Anchor hold-downs

I want to be able to anchor, and I don't want the anchor to be moving around in the boat when it's not in use, so I made a little spot for it in the forward compartment:

The hook-and-loop material is industrial strength and thanks to my friend Vladi.

The black stuff under and behind is some salvaged foam material.

Of course, all the scrapes and new work will be painted up. The anchor is a 2kg (4.4lbs) Bruce.

Today I took everything off that I've been so busy fastening on: oarlocks & oar sockets, rudder & rudder fittings, decks, leeboard brackets, bow ring. Getting ready to turn her over and do the bottom. I was going to totally finish the top first, but it's too cold for paint, so I'll do some fibreglassing instead.

Stowage racks, hatch buckle

I wanted to have a place to keep little things that would otherwise be rattling around in the cockpit. Things like a VHF marine radio, iPad, cell phone—everything in sealed containers so they won't get wet—sun screen, water and food items: stuff that comes along with a day's outing. So I made some magazine rack-style holders with open bottoms so they won't collect water:

I also finally got the fibreglass forward hatch cover to fit, and made a strap to hold it on:

The strap is auto seatbelt material, each side fastened to the foredeck with bolts through a piece of aluminum (and the end of the strap), with plywood backing on the underside of the deck and the usual washers and Nylock nuts.

The buckle is a "dual adjust" style, meaning that the webbing can be tightened down from either side.

I actually made a flat plywood hatch cover same as the aft hatch cover after I first saw the fibreglass one on the boat and didn't like it much. It turned out that I disliked the flat one more than the glass one, so glass it is. Thing with the aft hatch cover is that it needs to be flat so the tiller can swing over it without having to be ridiculously high.

Tiller done, board ballast

I took the tiller home and gave it four coats of varnish, hanging over my bath tub. In the end I decided that the quick-release cleat for the down-haul was too big for the tiller, and also probably unnecessary. I went with a simple jamb cleat.

The white webbing is the attachment for the main sheet block. It's held on by one screw and washer on the underside of the tiller.

Board Ballast

I had the idea that since the board was solid foam and thus very buoyant, I ought to weight it somewhat, as I wanted to lessen its effect on the boat's trim. I found the area of the foil section (roughly) by taking a scale drawing and filling it with rectangles and triangles whose areas I calculated. I multiplied that by 40" to find its volume, and worked out that it displaces about 16 lbs of water (the board is 48" long, and I expect that 40" in the water would be close enough to average).

John had given me a chunk of lead which I weighed and found to be 5¼ lbs. I thought it felt very heavy, and that I wouldn't want more than that. To make sure, I tied the piece of lead in a bag to the board and threw them in the water at a dock. The board floated very high, so I'm okay: it won't sink to the bottom! 😀

That foam is very tough stuff. Maybe you can see the glass hairs everywhere in it. I had flattened the lead somewhat by whaling on it with a hammer. As usual, I didn't take a photo of the final part, darn.

Where to store the oars?

This is something Phil Bolger agonized over as he designed his smaller vessels. And he made sure that his design somehow provided a good place to keep the oars aboard while sailing, where they wouldn't get in the way.

This particular design leaves that to the builder to figure out. It was something I tried to get a handle on right from the time I first saw the design on Duckworks. For me, it helps to have the three-dimensional model to work with, since I'm mostly a two-dimensional designer. So having the oars and the boat there in 3D allowed me to get a bit of a grip.

I didn't want to leave the oars in the oarlocks, with the handles sticking out and the blades sitting on the forward or after deck. Too sloppy for me, and inviting a line like the sheet to get hooked on the oar handle and cause who-knows-what weirdness. However, if the oars were loose in the cockpit, they'd either take up the seats, or get underfoot in the foot-well.

But at least, if they're in the foot-well, I'll have the seats! I decided to keep them off the floor, and having decided that, thought that they could even be used as hiking toe-holds, a substitute for hiking straps.

So I made sockets for the handles and positioned them at the after end of the cockpit so that the oar would be about bench level:

 In order to use the oars for hiking (who knows, I may never! 😁), they had to be secured so that they wouldn't lift up or rotate, so I made stops shaped like the number seven and its mirror, to contain the blades at the forward end of the cockpit, with an elastic cord to lift them up into the stops.

The seat top is higher off the bottom of the boat at the forward end of the cockpit (that's why I decided that the blades should be forward rather than aft), and it just happened that the oar blades have enough room to slide down beside the mast step and pivot into the stops. I wanted the stops to be the same height as the width of the blades so that the oars wouldn't rotate.

To store an oar, the handle is first inserted in the socket at the after end of the cockpit. The blade is then wiggled past the mast partner and the cleat, pushed down into the cradle of the elastic cord, and pivoted so that the elastic pulls it up into the stop.

