Kaimusailing

The laptop pooped the bed, so I have to scurry around with alternatives. Not as bad as typing on the phone.
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I flipped the dinghy over and positioned it to work on the inside. The epoxy was going off in the heat almost imme⁰diately, so I moved the epoxy workstation under the catamaran, in the shade. A mix of "glue hard", colloidal silica with some fiberglass mill ends in epoxy, was smooshed under the ends of the seats and any place that might need some extra reinforcement. The temperature was soaring and I took breaks in between the work.
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The areas under the seats and in the bow and stern were painted with Rustoleum gloss white with a brush, then a Chinese roller was used to paint all the flat areas. Finally I painted the inboard surfaces of the bow and stern transoms with some of the leftover gloss almond paint.
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The next day I put another coat of white on the interior. It was hot and the paint dried almost immediately. I was having heat problems and took many rest breaks during all this. After putting on the second coat of white and taking a break I decided to install the oarlocks. The procedure is to drill a fine drill that the screws of the installation will follow, but drill again with a large drill, not too deep, which will get filled with epoxy and fiberglass mill ends. The idea is that the screws will get into the deep fine holes and be encapsulated with the epoxy mixture elsewhere. I used some JB Weld structural epoxy because I didn't need too much and it said it was rated for 2 tons. I mixed it with "Glue Hard" and put the oarlocks on the rub rails. Gunwales.
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Heat has a bad effect on me. I can work for 5 minutes and then have to take about 10-15 minutes break. Chest pains could be an after effect from the Ole Mole Chili Dogs. Take a break, drink some more warm water.
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I drilled more holes in the bow and stern transom. I needed something to grab at the bow and also at the stern. I also needed a lifting harness to bring this dinghy on board, using one of the halyards. My solution was to drill two holes at the bow and stern and thread a 3/8" line all around, tie in a good square knot. I could use the lines to lift the dinghy and if we were going to bring the dinghy to the water, there was now a grip line at the bow and stern.
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I ran across a 2 hour interview with Greg Lemond on YouTube and could watch it while I was waiting for other things. His story is one of calamity. Recovering from leukemia. He's the reason many of us, me included, got more serious into cycling back in the 80's and 90's. He was gifted and just burst his way into international cycling, from America, no one else could do what he did. He challenged and beat Bernard Hinault, the French national champion, who was duplicitous. Americans were not held in regard by the French. Lemond beat Hinault, suffered a broken wrist, and while recuperating was shot by shotgun by his brother-in-law while hunting turkey. He only survived because a police helicopter was in the area.
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However unlikely it may seem, after being dropped by his sponsors, Lemond recovered. He was way out of shape and recovering from massive shotgun wounds, but he kept riding his bicycle. He went on to win a total of 3 Tour de Frances and a couple of World Championships. When he was not doing that well bicycle racing, he thought he had some kind of ailment. It turned out that cyclists were starting to use sophisticated doping. He quit when he could no longer compete.
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The next day I thought I would put the dinghy in and give it a row. The tide was out. It was hot again. I was out of bread and had a ham and cheese omelet for breakfast. I decided to wait for a high tide. Wouldn't be one till after 8PM.
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I had a reel of 3/8" dacron double braid line. The reel broke and the line became a snarl, all 70 fathoms of the remainder. I had tried to unsnarl the snarl and had some of it gathered snarl free and hung on the back of the dinghy. What a mess.
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What I learned from the bos'n's in the Navy was to flake out the line, all of it. There's no short cut. That's what I did with the first portion that I hung on the dinghy. Tedious. You take the bitter end and begin freeing it from the snarl. 70 fathoms is a long piece of line and of course you can't do all that in the heat at an advanced age. I left the bunch on the dinghy and started with the other end, hard to find in the snarl. After a while I was pulling out the bitter end and a length of line and flaking it down on the gravel of the boatyard. Then go back and pull it all through the snarl, maybe getting another yard of line out of it and having to flake it all down. Do it again. The heat would get to me and I could sit in the shade and work on the computer.
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The hard drive I had been using crashed after I erroneously swapped it while getting some books from another drive, Australian anthropology books.
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We focus on the ice age in North America, because it had a huge impact here. Meanwhile in Australia the First Nation, the Aborigines, not only lived and created oral tradition that exists now, but it was created during the ice ages, when Tasmania was connected to the mainland, and other places had stories about when the sea levels were lower.
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One oral tradition concerned a volcanic eruption of 3 craters. It happened 39 thousand years ago. A stone axe was found buried under the ash of the eruptions.
