Kaimusailing

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.