Tuesday 19 April
I cycled in a little early this morning so that I could have a bit of a clean up before the gang arrived. First in was Colin who started taking the clamps off plank 5 and went on to saw the depth notches for planing the plank lands. Next came Veronica followed by Stuart for his first working visit and they both got straight on to cleaning up the scarf joints on planks 6. I got out the noisy beast of a multitool with its oscillating sanding disc and made quick work of angling what remains of the frames sticking out below the last plank. We have left the small pieces of the fore and aft frames off for glueing in when we have stuck the gunwales in. From my research of builds online I can see that this sequence is popular in Scotland as it allows easy fairing of the gunwales prior to locking them in with the blocks, presumably as Iain Oughtred intended.
During the morning Roger came in and after sharpening his plane worked up a sweat planing the starboard side plank lands and then had to leave again after tea break. We finished up yesterday’s cake and had chat with Kay about her garden. JP then arrived after a frustrating morning trying to get a coffee machine back into service for a friend. He and I finished preparing the lands and put the sixth plank into place to see how it would fit. Pretty bloody good was the answer. Just a bit more to do on it tomorrow and we will be glueing it on.
See you on Thursday for glueing on the Whiskey plank.
Cheers Dave
PS I have been doing a little research into the Faering and its successors.
These boats probably pre date even the Vikings as the everyday transport vehicles in Scandinavia. They were built with temporary fixings then disassembled into the original Ikea flat packed boats and shipped to places without trees like Iceland, the Faeroe and Shetland Islands where they would inevitably been used successfully to hunt whales as far back as the 16th century.
The Americans then copied the design for their whaleboats like the ones used at the time of writing Moby Dick. A replica of the Moby Dick whaleboat can be found in the Maritime Museum of Tasmania.
In Hobart before the 1840’s they were building whaleboats to the American double ended style in Huon Pine and Cedar and racing them at the annual regattas. The similarities to the St Ayles Skiffs are obvious from the following picture in the Maritime Times issue 56.
