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.
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
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17 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
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26 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
17 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
11 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
04 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
03 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
Recent Blog Posts
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.

15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Day One

A Wharram Pahi 26 had been anchored in the river nearby the boatyard and was hauled out with the travel lift. I went around to look at it and talked to the owner couple. I was surprised that it had been built in Martinique in 1988. The boat is more than 30 years old.

11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Redux

The inflatable (deflatable) dinghy I had bought was deteriorating. It had bottom seams separating. It is a West Marine branded dinghy made out of PVC. HH66 is the adhesive to reattach the seams. A friend had a similar problem and bought the same adhesive. I was waiting to hear from him how it worked [...]

06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

The Clincher

We decided to go to Amelia Island for the day, probably to the beach. Our plan to cycle around on the Raleigh 20’s seemed like a bad idea, Bleu can’t keep up with a bicycle for very long and when he quits he quits. So we would walk, where?, Fort Clinch State Park. She has a forever pass for Florida [...]

Superfoiling and D4 dinghy

29 March 2018 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/Warm Spring
My title for the previous post implied that there would be something about the superfoilers who raced their final regatta of the season over the weekend. I thought I had put something in the blog post, but it was not there, so here is a part recap of the regatta on Australian Sunday, our Saturday.
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Over the season the skill levels of the all the teams improved as they learned how to handle these difficult boats. Now in the final regatta the team that had been so dominant, Team Euroflex led by Nathan Outerridge, began to have trouble. In one race they were on the wrong radio channel and missed the start. They had their very able crew, Iain Jensen leave to go sail in the Moth World Championship regatta in Bermuda. The replacement crewman suffered a nasty cut and was treated by medical staff on the racecourse. He soldiered on.
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Euroflex were playing catch up and had to win out on the final day if they were to take home the trophy. They did so in patchy and gusty wind conditions with the wind direction shifting up to 30 degrees. At the final windward mark of the last race they needed a second to squeak through to win the regatta and series, they were in fifth, almost dead last.
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Nathan Outerridge, who was mic'd up, said "We have to be patient now". All the boats were suffering in the turmoil of shifting and gusting winds and Euroflex kept picking away at them, picking up a place here and there. Their main rivals, Tech2, were way ahead and in better breeze, seemingly headed for victory. As Euroflex came down the course, closer and closer, Tech2 seemed to choke a bit and understood the final leeward mark. They had to jibe again and work down to the mark, a short distance, and they were not up on foils, not going very fast. ZIP, Euroflex went by on foils. Now the two boats were see-sawing as the wind shifted this way and that. Finally Euroflex made it over the line 7 seconds ahead of Tech2. Their victory came after a tough fight and after a long season where their dominance was fading with each regatta. The have won the first Ben Lexen Trophy, which is the trophy for the superfoiler series.
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Back to the D4 dinghy construction. We had taped the exterior seams and now sanded them a bit, after they cured, to knock off any blatant high spots. Ron, the carpenter, suggested I use his Bosch orbital sander, so I did. He has lots of professional power tools, so I expected the Bosch to be special. It is, in a way, it vacuums the sanding dust into a self contained receptacle and I emptied it by hitting it with the shop vac. My own Harbor Freight random orbital sander would probably do just as well, but I would have to hook up the vacuum to it. The other sander I was using was the cheapest Harbor Freight palm sander. I have never seen any size sandpaper sheet that would fit it. I am using some autobody sand paper on a roll, the kind that is self sticking, so I roll off a bit, stick it to the pad sander, which needs two pieces of paper on it, trim the first one, then lay another beside it. This sand paper is 3M "gold" and it works well.
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The way it works out, I started epoxying the inside of the boat first, so it is one step ahead of the exterior of the hull. My plan is to put 2 primer coats of epoxy on and then follow with two coats to build up the layer. Some where along the way I have to try to fair out things like the edges of fiberglass tapes, any imperfections in my joinery work, and other divots that can happen when power tools are involved. Then a couple coats of paint should get this puppy out of the woodshop and out for a test row on the North River Marsh.
