Dear dedicated Shipsblog readers (all, like, five of you):

It's taken a few months to get it up and operational, but we can finally announce that we are moving Shipsblog to its new home.

As of today, you can track the perils and adventures of the newly renamed Picaroon at the Picaroon Blog.

The Picaroon Blog is a a full website, with articles and other pages, as well as the blog itself. Please visit us, add our RSS feed to your aggregator and sign the guestbook.

Thanks,

Pip & HB

FINALLY, some decent bloody weather.

Yesterday was a beautiful day for a sail. There was a southerly gentle breeze coming up the bay, the sun was shining and it was 70º out on the water.

Nick and Wendy joined us for the day, and brought with them a couple bottles of fabulous wine – as per. Nick also brought his extensive knowledge of Jack Aubrey, and kept asking questions like, ‘Where’s the mainbrace?’ and, ‘Do you have a holystone?’

Sailing was good. We sailed up just past the green buoy outside the South river, then headed for the usual anchorage in the cove. Dropped anchor under sail – always feels good to do that, and lit the grill for a fabulous marinated lamb, accompanied by a nice
’02 Andrew Rich pinot noir.

Engine Maintenance

Earlier, before we left the dock, I pottered around the engine a bit. Both the alternator and water pump belts are slipping badly, so I tightened them – it worked initially, but the squealing started again later. I suspect the belts are shot and need replacing.

I also took the opportunity to clean up the engine and check the condition of the sacrificial zinc (about half still left – should check again in a couple months).

MOST of you in the Mid-Atlantic region will have noticed that the weather last weekend was a little wild. That's because we were hit by one of the area's notorious Nor'easters – so called because the winds come from the north-east. Had you looked at a surface analysis map, you would have seen what looks like a great big pressure hole moving up the coast – like someone placed a bowling ball on a big rubber sheet. That was the storm. The picture here doesn't do it justice, as I forgot to save the map from the peak of the storm.

We found a couple of weeks ago that the boat had been colliding with the dock in an earlier storm and the tiller had snapped about six inches from the end. HB and I were up in Garret County until Sunday, but we wanted to make sure the boat was secure this time so we diverted our route home to check.



Contrast the picture here of HB climbing up onto the boat with the one here of me clambering down. The water is high. The Bay isn't very tidal – a range of about a foot on average – but this isn't tide. Rainwater from the storm swells the output of the creek, but also the winds further south push the water up into the Bay. It was pretty dramatic, at least until I remembered that most boating Brits see their boats dry out completely at anchor twice a day.

Anyway, we added an extra pair of aft springs and tightened up the stern lines to keep her snug. We hope to go out again next weekend.

Byline: HBH

So, I finally got around to posting to Flickr our photos from the 9-day sailing trip we took in October. We have pages and pages of journaling that I fully intended to turn into blog entries. Which, of course, never happened, despite my wonderful sabbatical. So, here, I present to you, our Photo Journal of our big trip!!

Important: when you get there, click on Detail underneath the title of "October Sailing Trip 2006;" that way you'll see my descriptions.

WORK on the dinghy is progressing slowly surely. Sometime in March HB uncovered the Woodworkers Club, which provides a wide variety of woods for craft projects and other non-industrial applications. If you are looking for woodworking supplies, lessons, or other resources in the Washington metropolitan area, they are a good place to try. Look them up at http://www.woodworkersclub.com.

I actually bought a 5’x5’x¾” slab of high grade birch ply. It’s not what I originally envisioned but it’s big, strong and looks beautiful. Working with a 5” square piece was something of a logistical challenge, but it got easier as I cut the pieces.

I started by cutting the simplest piece – the stern thwart. It’s basically an isosceles trapezium with a quarter-inch taper on the two sides that touch the hull. I cut it with my big ol’ Stanley cross-cut saw, and nothing went particularly wrong.

When I test-fitted the piece to the boat, I found that my measurements were slightly off – not really surprising given that the boat is warped a bit at the stern. I may adjust that piece later.

That was the only piece I could do with the cross-cut, so the next step was to purchase a jig-saw, which HB did – a Makita – from Amazon.com for about 70 bucks. This allowed me to cut that big curvy centre thwart you see in the last post.

The really complex piece was the forward thwart and locker. This is a varying curve, a bit like the top of an egg in profile, and tapers along the edge all the way round. HB and I measured the width on the boat at intervals of an inch, then marked the measurements on a piece of craft foam and joined the dots. We could then test out the fit of the foam before doing the same with the wood. Thankfully, the Makita jig-saw has a mitre cut function, so cutting curve on a taper was actually pretty easy.

I still have to finish the locker hatch, and revisit the stern thwart, but otherwise, we are ready to varnish.

AT the end of this post, in which I described the work I would be doing on the dink, I said 'There's more, but I'm saving that for a later post'. This is the more.

The photograph shows the dink as it is now, but overlaid on the image is the blueprint of what I intend – lumber-supply gods willing – to do.

As you can see, the basic layout of the thwarts remains the same &ndash not much one can do there. However, during the previous six months of use, a couple of desirable features have suggested themselves.

The first, and most critical, is some way of moving the rowing position forward. The current rig is fine for one person, but put even a light passenger in the sternsheets and the balance is compromised.

The solution to this is to extend the center thwart forward of the daggerboard casing, and to add a second set of rowlocks. The attractive curve is so that as little space as possible is lost.

The second addition is really a luxury, and that's the forward locker. I think this will be a fun project, and should prove useful for stowing bait boxes, ground tackle, painter and the like.

