Kaimusailing
s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran
| Vessel Name: | Kaimu |
| Vessel Make/Model: | Wharram Custom |
| Hailing Port: | Norwalk, CT |
| Crew: | Andy and the Kaimu Crew |
| About: | Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area. |
17 April 2024 | St Marys, GA
Dinghy Skeg
I was suffering with what seemed like a cold and also had allergy symptoms. I awoke and felt fine. The green pollen that was coating everything was gone. Maybe it will return.
07 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Clammy Hands
Items came in from TEMU, the Chinese cut rate retailer. One was a nice little drone that cost about twelve and a half dollars. It looked like an easy thing to play with while I coughed and sneezed. I was fighting a summer cold, even though it is not summer elsewhere, it seems like it here. A nice [...]
02 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Sun Doggie
After laminating the cedar strips onto the gunwales of the dinghy I found the screws I used wouldn’t come out. The epoxy had seized them. The screw heads were stripped so I cut a straight slot in the heads with the cut off wheel. The cedar smoked when the screw heads got red hot. I could remove [...]
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Just Add Water
The rainy weekend started off with overcast and fog but no rain. It looked like I might be able to get something done on the D4 dinghy. I wanted to change the bow seat which is really the bow deck. The sailing option uses the deck to hold the freestanding mast. I didn’t like how the deck looked, [...]
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
D4 Dinghy Alternative Seats
The rain event was more wind than rain, strong winds with gusts up to 44 mph. We drove into town to see what the harbor was like. There was a small sailboat that had dragged anchor and was sitting close to shore. The tide was out. We left and played with Bleu at Notter’s Pond.
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
D4 Inside Seams
Day two of the dinghy build started out with me finishing wiring the hull bottoms together on the centerline of the bottom panels. This was much easier than the wiring of the chine edges of the bottom panels and the side panels.
The Birth of the Tar Baby
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After more attempts to dislodge and remove the foam inside the mast I decided to move on. I had removed some foam and a long piece of PVC pipe. The length of the pipe indicated that it ran only partially within the mast. The wiring it contained must have exited the mast at a point much higher than what I will use. This had been a keel stepped mast and now it will be deck stepped.
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The new anchor light mounts on a flat surface with three screws and has a center hole in the base for wiring. The mast has a protruding conduit at the top of about 3/4” diameter, perfect for mounting the anchor light. A thick piece of plexiglass was drilled with a holesaw to make a disc just a little smaller than the base of the light. A second smaller holesaw blade was used, centering in the same pilot drill hole, to make a 3/4” hole in the center of the disc. The light was disassembled and used as a template to drill pilot holes for the 3 mounting screws. The light was reassembled and mounted on the conduit temporarily. Perfect.
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The conduit will have to be trimmed down to allow the windex wind direction arrow to clear it. The windex mounts with the VHF antenna at the aftmost part of the masthead. A bolt goes through the masthead to hang the blocks for the main halyard and main topping lift.
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The old steaming light, an Aqua Signal series 40, was OK after cleaning it up, so it was mounted just above the spreaders on the front of the mast. A section of the mast that was cut off the base was used as a form to hammer the Aqua Signal “Quickfits” bracket to match the curve of the front of the mast. The bracket was then blind riveted using 3/16” stainless blind rivets.
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The eye straps to mount the staysail and genoa halyard blocks were mounted using 5/16” bolts tapped into the front of the mast. One of the straps decided to take a swim so I got my grabber tool to fish it out of the shallow water. It was too murky to see it, but for some reason I probed the mast with the grabber and grabbed a piece of foam and pulled it out.
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I was able to remove a bunch of foam, then tried pushing the remaining foam to the spreader mounting hole which was where I had removed it. I was successful. It was difficult to pull the foam out through the mounting hole, about 1 1/4 inches diameter. It was like the mast was giving birth. The foam was soaked with water and brown looking. Obviously some small animals had used the mast as a home. When the foam came out of the hole it sprang out and brown water spewed everywhere. A total of about 10 gallons of foam came out. Capn Ed had returned from a sail and asked what was that brown mass of stuff sticking out of the mast. I said the mast was giving birth to a tar baby. The photo is from the 1920's Brer Rabbit getting stuck in the tar.