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The Aborigines have a concept called Dreamtime. It's like something that has existed for a very long time. Humans come and go in and out of the Dreamtime, sometimes go to it when they sleep. Their stories from long ago in the past center not on the people in the stories but the locations they travel through. This makes certain locations sacred.
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Going after some of these books crashed the hard drive that had all my recent stuff. Ephemeral.
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I panicked. My hard drive was dead. I had a spare chassis that I had given Cornelia Marie, but she gave it back, unused and not fully charged. I had that hard drive, which I thought was a clone of mine, and another older drive. I was facing an end of my endless amassed digital data. I appealed to Komputer Ken, I need the Navigatrix installation drive. He tossed it down to me.
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So I spent the time between unsnarling the 70 fathoms of line and trying to get my computer situation back. I found out I was missing a little harness on one of the hard drives. I had to use my defunct hard drive on a USB adapter to transfer files off of it, the ones that are indispensable. I had to make sure, the drive would be wiped and everything on it would be erased. The files were saved onto Cornelia Marie's hard drive. To use the hard drive on the laptop as a boot device it's best to have it installed in what's called a hard drive caddy. To use a hard drive as an external storage device it's best to use a USB3 adapter and not have the drive in the caddy. I had to be careful which drive was which.
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Eventually all was restored, but there was still a bunch of snarled line to unsnarl. The next day I unsnarled the rest of the line and begged for a ride to Harbor Freight to get a reel to wind up 70 fathoms of line. I bought two reels, one for the line and another for the 75 foot collapsible garden hose that will be put away when I leave for Crisfield.
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I borrowed a hand truck and used it to haul the dinghy to the dock after dumping out rainwater. We had had a serious front come through with lightning and high winds. The rain drenched my hoodie that I had left out. I twisted it against the boat cradle next door to get the water out and then left it in the now blue sky and sun to dry. The dinghy was unceremoniously cast into the water and led around the docks to a floating dock where I could climb into it. I went back and got the oars and oarlocks. A fellow was at the dinghy and wanted to talk about it. I got in and rowed about 500 feet to the dinghy dock where I tied it up.
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This was the first time in the water and I was curious about how it would trim out because I had substituted a copy of Chesapeake Light Craft's seating arrangement and I thought the middle seat was now too far forward. It turned out to be OK. If I had a passenger in the dinghy or a bunch of water and groceries it would trim out perfectly. As it was now with just me in it, the transom was not in the water, but the point of the transom, the keel, was immersed. The dinghy rowed easily. If I had a sailing rig on it, it would trim out perfectly. I dragged it up on the dinghy dock. People are so polite, even in a coarse boatyard. Your dinghy looks fabulous. Yeah, right.
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I had to take a break. Komputer Ken said he and Steve the Environmentalist were going to test their ARK, a remote controlled water vehicle that consumes trash from the water, later around 7PM.
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At around 6 I decided to go back to the dinghy, I was eager to try it out again. A kid was down on the dinghy dock, one of the twins from the big catamaran in the river. He had toilet paper and masking tape over his thumb. He had cut himself and that was his makeshift bandage. He wanted a ride out to the catamaran. I had no lifejacket on board and really didn't know how the dinghy would behave, although so far it was OK. We got in and began to row across the river to the big catamaran.
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There was a problem I noted, the rough Polish rustic oars I had made were jumping out of the oarlocks from time to time. Nothing was tied down and I was afraid of losing the oarlocks overboard. When we got to the catamaran they onboard were getting ready to go ashore in their high powered inflatable (deflatable) dinghy. His dad was holding his left arm close to his body. I stabbed myself he said. Like father like son. The kid climbed into the inflatable and they sped off to the dock we had just come from.
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I rowed back and tied up. I brought the oars and oarlocks back to Kaimu and the tools. The oarlocks had pins that could be driven through the shafts of the oars. Then you could lose an oar and an oarlock, but you wouldn't lose a loose oarlock. I drilled and pinned the oarlocks to the oars and added some clevis pins to secure them.
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I went back and rowed across the river to my old C&C 24, Trillium, which had been neglected by its next two owners. The sail cover was in tatters, the sail exposed to U/V. I rowed back and met Steve and Ken and their environmental craft. There were others gathering for a test of the remote controlled environment saving craft.
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The tattoo artist was there with a Stand Up Paddleboard with an electric jet drive, scooting around, showing off. A photographer was there with a drone following all the action. The ARK went across the river with its flashing lights, a suction mouth would drop into the water and a big paddle wheel would spin and throw surface water that would go through the device and be filtered or otherwise analyzed and returned to the environment. The drone followed all the way across and back. Impressive flight time.
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I had been out in the dinghy, but the gnats, the no-see-um's, were pestering and I docked the dinghy and called it quits. I took a few photos of the ARK and the sunset.