All three thwarts will have space beneath for inflatable buoyancy bags.

ONE of the most frustrating things about living in the US is the difficulty of finding basic raw materials to carry out repairs or maintenance. I can only assume that people simply do not repair anything, they throw it out and buy another piece of crap from China.

I have been having the devil of a time trying to find teak or other suitable hardwood to build new thwarts for the dinghy and new drop-boards for the big boat's companionway. You'd think it'd be easy, but the local wood merchant, TW Perry, carries no teak, and no other hardwood in anything wider than 11" planks, which is not enough.

We have now found a lumber merchant specializing in 'exotic' woods, whose website lists teak in various useful sizes. I'm not sure whether labeling something 'exotic' puts something higher or lower on the Ka-ching! scale than labeling it 'marine'. We'll see.

Anyway, we drove up to this place on Saturday. It was closed, because Philip got the opening times wrong, but it's not far from our dock, so we popped in to make sure the boat was doing fine.

The creek is lightly iced over--not thick enough to stop even a rowboat--and the water level was very low, as you can see from the picture (we usually step up off the dock). Otherwise, everything was fine. We'd left the Kingston cock open where it has frozen, but it doesn't leak. I'm a bit worried about the batteries, which lose charge in cold weather, but I intend to get a shore power charging system set up before spring.

BEFORE setting off on a 9-day trip in October in the Chesapeake, Philip and I thought it might be a good idea to be able to reef the sail. A reef allows you to reduce the surface area of sail catching the wind, which is useful in heavy winds to keep the boat from tipping over and all. (It’s also useful in moderate winds to keep Philip and Heather from getting a wee bit too nervous when the boat goes all tilty. (Yes, that’s a technical term. Tilty. Look it up.) (OK, it’s not. You caught me.) It's a good thing we did put in the reef, as we used it quite a bit on that trip - see me looking all sporty at right?

I worked in part from instructions in The Sailmaker’s Apprentice: A Guide for the Self-Reliant Sailor by Emiliano Marino. Reef points are covered in about 10 places in the book, and the instructions are very brief and actually quite hard to understand if you aren’t 100% up on the technical jargon. So here’s my version.

( How to Put a Reef in a Sail: Complete Instructions )

EMERGENCY flares have a definite shelf life, like almost anything in a marine environment. Because one doesn’t want them to fail, most boaters buy new ones every year (it may be a legal requirement too). That creates the perennial question of what to do with the old ones. You can’t throw them out easily, because they are hazardous; the Coast Guard isn’t keen on people shooting them off their boats, for obvious reasons. So most people stockpile them.

We, however, have the benefit of a house in DC where no one will notice an additional few gun pops, especially after midnight on New Year’s Day, which is when we ‘tested’ them. We had a pack of handheld flares from 2004, and Verey gun shells from 2002.

The pistol shells were disappointing, perhaps not surprising since they were four years past their sell-by. They all fired, but the phosphor didn’t really burn. They would have been useless in an emergency. Nice bang though.

The handheld flares worked fabulously. Actually, a bit too well. They give off a lot of smoke and burn for three minutes each. Three of them in an enclosed yard were a bit much.

THE gunwales are the tops of the boat’s hull, the rim of the bathtub, if you like. The word comes from the old English ‘weal’, as in a ridge (now only used to describe scars); the gun-weal was the strengthening ridge around the boat to accommodate the recoil of cannon. It’s now pronounced ‘gunnel’. There are a couple of jobs to do on the gunwales: repair or reinforce the damaged areas, and replace the rub-rail that protects the boat from everyday bumps. First thing was to strip off all the hardware, thwarts (which are seats, by the way), and rub rail. This involved a lot of hacksaw work – the rub rail was riveted on and most of the bolts were rusted up.

Damage to stern gunwale

Galvanism - why we don't use a steel nut on a bronze bolt

Next came the glassfibre work. Inevitably, the job was more complex than it should have been – apparently not enough people repair glassfibre to warrant anyone selling the materials. After a futile trip to Home Despot (really, what the devil was I thinking?), I got what I needed, after a hunt, from Strosniders. I will take this opportunity to give it up for Strosniders, which has three stores in Bethesda, Silver Spring, and Potomac. Just don’t bother even trying Home Despot or bLowes: they won’t have it, and it’ll take you half an hour to find that out. Strosniders has a lot of staff, and they know their shit. They also have everything. On top of that, you’ll be supporting a local business. Glassfibre is pretty obnoxious stuff, so I got fully Darth Vadered up for this. There are three parts: glassfibre mat; resin; and hardener. The mat is made of glass strands laid down like felt and the resin and hardener are both toxic, so yeah – respirator, goggles and butyl gloves. I was working on three sections: the stern gunwale had broken off and needed rebuilding, and two flex fractures on the port side needed reinforcing. Here’s the process:

After sanding and cleaning the surface around the damage, the resin and hardener are mixed together, then painted on. The gunwale at the stern was broken off, so I created a male mould out of a piece of dowel wrapped in duck tape (duck tape creates a smooth surface the resin won’t bond with). With a coat of resin on, the matting is cut to size and lain on, then more resin is dabbed on to saturate the mat. The process is a bit like doping aircraft fabric, if any of you have ever done that (unlikely, now that I think about it).

After the resin has hardened - ouch!

Finished

Repeat ad nauseam (really, if you don’t use a respirator), until you have the required thickness of layers. I used about six. The next day, the resin is hard. The only thing left to do is to cut the excess off with a Dremel, and sand smooth. My repairs are now better than the original.