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After the next coat of epoxy was painted on both the interior and the exterior, this would be a first primer coat on the exterior and the second primer coat on the interior, I went out to the home improvement store to get some 1 1/4 inch wide battens, ten to the pack at about ten dollars for the pack. The plans called for 1 1/2 inch by 3/4 inch gunwales, laminated, but no lamination schedule was provided. It could be two laminations of 3/8" or three of 1/4". The battens from the store were .3 something inch thick, so too thick for 1/4" and too thin for 3/8". I sat there inspecting the battens. They are made out of junk wood. Only about half of them were straight, most had some knots, and they were only 6 feet long, so I would have to build up the laminations not only in thickness, but also in length. Think many small pieces of wood, complicated glue up, time consuming.
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Here came Ron, the carpenter, to the rescue. Why don't you use those cypress pieces over back in the corner. He had gleaned a bunch of lumber from a couple of tug boats that had redone their interiors at our docks. There were nice marine plywood panels with a white marine textured finish on one side and they were not mounted on furring strips, pine, they were mounted on straight grained cypress, 3/4" thick, and about 2 inches wide. Nice looking wood.
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I grabbed two of the cypress planks and ripped them to 1 1/2 inches wide, then cut 1/4" slices from their faces. Now the saw kerf is 1/8", so I took off a quarter of an inch, plus the saw kerf of 1/8", then another 1/4", and another kerf, and that was it, the last cut just trimmed the final 1/8" off and there was no residue. I had two perfect battens from each piece, but I needed 3 on each side, so I took another piece and ripped it same as the others. Now I had 6 8 foot battens of clear grained cypress, 1/4" thick and 1 1/2" wide, and as left overs, 3 8 foot battens 3/4": wide and of various thickness.
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This was beautiful wood, the grain ran straight from one end to the other. I digressed from my epoxy plans for the day and got involved with the woodworking of the laminated gunwales. I had to cut the ends of the gunwales to match the angles of the bow and stern transoms, plus I planned to round off the gunwales, and also round off their ends at the bow and stern. I cut them to length with the angle of the bow and stern transom echoed in their ends. This was time consuming, because I tried different ways of getting the length correct for each lamination layer, and had to redo some. It is important to err on the side of excessive length, you can alway cut off some, but you can't stretch these pieces of wood very much if you cut them too short.
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It ended up that the quickest and most worry free method of laminating the gunwales was to carefully machine one end. This consisted of rounding off the bevel that matched the angle of the transom. This was subjective, artistic, using the angle grinder with the coarse flap disk, wood vaporized before it, but be careful. Looking ahead, I put a short off cut of one of the gunwale laminations under the curve I had just carved in the end of the gunwale and marked it, then using the same flap disk shaped it identical to what I had just done. I would use this as a pattern for the other gunwale. The other end only had one layer that was machined. There was also a pattern made of that for the other side.
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Next the gunwale laminations were clamped to the gunwale. Many clamps were needed to keep the lamination strips aligned edge to edge, plus keep the whole thing fair to the plywood gunwale. Now we had 3 1/4" strips that were fair against the gunwale of the boat. One end was already machined, the ends of the laminations were carefully positioned to all be ending at the same point. At the other end, of course, things were not yet machined, only one layer had been shaped, and that was used as the pattern for the others. First the angle was cut using the multitool and a halfmoon blade. Then the laminations could be taken off the hull and lined up to machine the corners off that end. It turned out that further machining off the hull would need more machining later, so I'm leaving out some time consuming steps that aren't necessary.
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Next the 3 strips on each gunwale are remounted on the hull, maintaining their edges, top and bottom, fore and aft, as much as possible. Now we are going to drill holes for the temporary mounting screws at 3 inch intervals centered on the centerline of the gunwale. The ends have already been machined, but there might be a need to remachine them a bit. Be careful not to grind into the hull with the flap disk. You might have to take them off to clean up the strip that is closest to the hull.