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The image is of the dinghy at the dinghy dock.

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.
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I had put a coat of epoxy on the interior of the dinghy and reinforced some areas that didn’t have proper fillets with improved fillet material, I call it “glue hard”. It’s colloidal silica with added fiberglass microfibers. When it sets up it’s like rock, impervious to ordinary tools. Best to shape it while it’s wet. Instead of dealing with that stuff the next day, I flipped the dinghy and worked on the exterior.
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First I sanded with the belt sander and the pad sander with 150 grit self adhesive paper. The hull was smooth with a lot of rough areas and divots. I dusted the hull, then made a mix of fairing compound. This consists of 50/50 colloidal silica/glass microspheres. I used a very large tongue depressor to mix and spread the mixture over the bottom of the hull. I did not try to create another layer on top of all the rest, just fill the weave in the fiberglass cloth and any rough spots.
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When I finished I thought I would sand and paint the exterior tomorrow. Then I realized I had forgotten about the skeg. Should I cut out a skeg and glue and screw it to the hull before painting? I will add it later. I want to see what the color, almond, looks like. Rain is coming again so I have to do what I have to do beforehand.
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Following the stock market involves following the Trump phenomenon, Truth Social, as it soared up to around 70 bucks a share when it was initially listed. The fundamentals indicated this stock has almost no value, gee, I should short it. Now, days later, it is around 40-50 dollars a share. I could not short it because there are no shares available to short. There is such a demand to short the stock that those who hold shares are not willing to part without a significant fee for anyone who wants to “borrow” shares to short. Perhaps there are Trump adherents who just want a stock certificate to frame and hang on the wall.
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My favorite stock now is Laird Superfoods. Nuff said. Clear One, a firm whose products I used during broadcast work, and who shot up when the pandemic forced people to telecommute and thus bought their products, now has a 50 cent dividend payable tomorrow. I can’t wait. There is a buy signal for it so I will hold.
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The next day I ran the grinders over the dinghy hull and applied a coat of Gloss Almond, from Rustoleum. I expected to see some irregularities but it was worse than I expected. There were patches where the glass weave was not filled and some dings here and there. I sent a photo to a couple of friends and one responded wonderful and the other said isn’t that just like the green dinghy you had before. No mention of the irregularities. The International Space Station, however, taking photographs of the recent total eclipse remarked there is a catamaran in Georgia with severe irregularities. Also no mention of the almond colored dinghy alongside it.
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I rushed ahead with the paint job because we have another rain event coming through early in the morning. Paint now or forever hold your brush. Most of the day will have some rain.
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In fact the rain event was a deluge. I planned to do my taxes indoors while the rain came through but by the time I got around to it the rain had stopped. I had been consoling Cornelia Marie over the phone because her sailboat engine and vehicle engine were acting up. Too much for her to deal with all at once. I retreated into the woodshop with the laptop and smart phone. My tax documents were downloaded somewhere on them and the wifi signal was strong in the woodshop.
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After going through all the ridiculous gathering of data to do my taxes I found out the tax prep service I was using was a sham, they wanted $66 for what should be a free simple tax preparation. I quit them and used Turbotax. Turbotax had some nice easy new features that made data acquisition very easy, except my newest Samsung upgrade had my .pdf files paired with Samsung Notes with no option available for the .pdf file apps I had been using since forever. The laptop’s battery died and I gave up on the woodshop. Back on board I used the phone. I still couldn’t open a .pdf but I could take a screen shot of it and use the .jpeg image with the Turbotax app. It took about 4 hours to do a very simple tax return.
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I was hungry and needed a quick meal. I tried the beaten egg in a bowl with boiling water thrown on it and made egg drop soup, adding ramen noodles and the chicken flavoring packet. Add some oyster sauce and sesame oil and it was acceptable. I knew I had to make a shopping list for some alternative meals. Chili dogs.
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The aftermath of the rain event was clearing skies and 40 mph winds. My allergies suddenly were going haywire. Either the winds were stirring up dust or pollen was coming in from the WNW. Maybe I was allergic to Kansas City.
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When I texted Komputer Ken about a shopping trip he said he was going to pick up Doc at the hospital in Jacksonville. Heart surgery. We returned to the boatyard and I borrowed the car to go shopping. $150 later I had ingredients for chili dogs as well as several other menu items. I forgot to get cabbage though.
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This time I started with a large skillet with a large onion, diced, drizzled with EVOO, and while it was starting to sautee, dusted it with chili powder, cumin, cocoa power, and a couple tablespoons of apricot preserves and peanut butter. A jar of chunky medium salsa went in and then 10 hot dogs. I used the boil/poach method so as to not burn the bottom of the pan. I had a couple chili dogs for dinner, donated a couple to my boatyard neighbor, and froze the rest.
