Monday 19th April
Easter Monday and we still have a keen group ready to glue on plank 5 and glue up the scarfs on Plank 6. Nick was first in and went straight to planing the last plank scarf on this boat. Then Paul, who planed the plank lands on the ends of plank 5. Mark who fine tuned the frames on the boat and JP joined in. Meanwhile I tried to do as little as possible in keeping with the instructions of my doctor and wife because of my slowly recovering elbow.
We had a visit from Paul’s daughter Alexandra, her partner Guillaume and baby daughter Bria and his parents Christophe and Veronique from French Polynesia. By the time we were ready to glue it was tea break and we had a choice of fruit cakes to dig into as I had brought in part of a delicious upside down plum cake my wife, JB, had made. There were equal takers for both cakes and still some for tomorrow.
Then it was into the glue up. Again I had to extol the virtues of lots of glue as I knew there would be gaps to fill.
The string method for aligning plank six worked perfectly, like plank 5, which fitted on the boat well even though we hadn’t trial fitted it before glueing up its scarf joints. Here’s hoping for the same result in Plank 6. We’ll find out tomorrow.
Depending on how we go tomorrow it looks as if we will be gluing on the Whiskey plank on Thursday (the last plank). Perhaps we should keep the celebration for Monday when we get the clamps off and see the full extent of our first St Ayles Skiff. The Whiskey is all ready and waiting, it just needs a happy crew to celebrate this milestone in the build. Please join us.
Cheers Dave