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Next a rounding off bit in the trim router is run all around the gunwale strips. My own method that I actually used was very time consuming, but it involved removing the strips, mounting them on a work table, and machining them there. Very stable. But still I had to do some routing in place on the hull, so maybe you could do it all there. I unscrewed the temporary sheet rock screws and laid all the gunwale strips down on the hull, in order, and prepared to soak them with epoxy and glue them all up.
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Somewhere around this time Ron, the carpenter, came into the shop and began helping me. He was all fired up with woodwork, working with 14" wide clear teak cockpit coamings for a long time blue water cruising couple who knew what they wanted. The boatyard owner, manager, and chief crane operator, also came in and got sucked into the job.
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Everything was preassembled, predrilled, and disassembled, soaked with epoxy, and now we were trying to put it all back together again. It's a funny thing how epoxy is a great lubricant, so when you clamp together something dry, then try to do it after the epoxy glue is on it, things don't go the same way, you need additional force. We worked from the center of the gunwales out to the ends. One guy (me) holds the laminations and using both hands holds them to the hull and bends them up so the other guy (Ron) can use his variable speed drill to set screws, secure each point one at a time. He complained that he had on his nice shirt and it would be ruined with epoxy, and I guess I couldn't argue, he had on the wrong costume. The boat yard owner ran errands for us, get screws, bring that bag, and I had to say to him, payday is tomorrow, I will bring my checkbook. I was glad he was interested in our project and I also knew my payment schedule better than he did. He smiled.
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After all the gunwale laminations were lined up, glued up, screwed up, it was a relief to discard the protective gloves, it was late, stand down from the build, let it set up overnight. In retrospect, we should have worked a little harder. The hull was upright, so excess epoxy from the glue up was streaming down the hull like tears, like a thousand tears. These would also set up, so that was an additional job the next day that could have been taken care of by taking a quick wipe of the hull under the gunwales with some paper towels.
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By now the twenty hour dinghy must be a big joke in the boatyard. Many came in to see the progress. I got polite compliments, but when I was busy describing some detail and pointing to it, when I looked up, they were gone. It was nice to see it sitting there with the gunwales laminated in place. I started to remove the screws. I found out right away they were mere pawns in the epoxy game. The first one sheared off its head. And then it turned out I had to physically get the screws to turn before I could use the electric drill to remove screws. I used a nice phillips head screwdriver with vice grips strongly fastened to the shaft to work each screw loose, then I could whizz them out with the drill. Other screws were filled with epoxy in the head. I used a small ball peen hammer and the scribe from a carpenter's sliding right angle guide to chisel out the epoxy embedded in the phillips screw heads. They all ended up coming out, except for two, who got ground flat.
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It was a big step to have the gunwale strips ready to go, so now it was time to turn the hull over, upright, to work on it. It feels heavier than before, still not too heavy, but how to grab out there 4 feet away at the other beam and pick it up, and turn it around. It turned out I found out how to move the hull, first set it down on its transom, then you can spin it around. It will position on the sawhorses but you have to move your feet and prevent the sawhorses from tipping. When the boat is inverted, all the seats are at the same height, so you can get your sawhorses in at that height and the project will be level and stable. Not so with me, my sawhorses were made for the outrigger canoe, so they are only 2 feet wide, and not wide enough for this project. My bad.
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It was nice to see the little boat sitting there on the sawhorses with the clear cypress gunwales attached, ready for more murderous efforts from the boatcarpenter. I needed to get another coat of epoxy inside and out, and typically we would work on the inside first, then flip it over, and then work on the outside. The twenty hour construction time was now a big joke. I had overused it, so I was now just working on a rowboat and just get it done as soon as I can. I paid my quarterly bill at the boatyard and had to give an estimated time of launch, and ETL. June 28th.
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I did another coat of epoxy on the inside, then flipped it by setting it down on its transom, moving the sawhorses, and setting it up again. A lot of work was done on the transom, I knew it was lopsided, so I sprung a new batten and marked the new arc from transom to transom, but still nearly reaching the transom's old peak. I marked it and cut it. It had to be sanded with the belt sander to get the wood to align with the marked line, then work a radius on the edge, roll the sander from side to side