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The next day I found a piece of 1X3 scrap lumber that I could use for a skeg on the dinghy. I quickly cut it with the correct angle and put it on the upside down dinghy. Perfect.
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I love meat balls but haven’t made any in a long time. I had bought some ground meat with that in mind. I also had kielbasa, but my plans to make soup with it were incomplete. Also there was a partial package of pepperoni from months ago. Pepperoni is forever.
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A very large onion was minced and thrown into a large skillet that already had a half cup of bread crumbs and two beaten eggs. The kielbasa was chopped with great difficulty. Try it. The pepperoni was also minced. Spices were added and the mixture was hand blended together with a pound of hamburger meat. When it was homogeneous it was formed into 13 meatballs. The skillet was wiped out and heated with EVOO.
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I could only fit 7 meatballs into the skillet and sauteed them, set them aside, then did the remaining 6. I set them aside.
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The remaining fat in the pan was not excessive so I sauteed diced onion for about 5 minutes, then added a tablespoon of minced garlic. Dusted with “Italian Spice Mix”. Added a large can of pureed tomatoes. Not Cento, too good for this experiment. The mixture in the pan was bubbling and I added as many meatballs that could fit without everything spilling all over the place. Tedious work.
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I began putting meatballs into zip lok bags, sauteed the last few in the sauce, bagged them all but one. Added the sauce to the bags, maybe a third of a cup to each one, and had the lone remaining meatball in a bowl with the remaining sauce. It was tasty. Not as good as Geoff’s.
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I ground away the paint on the centerline of the keel where the skeg should be. I washed the wood for the skeg and also cut off a pair of small diameter pvc pipe sections the length of the skeg. I waited a while to consider what I was planning to do. I made a small batch of epoxy and painted the skeg and the area it would be adhered to, then mixed some glue hard, smeared a bunch of it on the skeg, screwed it down, then formed the excess smoothly along both sides of the skeg. I had limited time to work the epoxy due to the heat. I concentrated on making it all smooth enough to encapsulate it later with a layer of glass and more epoxy.
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The next day it was hot and the epoxy would go off in a short time. I cut a triangle of glass to cover the skeg, soaked it with epoxy and the area it would be glued down. I used the pieces of pvc on either side of the skeg to keep the glass situated while the epoxy went off. I had dry clamped all this previously. I mixed the rest of the epoxy with 50/50 silica/glass microspheres and faired some rough spots on the hull. The heat of the day caused the mix to go off too soon. The fairing of the rough spots resulted in an even rougher finish than when I started.
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The image is of the newly installed skeg.

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 old gentleman was sitting with me on the Pandemic Porch where I was placing the drone, preparing to take off. He was interested in the drone and babbled about his nephew or son-in-law who used a drone to make videos of properties for sale. I read the Chinese manual and started the drone. It flew in my neighbor’s direction and he camplained, it almost hit me.
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I tried again. The controller had a button to try to correct for the crazy flight. This time it soared off and I panicked, what could I do, it zoomed up and took a turn for Rocky’s shop. It crashed into it. Everybody laughed. I put it away.
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I was feeling poorly and didn’t have energy to continue with the drone. I regressed into hunker down mode.
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The news was that the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after a ship rammed it. From what I know now, the accident was a freak event, the pilot and the crews that man the ship have contingencies for almost anything that can happen. When they lost power and propulsion they were able to alert the local authorities about 90 seconds before the impact. Traffic was halted by the sheriffs and the only people on the bridge were a pot hole repair crew who ended up in the drink, in Patapsco River water that was frigid enough to kill anyone in minutes, this at 1:30AM.
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While I was under the weather I was under the weather. A storm came through with a tornado warning and I hunkered in. All my tools were under cover, mostly, and I lay down in my bunk to suffer. Eloisa called me, we are here. I had to get up and go down to see her. She was upset. Her windshield wipers were stuck. We had worked on replacing her spark plugs and that required removing the cowling that held the wiper motor and the wiper motor electrical connection had to be disconnected.
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The spark plug replacement on this vehicle, a Ford Windstar, is a nightmare, which continues afterwards.
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I took the windshield wiper arms off and Eloisa cycled the wipers. I put one wiper on and she cycled them again. I put the other wiper on. She cycled again. They seemed to mechanically be assembled correctly. Then she tried other settings of the wipers and they intermittently ran or stopped all over the place.
