/shop with only spent the most money on the most expensive parts and in 2 years never raced once. Don't get me wrong here, his car looked beautiful, but didn't leave the garage. Mine, well it didn't look very good at all, but it ran great. A quarter mile in 11.21 seconds at 126.7 miles per hour from a standing start. I had a lot of fun with that car, had some trials but over all mostly fun. I guess my point is that you don't always need the best of everything to enjoy something. I want to be able to have fun with my Navigator without worrying that it might get nicked or scratched or something, as long as I feel confident it's built properly and will handle as it should. Strength and utility, a work horse type, like the commercial fishing boats you see at the docks. Not those "gold platers" that you never see leave the dock.

After all is said and done no one rags on Steve Early's Spartina for her "work boat" finish, or Joel Bergen's Ellie for using rustoleum for paint. I see lots of viewers of their blogs rave about how good looking their boats are and I agree wholeheartedly, I just hope mine will sail as good as theirs and the finished product will be acceptable to me. Ya gotta know when to say that's good enough.

Well 'nuff said, I'm beginning to ramble and that's not a good thing.


Geoff

In case you were wondering.........

This isn't the beginning of this blog page. Oh yes it has begun but it "actually" started back in the summer of 2016, with our move from Colorado Springs back to Florida for the fourth time. We do like Florida, my wife and I that is. So with that move I had decided that this time I was going to build the boat of my dreams, John Welsford's NAVIGATOR. I have gone round and round first a Navigator then a PATHFINDER, also one of John's designs, then back to the Navigator, then Pathfinder and etc. for a very long time. Years actually, and even off into other designers and other designs but kept coming back to a Navigator. You really want to know how crazy this got? I even allowed my oldest son to talk me into buying a used production sailboat that needed work as a means to "get on the water faster". That boat was a 1982 Catalina C22, a good design and sailor, very popular and plentiful to find but in the end it wasn't "built " by me and it wasn't a Navigator. So I donated it to the local marine institute for troubled kids after spending more than what I originally paid for it buying most of the necessary pieces and parts to fix it. This happened just this past July, then looking at my blog page and thinking "what a mess I am making out of this blog business". Only one thing to do and that is to wipe it all out and "start again"! So I did.

So messed up was I that I had restarted this blog with the decision to build yet a different boat!! Then reading an email from someone who had built one already, he mentioned that he was looking at some designs for a "retirement boat" to build when he had plenty of time and no place special to go. I said to myself, "Hey! I'm retired with plenty of time and no place special to go, and I want to build a boat, so why not finally build that Navigator I've always wanted to build?" Well I couldn't give myself a good enough reason for not building it so here we go again, whadayathink I came up with? That's right, I'm going to build the Navigator, and I've ordered the plans already and they should be here by Tuesday the day after Labor Day.

All that stuff in the first post about Michalak's Ladybug, as they say in Brooklyn, fagetaboutit. The journey to the realization of a lifelong desire is under way.


Geoff

In the beginning, again.....

Here it is, August 2017, I've just passed my 66th birthday and I still have yet to even finalize a choice of which boat to build, let alone get any building done. I know, "what a wuss, just pick one! Any one of them would be plenty good enough for what you will wind up using it for." And you're right, either of them would be just fine. However I find myself torn between the one that thrills my sight and the one which would probably have the best chance of being built (read that as finished and sailed, with reasonable regularity). So here's the short list of choices, one of John Welsfords designs either the Pathfinder or Navigator, or perhaps something a little more modest, like Jim Michalak's Ladybug.

Yeah, I get it. How can these boats really compete with each other? I don't really know myself. First off, the Pathfinder is like the dream come true boat. It has all the looks I desire as well as the capability and practicality I would want with the Navigator only next because it's just slightly smaller by about a foot and a half. But along with that beauty and brawn comes a higher price tag and complexity of construction which leads to increased build time and a possibility of not being able to finish before I am unable to use it (wow, did I really say that?) So in comes a Ladybug. Only a few inches shorter than the Navigator in length and beam, but a simpler and less complex build plan and still capable of what I would hope to do with it when finished, and anywhere from 1/2 to 2/3's less construction time which will result in a considerably smaller price tag.

So here I sit, facing most likely a self induced dilemma, after all it's only time and money and I'm still reasonably mobile and competent, so you say, "make a choice already, while you still draw breath!". So here it is, I guess I've just talked myself into building a Ladybug by Jim Michalak. Although I really do love the looks of JW's Pathfinder and Navigator. I'm a sucker for a classic old boat look with a Gaff rig and a mizzen. Like I said the dream boat.

Oh well, onward and ..... you get the idea. When the first of the month rolls around I intend to purchase the plans for Michalak's Ladybug and see about where and when I might be able to start in. I hope to keep track of not only the construction but also the time and the cost. However I am not always so good at that part of the business. I tend to be more about getting on with it and the rest seems to get forgotten. I will honestly try to keep up that side of it. Besides maybe one day I'll build that Pathfinder or Navigator after all.


Geoff