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I did a lot of work with the belt sander, the angle grinder with a 40 grit flap disk wheel, and with the pad sander with 150 grit with self adhesive pads. The bow transom was shaped with these tools and the whole belt line of the boat, and the angles going up into the transoms, all were worked so that it all blended in.
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A new coat of epoxy was applied inside and out, not a small job. A side job, shaping the skeg was done at this time and epoxy used to glue the skeg's two parts together. The skeg and four pieces I would call gussets were machined out of a short piece of the clear cypress. The gussets have a proper nautical name, the two at the stern transom are called knees, and the two at the bow transom are called breasthooks. I have run into breasthooks before, and they are tricky.
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I had to be careful to organize cutting out these things from the little piece of wood. Beautiful wood, clear straight grain. The gussets are corner braces put into the corners of where the hull sides meet the transoms. The angles of the meeting faces are very complicated, but one thing is pretty sure, the opposite sides, port and starboard, have angles with the transoms that enable the two gussets at that end of the boat to share an angled cut, that is, you could put the two gussets together end to end and they would share that transom face. No wasted wood. That was my hope. The reality was that all three corners of the boat were different enough that I had to cut and recut, sand, belt sand, aggressively sand with a flap disk on the grinder, and the professional boat carpenter, Ron, said, they are tricky aren't they.
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The skeg presented other problems. I faired its arc where it meets the hull and it did fit precisely. The drawing in the plans shows the point of the skeg being rounded. It is kind of like a shallow triangle that starts in the after part of the keel and builds up toward the stern transom. It mates with the hull right at the keel centerline, and it is rounded off at the transom, I used the bottom of a plastic cup to mark the curve and sanded it off with the angle grinder and a flap disk. Now the skeg is the very bottom of the keel on the aft end of the boat. It is now square, but a quick run of the trim router with the rounding off bit (3/8" radius) makes its bottom and aft edges rounded, right around the curve where they come together. I then used the pad sander with 150 grit to smooth out any machining marks, remove any stains, markings, and I brought the piece out to a small group of yardbirds having a gam on the porch outside the woodshop. Piece of a boat, I asked, and they said yes, indeed. They were working their way through two cases of beer, though.
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Now it was time to start gluing things together. Ron had gone off to cook some chicken soup, so I had no help. The procedure to get the skeg glued to the keel is difficult, and almost impossible, alone. Ron did come back to the woodshop while his soup was heating up and helped me by holding the skeg in place while I tried to screw it to the hull with a couple of machine screws sunk into the centerline of the keel in the area covered by the stern seat. It seemed to go almost too easily and he left to enjoy his soup.
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I went easily because it didn't go at all, the bolt at the stern didn't get into the skeg, just bypassed it, likewise the second bolt further forward. I now had to scramble and try to get it screwed together, alone, which is almost impossible.
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I had gorilla tape which helped to hold things in place while the screws were vainly turned, hoping to have them bite. The impossibility is that you can't reach around from the inside to the outside of the hull and reach the keel. I kept at it and had to crawl around in the dust of the woodshop floor, getting down and in, then scrambling out and up, try to get it to bite here, no, it swings away, nautical words, I try again. Somehow I got it to bite, then worked both screws, brought the skeg up tight against the keel, slapped on three big pieces of gorilla tape to hold the leading edge of the skeg against the hull. Ron came in and I told him what happened. He helped me turn the hull upright on the sawhorses to continue and glue on the breasthooks and knees.
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I was using the usual epoxy mix to bond pieces together, first unthickened epoxy is applied to the mating faces, which have been sanded to a matte finish beforehand. Then the remaining epoxy is thickened with "Glue Hard", which is my mix of 4 or five parts of colloidal silica and one part of glass microfibers. This is a very tough mix that bonds things together. Difficult to sand, but machinable.
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We are now going into a very religious weekend. It was on Good Friday the 13th when the catamaran parts that would become Kaimu arrived at Norwalk Cove Marina, in the year of 9/11.
The image is from the i60e camera and it shows the little dinghy lit by the yellow sunlight of the woodshop.
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