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I washed the grease off my hands and tried the wiper control myself. There was obviously a problem, but if you ran the wipers on speed 8 they operated normally, and you could stop them at speed 1, then shut them off. Other speeds were erratic. We had the company of Geoff, the genius phd chemist, who can also fix almost anything, and he looked at things. Eloisa went off for the evening. Geoff said, I think that little connector that you can’t find a plug for might be the problem.
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The front, with a tornado warning, came through, thunder and lightning, big rain, dripping from the same old drip on the overhead hatch. No tornadoes.
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The next day was wet and overcast. I stayed in and began the cure for the common cold, wait it out for a few days.
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Eloisa was up in the mountains to “take care of business”. I wasn’t up for any fun anyway. I felt like I had the flu and was coughing up phloem prodigiously. I had once had bronchitis during a bad allergy season and this seemed the same. It was difficult to sleep, so when I did sleep, usually in the morning, I stayed in my bunk and got the most of it. I could get no work done and the weather and gnat swarms didn’t help.
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Geoff was relaunching his beautiful yacht for the upcoming trawler fest in Fernandina and his near neighbor was in the yard with his trawler just 50 feet away from Kaimu. I hope I am well and can visit the event, even though I don’t have a trawler.
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The SailGP racing series went to Christchurch, New Zealand, and I found a synopsis of the highlights on YouTube. The announcers sound like they are calling a horse race. The racing is exciting and if you like watching sailboats race, and who doesn’t, try it out. The USA team has recently changed its crew and they are obviously learning how to handle the boat. New Zealand won the final race on their home waters.
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I had no appetite, didn’t go out to the restaurants, and didn’t go shopping, just lay low and let time cure the cold or whatever it is. I ran out of wine and coffee. I gutted it out for a couple days. I was running out of my already meager supply of food. I could still make a mean ham and cheese omelet sandwich for breakfast but when din-din came around I simply didn’t eat, I wasn’t hungry. Then I had a night of really bad coughing, etc. I was getting worried. If I went to the health clinic it would be the VA clinic and I would have to get permission from the Maryland clinic at Pocomoke to visit the one here in St. Marys. At least I have it available as a last resort.
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I was able to try some work on the dinghy. When the rains came I had to turn it upside down to prevent it filling up with water. The last storm dumped about 3 inches of rain. While it was upside down I worked on the bottom and the bottom edges of the gunwales. Epoxy fairing mix was applied to any divots. The next day I could smooth the patches with the angle grinder with flap disk and pad sander. The bottom edge of the gunwales was rounded with these tools after I marked where the oarlock sockets would be mounted, where the gunwale had to remain square.
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Next I turned the dinghy upright and began working on the top outside edges of the gunwales the same way. The ends of the gunwales at the bow and stern were blended into the shape of the hull. Work was interrupted by rest breaks which included flying the new little drone.
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I found on YouTube how to properly set up the drone. Unlike the fractured instructions that came with it, the video showed a gyro calibration button. If you don’t calibrate the gyro the drone immediately goes haywire and becomes a Japanese Kamikaze killer, not the cheap meek Chinese drone clone. It is, I think, a clone of the Mavik Pro Drone. Of course it isn’t as good, but I haven’t flown the real thing. The clone drone has 3 speeds. Supposedly on the higher speeds it will have enough power to fight the breeze, which my old Bugs2 could do, but I found even a light breeze would make it difficult to hold position. I’ve been meeting more boatyarders who are either annoyed that I’m flying into their air space or happy to have some entertainment at my expense. Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing, I am told. The drone cost $12.98 from TEMU.
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I finally felt well enough to go shopping and Komputer Ken said he was going to the hardware store and he’d take me along. We had a nice chat, hadn’t been out on the road with him for some time. I chatted about clam farming. It was my new food obsession. When I was really low on available food and didn’t want another ham and cheese sandwich or peanut butter, I made a quick soup, like a Thai clam chowder.
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I put about a cup of water in a bowl with some instant tom yum paste, about a heaping teaspoon, and microwaved it till it was boiling. In a second bowl I scrambled an egg, then poured the hot water into the bowl. Instant egg drop soup, but then the clams went in as well as some sesame oil. It was surprisingly tasty, but maybe I was starving by that time and would eat anything.
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The YouTube clam farming videos were from Cedar Key, of course, and from Virginia’s Eastern Shore, just South of Crisfield. Another came from Vietnam or Philippines. They showed the process of incubating the tiny, microscopic, clam larvae, nursing them along, and then letting them grow up in the local waters. They need no food at this stage, they filter feed, and as a result, the local waters get cleaned up. Of course the local waters cannot be polluted.
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The image is of clam harvesting from the Associated Press, photographer Alvaro Barrientos.

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 them with a straight blade screwdriver now.
