My friend Cerrise and her husband Mike came over to Amy’s this week to help sew on the skylight hatch covers. We got both made and Amy put a big belt around each to hold them in place. Thanks.
Brian and I decided that a mahogony hatch over the engine room would look better and be cheaper than the aluminum one we were going to put on the boat. I spent sometime in SketchUp designing both the hatch and the engine room vents. I also designed a table to help transport the wood work up to Halifax and was able to build it this weekend.
We didn’t finish the ballast, but got another ton of lead in. Amy moved most of it herself, but Angelo and I helped out, especially in the stern keelwell. I believe we only need to put in another ton, but I’ll know more when I plug in all the numbers.
We started the stern railing, and probably spent most of our time with that. Angelo and I cut most of the railing for the risers. John cut most of the horizontals. John and Gordan welded. Kevin grinded. Angelo cut. Amy bent. Since there is no cockpit, we put up a nice sturdy railing around the whole back 1/3 of the boat.
We also started installing the drive shaft. Robert and I used a laser level to sight up the drive shaft and we cut through all the bulkheads.
We made some vents for the engine room, but I decided not to put them in. They were too clumsy looking and I want to design something better out of wood.
Not bad for three days. Thanks all!
Amy and I left Austin on Thursday to head up to Halifax for the Tallship Challenge, and of course, to put a few more hours in on the boat. We had got a 3 day pass to the event and spent most of it crawling around beautiful wooden boats and taking pictures of everything we found interesting. Angelo from Austin, joined us for the 2nd two days. First friend to come all the way up to Halifax with us. Dude! We toured some famous boats, such as the Pride of Baltimore, Bluenose II, Spirit of Bermuda, Virginia, Bounty and the Roseway. There were other smaller schooners, such as Peer’s Fancy, which we also truely enjoyed. Thanks Gail, we enjoyed our chat.
One of the revelations that Amy and I had was we’ve done an excellant job on our woodwork so far, on par with some of the more fancy boat such as Bluenose II. And our ash blocks were much nicer than a lot of the blocks we saw and our hatches look awsome. Yea!
On a funny note, CTV, channel 9 news interviewed me on the back of the Spirit of Bermuda and apparently it was broadcast on the 6 o’clock news. I failed to catch it, but I talked up my little Schooner Tesha boat project and was wearing my new Schooner Tesha build crew cap. Not everyday a guy from Austin, Texas builds an aluminum schooner in Halifax.
Angelo has some relatives who live in the area who happen to be sailors with similar designs on cruising as I. Greg and Caroline took us all out on their Hunter 30 on Sunday night for few hour cruise around Halifax harbor, which we enjoyed very much. We event enjoyed the dense fog that floated in. Thanks guys.
Tommorrow…. time to work on the boat.
No real wood working this week, but plenty of sewing machine frustration. Amy’s sew machine wouldn’t maintain the bobbin tension and we’ll probably have to have it serviced. Luckily, Liz lent us her sewing machine and together we stitched up the 3 dorade covers. I did the cut’n. Amy did the sew’n. Going to have to wait till the dorades get cut for the boat to put the cover
trim on.
