We took a weekend off for sailing lessons in Casco Bay. It happened to be the hottest days of summer. We had a good time.

Finally, Something Goes Wrong

Trouble 
Oh trouble set me free 
I have seen your face 
And it’s too much too much for me

Trouble 
Oh trouble can’t you see 
You’re eating my heart away 
And there’s nothing much left of me

Cat Stevens

Unfortunately, it happened to Patty. We were talking about how to use the chines to scribe the keelson, and she flexed the port chine inwards to the keelson, and it broke in her hands at the scarf. She was mortified. I told her I was glad it had broken. However, I was making lemonade out of lemons too quickly. She needed time to feel it. I went to the starboard chine and flexed it, and it cracked at the frame. Again, I am glad they broke. It gave us a chance to fix it rather than build a fragile boat. She offered to pick up the materials the next day and of course, I agreed. I figured we could just cut and scarf between station seven and eight with a couple of 8-foot pieces and have all the flex we needed.

The next day I came back and asked her what she had felt at that moment. She was embarrassed and felt like she had delayed my dream, and like she was not a full partner in the project. So we talked that through since that was not how I was feeling. Interestingly Patty tends to make the lemonade first.

You can see that I ran the scarf in a different direction. I also reinforced it with screws. Interestingly by flexing the sticks during the glue curing and the angle of the scarf worked together to help form the fair curve. I felt doubtful about them and speculated on using epoxy and glass to remove any question. However, that was not necessary, and the lesson learned was that scarf was viable and likely a better way to do the chines and sheers.

So that we did not screw up the keelson, we used blue foam board to mock up a pattern. This confluence of boards all meeting at the stem was challenging to think through and execute in wood. We have been saying all along “It is just wood!” However, messing up the keelson felt a little more serious. Taking the time to make the template allowed us to be more confident with cutting the wood. We used the new backsaw, a regular handsaw, and a surform rasp. Sharp and new tools take the sting out of using hand tools. 

The next task was to custom fit frames one and nine since we had left them out of the original lineup. We did that intentionally. With frame nine, I felt better letting the wood take natural curves and then building a frame to support that, rather than putting more pressure on the longitudinals at an already complicated confluence. In the instructions, Jeff suggests doing frame one differently. However, we could not see how to make it work. In this picture, Patty is installing the floor frame. Later Em and I cut and fit the wall frames you can see it below at station one just after the transom.