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We had another rain forecast so Komputer Ken helped me flip the dinghy over, bottom side up. Everything else was covered or put away. The weather pattern is a few dry days then a front coming through with rain and thunder. It was remarkable how much rain fell. At least 3 inches.
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With the dinghy upside down I could run the flap disk on the underside of the gunwales. There were other small spots here and there that needed cleaning up with the disk. Someone said “looking good” and I said they needed eyeglasses.
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Because I stupidly installed the seats and their crossbeams without priming them with epoxy I now had to figure out a way to apply the epoxy. It would be impossible with the dinghy right side up and to have enough room to fit myself into the upside down dinghy I would need to put it on taller sawhorses. I ended up laying the dinghy on its side propped up against the catamaran. It was still difficult to get a paint brush in under the seats, but I was able to apply a coat of epoxy.
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The wooden oars were also given a coat of epoxy.
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We were falling into a routine of going to Angelo’s, a small Italian restaurant near exit 3 of I-95 on Tuesdays when the place was not packed, as usual. We found their Pesto Pizza to be exceptional. It had both mozzarella and feta cheese. Eloisa remarked that it had no pesto on it, but I think all the ingredients were there, somewhere, maybe no pine nuts, but there was spinach and ham. I would never have thought of that combination of toppings. I said to the wait staff, I make pizza, and if I made one like this I would be very happy.
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Eloisa was describing a beach on Amelia Island and we decided to picnic at the beach. While on our way we stopped at a Publix market for wine and then I thought why bother trying to organize picnic snacks, let’s just get Cuban to go. We stopped at 1928 Cuban Bistro and she ordered the food. The total was $34, the wine total was about $12.
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She drove past the entrance to Fort Clinch State Park which surprised me. She said you have to see this beach. We went North on a semi paved road along a barrier sand dune and stopped at an access point where a wooden boardwalk with gazebos and picnic tables ran over the dune to the beach.
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No alcoholic beverages are allowed. We brown bagged the wine. A constant flow of beachgoers came and went. The sky had wispy cirrus clouds and a sun dog overhead. I took a photo.
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The vehicle had been running rough so we got a half dozen spark plugs, oil and oil filter, for an oil change. The procedure to replace the plugs seemed to be rather ridiculous. My guess is the Ford dealer would change the plugs using proprietary tools with the car on a lift. Our repair manual had a procedure that included removing the two cowlings that covered the windshield wiper motor and the air intake system for the cars ventilation.
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The plastic fasteners were impossible for me to remove. Geoff, the phd chemist, was working nearby on his Bayliner yacht and stopped by. He was able to remove the fasteners while I worked at replacing the 3 plugs on the front face of the engine. How many plugs have you replaced he asked. One. The plug wires were so seized onto the plugs that I was afraid I would damage the wires. We removed the windshield wiper blades and the two cowlings. The plugs on the rear of the engine were not visible. I had to feel around. Everything was so tight and seized. Geoff loaned me his Snap On ratchet drive which I quickly dropped into the abyss behind the engine. He ran off to get a jack.
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While Geoff was gone I was able to remove the rear plug wires using a short piece of wood to pry them off. I was able to change the plugs with my own ratchet. He came back and jacked the car up and retrieved his ratchet drive.
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The manual says to replace the spark plugs at 60,000 miles. It looked like the plugs were aftermarket, so probably were the second set installed on the car. The plugs we took out were very badly worn.
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We replaced the lower cowling and the wiper blades. A new ventilation filter was on order and we would put the upper cowling on after replacing the filter. The space under the cowlings was jam packed with leaves and other debris. We had vacuumed all that up.
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The next day we installed the filter and the upper cowling. The car was good to go with new oil. I was not feeling well with a lot of congestion, coughing, maybe it was the pollen which has been especially bad this year. Eloisa took Bleu to Crooked River State Park while I remained in the boatyard, under the weather.
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The photo is of the sun dog on that beautiful afternoon at the beach.

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, it was flat with straight edges.
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My idea was to follow through with my copy cat of the Eastport Pram seat arrangement. The flat square shaped deck with its crossbeam located right across the aft edge would be replaced with the same piece of plywood which has already been fit to the bow, but the crossbeam would be moved forward, forward of the mast which passes through the deck through a hole that is centered 3” forward of the aft edge of the deck. My idea was to cut away the deck in a curve so there would be one less straight line.
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I bent the deck over a ¾” piece of wood to see how much I could crown the top of the deck. It looked like I could crown it even more. I set up the crossbeam with temporary screws to bend a batten across the aft edge of the deck. The curve would pass through the center of the mast hole. In fact, there would be no more mast hole, just a semicircular indentation. The mast would fasten to the crossbeam. Maybe with a U-bolt.