This arrangement makes the cockpit narrower:

But the advantages are that the seats are free, the oars aren't rolling around underfoot, there's space for feet underneath them, and they can possibly be used as toe-holds for hiking. I think there will be just enough room to crouch between the oars when one needs to.

The blade stops are made of yellow cedar. What lovely stuff to work with! Aside from how fragrant it is, it carves smoothly since it has virtually no noticeable grain. In the photo below, the stand-in mast shows how the forward end will look with the mast stepped and oars shipped:

This idea may not work and I might have to abandon it after a trial, but I think it's worth a try.

Third tiller

The first tiller was hacked out of a two-by-four, and I didn't like it, so I made one with layers of mahogany plywood. But the glue job was too sloppy, as I was gluing multiple layers simultaneously, and pieces shifted relative to one another. I thought I might be able to grind it into shape with a grinder, but it came out "skew-wift". So I set it aside and made another, layer by layer, with a slightly different design.

The red line is the rudder blade down-haul line in this photo. It will be snubbed in a quick-release jamb cleat mounted on the port side of the tiller. I realized that the up-haul and down-haul lines for the rudder blade needed to go from the blade to the pivot point of the tiller, so that the line length doesn't change appreciably as the tiller is tilted up. Because the tiller is so long, it would get in the way of rowing if it were not able to be tilted up.

The quick-release cleat allows the rudder blade to pivot up when it hits something, otherwise it's held down so that there is always helm control. I don't trust a blade that's just held down by an internal weight, since some unforeseen event could make it rise at a time when it would be needed most. This way, it needs a solid bump to release it.

The up-haul line will follow the same path along the tiller, ending at a jamb cleat on the starboard side of the tiller.

We had our first dusting of snow today, and the coming week looks like it will be wintery-cold, so I'll probably bring the tiller home and varnish it here, and I might even make the sail! The materials are in a pile awaiting my action.

Oarlock sockets, oars

The design of this boat is ideal for implementing Phil Bolger's oarlock socket, which is a pair of metal plates on the top and bottom of the gunnel/rub rail, tied together with bolts:

I first made four aluminum rectangles. I put a metal cutting blade in the table saw and took a 1½" slice off a piece of John's scrap aluminum. Sliced that into four rectangles 4½" long, clamped them together and rounded the corners with a grinder.

Drilled one of the bolt holes with the pieces clamped together as above, then put a bolt through that hole and clamped the bundle with a tightened nut. After the second bolt hole was drilled, a bolt went through that, which also got a tightened-down nut on it. With the plates all held together tightly, I drilled the big ½" hole for the oarlock pin. All drilling was done on a drill press, so that the holes were aligned vertically.

I took off the top corners of the plates with a grinder, then used various grades of sandpaper to finish the pieces smooth.

It was a bit of a challenge to drill freehand and match the top and bottom plate holes, but it seems to have worked. I stood one of those little carpenter's squares up close to the target area, and kept lining the drill up against it, from the side as well as the front, trying to drill as straight down as possible. After the plates were bolted top to bottom, I drilled the ½" hole for the pin through the gunnel. I had to do a bit of reaming with a round file after that, as well as whittling the bottom of the nylon pin a hair thinner, as it was jamming when the oarlock was dropped in.

The oars are mainly finished; mostly just fine sanding left to do. I'm thinking I'll paint them, since neither the wood nor the woodwork are very attractive. I'm waiting for warmer weather before doing any more painting.

I'm leaving the handles octagonal and unpainted. I was asked why the handles have such a small diameter. I started out with larger handles on the oars I made for my sliding seat canoe, but found that my hands were going numb after a length of time (I was on a camp-cruise, rowing six hours a day). I had read somewhere about using smaller handles to avoid that, so I made those even smaller than these are, and it worked.

The corners of the octagonal handles provide a better grip than round, especially if one is feathering the oars. I'm not planning to row this boat as much I did the sliding seat canoe, so hopefully I won't come up against the numbness part. Leaving the handles unpainted gives better grip, and means no blisters. If one rows enough without gloves, the wood gets seasoned with body oils.

The looms are square so that the oars are more balanced. This is an old East coast design that was favoured by the great Pete Culler, who designed and built many beautiful, practical boats of various sizes, large and small.

I'm planning to make a cut in the top of the oarlocks, so I can put the oars into them, since they won't go over the square looms, and since I don't want to mess with the design of the oars. I will re-work the shapes of the looms and use a new set of oarlocks, if I find that I've made the oarlocks unusable or unsafe by cutting the tops open.

Always grateful to John Booth for the use of his shop!