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I dry fitted everything together and cut blocks to support the rear seat at the transom. I then disassembled everything and mixed up a batch of epoxy. All mating surfaces were coated with epoxy and the rest of the batch was mixed with “glue hard”, a mix of colloidal silica and glass microfibers. This mix was dabbed onto one side of mating surfaces. When I finished I began screwing things back together. The front deck was screwed to its crossbeam, the rear seat was screwed to its crossbeam, the centerboard case was screwed and clamped together, the middle seat was screwed to its crossbeam, and I finished the last of that batch of epoxy. I made another smaller batch and applied it in the same way to the top of the centerboard case, the top of the rear seat blocks, and any remaining mating surfaces.
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Next the deck was screwed in place at the bow and the rear seat was screwed in place at the stern. The middle seat was attached to the centerboard case and the whole apparatus was fastened into the hull. Thunder was starting off to the South and I quickly put away the power tools, flipped the dinghy on the saw horses, and covered everything else. Rain began pelting down. I had finished just in the nick of time.
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The front came through and I began work on the dinghy again the next day. The middle seat came loose, it was not completely glued in place. I removed it with the centerboard case attached and did more shaping with the angle grinder with a flap disk. The seat and case were then glued back into the hull. I used leftover epoxy mixed with colloidal silica and glass microspheres to fill any gaps and screw holes.
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While all this work was going on, maybe 2 hours a day, I was also trying my hand at day trading and if I made enough money, celebrating. Although I had no luck day trading when I first retired, now it was working very well. I thought about all that time my account had been sitting with the traders making 2% while in some cases a fund that they had purchased lost $6,000. There were several funds that were not in the black. The pandemic was particularly harsh.
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I picked up a cedar 2X4 from RPM lumber in Yulee, FL. 6 years ago I made a pair of wooden cedar oars. I now only had one of the pair, so I planned to make a replacement. No sense in having one cedar oar and nothing to match it. I also needed 1/4X1 ½ wood strips to laminate rub rails on the dinghy. To do that I cut 1/4X4 off the face of the 2X4 and cut that into 3 strips. After taking off two faces I had 6 strips and the leftover cedar, maybe a 1X4. That should leave enough to make an oar.
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After going over the dinghy with the flap disk to smooth epoxy blobs I added more epoxy/silica. The transoms were rounded over with the disk, carefully, then sanded with the pad sander. The centerboard slot was drilled with a very long drill, from the top, then that drill hole was expanded with a ½” drill, drilling from the bottom. A ½” straight laminate trimmer bit made a perfect slot for the centerboard.
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The leftover cedar 1X4, which is actually more like 1 1/4x4 was cut to around 62” and then in half to make a pair of sticks to make the handle of the oar. The remaining 4” wide piece was cut in two to make two halves of the blade. Pictures to follow.
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Eloisa loves wood storks and when we found that one of the two local breeding areas was right across the North River Marsh at the old paper mill site, she went there and counted about a dozen wood storks, some American ibis, osprey, and a bird she couldn’t identify, like a skimmer.
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Another front was forecast to come through and there was a tornado watch. I put things away and felt listless, like I was coming down with something. There is news of norovirus up North and some in the boatyard have had a sort of stomach flu. I had no appetite but wanted to get some food by mid afternoon.
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The clouds of the front were like cloud formations in the Caribbean. These signal the summer weather pattern. We went to the Southern River Walk where we were sitting under cover but had the sky open to us to the Southwest. It was early, before 4PM, and I had a plate of shrimp alfredo and ordered a bottle of pinot noir, the last one they had in stock. I felt better after having some food and wine.
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Geoff and Karen, phd chemists, arrived and joined us. Another couple from the St. Marys Yacht Club arrived and we had a full table with intelligent conversation. As the Caribbean clouds came in and the sky grew darker the winds picked up. Lightning began flashing to the Northwest. The bulk of this weather passed us by. I awoke the next morning with a half bottle of wine at the swimming ladder, where did this come from? It is what’s left of the third bottle.
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The next day was an attempt to have fun at the beach. We had a bottle of malbec at a table looking out at the sea. Surf was not big. Eloisa had a poke bowl. There was a second bottle of malbec. I had shrimp cocktail, but it was not well presented. Good protein, bad presentation. I had to go inside the restaurant to get lemon wedges.
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We went into Fort Clinch for a bit, then headed to Southern River Walk. I had the tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich. We were celebrating a 1220 dollar stock trade windfall.
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The day at the beach meant I had to insist to do a day of work on the dinghy while Bleu and his mistress go kayaking and catalog the ducks and geese at the pond, Notter’s Pond.
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I wasn’t sure how to put together the gunwales, laminated from 3 layers of cedar. I thought I would dry fit them using my assortment of SST screws. I only needed one screw at each end, drilled and dry fitted each end. The other glue job on the list was putting the cedar oar together.
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I was being very careful, the oar needed to have a joint cut for the blade to set into the shaft and the shaft to be glued to the blade. I cut the joint with the woodshop table saw and remedial trimming with the multitool, with a blade that was less than a half inch wide. After dry fitting I needed to mount the oar in a vise to get the blade out of the shaft.
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I dry fit the gunwale laminates and then decided to start gluing. If you dry fit everything, you stand a good chance of gluing everything up nice, perfect. But not now. I had an afternoon temperature at around 80 and as I painted epoxy on the gluing surfaces and then mixed the rest of the epoxy mix with some additive fillers, I realized the epoxy was doing its natural thing, it was coalescing, gelling, I was losing my opportunity to get it to work. I had to screw, clamp, and glue everything together, but there was too much. Too late.
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The result was a mess. Sometimes it’s better to quit while you are behind, stop the damage.
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The next day I used the multitool to cut the bad glue lines. I borrowed more clamps from the boatyard and put the starboard gunwale back together. I glued one lamination on the port gunwale.
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The next day I epoxied the two remaining laminate strips and glued them onto the port gunwale. When they were set up I ran the flap disk over them removing excess glue splotches. The forward ends of the gunwales were trimmed to match the angle of the bow transom.
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These days consisted of working an hour or two on the dinghy, then going to the local Irish pub where St. Patty’s Day was an entire weekend affair with live music. The bands were very good and we played with Bleu, he was like a seal, bopping a ball back to us when we tossed it to him.
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We were exploring Crooked River State Park where Eloisa had a pass. It is near the submarine naval base and is another place where migratory birds stop on their way North and South. There is a boat ramp, put put golf course, campsites, and kayak rentals.
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The image is of the wooden oars prior to applying epoxy.

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.
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Back at the boatyard I had to refasten a tarp. The wind was really howling.
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Supplies were coming in for the dinghy project, epoxy, 1708 glass cloth, plastic syringes to measure epoxy, mini paint rollers, and a dozen multitool blades. Some of the items came from TEMU and cost a fraction of the prices at the local stores.
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I glassed most of the exterior of the dinghy with 1708 and found it difficult to lay flat. Cutting darts in the cloth helped. The scissors soon became dull. I had to babysit the epoxy as it began to cure. I got most of it to stick and stay stuck.
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The next part of the project was the seats. I was straying off the building plans now, I was making seats with similar shape to the Eastport Pram by Chesapeake Light Craft. Also I cut a curve into the top of the bow transom and a compound curve into the top of the stern transom. The Eastport Pram has beams under the seats to stiffen them. Also there is a daggerboard case that is part of the middle seat.
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Next I laminated 1708 to the transoms inside and out. I found some scrap lumber from some long ago project. I made 1X3 seat crossbeams and two 1” wide cleats for the centerboard case. The cleats are spacers to hold the two sides of the centerboard case 1” apart. The centerboard case attaches to the middle seat seat beam and the seat is fastened atop.
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The bow seat is actually a bow deck if you are building the dinghy rigged for sailing. It took a long time to shape it, compound angles all around. I contemplated putting a crown in the little deck but kept it flat.
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The edges of the seats are curved. I used the angle grinder with a flap disc to round off the edge and smooth out the curves. I dry fitted the seats and beams and was ready to glue it all up when I remembered there are small wooden blocks underneath the ends of the seats and across the stern transom to support the rear seat. A cold front was approaching so I had a yardbird help me flip the dinghy upside down on the sawhorses. The bottom is glassed already so rain will not hurt it.
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All the tools had to be put away under cover. While I was scurrying around doing that, the boatyard came and took away the gray Westsail 32 (nickname Wet Snail) to be put into the Travel Lift slings for launching. Now there was a big space between me and Komputer Ken, a space big enough for a certain catamaran, CATNAPPER, waiting for haul out.
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Eloisa arrived just as I was about to call her and invite her to have dinner at the China Wok. She had never eaten there before. It has great food but the ambiance is of a take out place with just a couple booth tables. I had Hot and Spicy Shrimp and Hot and Sour Soup. Eloisa had Egg Foo Young and the soup with some spring rolls. We then left and had some wine and tea at Southern River Walk.
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The night was chilly and rain was imminent. We will have a rain day and then get back on the dinghy project over the weekend. The image is of the dinghy with seats dry fitted in place.