Thursday 21 April
The core crew turned up today to do the final shaping of the planks and glue on the Whiskey planks. They were Nick, Paul, Adrian, Veronica, myself and eventually JP who had been off hanging a curtain rail for a mutual friend. We had an early visitor, Dai/Thomo, who had to get back to his own boat restoration of Sweetheart that I wrote about a few days ago.
Now my spelling of Whiskey has caused a bit of talk. It’s apparently the spelling of Irish Whiskey, and as these St Ayles Skiffs are Scottish in origin I should be spelling it without an “e”. You can tell I’m not much of a Whisky drinker so I looked up the difference and it is mostly that “Scotch is distilled twice to Irish whiskey’s thrice“. There could be a metaphor in there, somewhere, for how we are building these boats. From now on though I’ll use the abbreviated Scotch version.
Yesterday I went shopping for more wood for the next boat’s keelson/hog (the inside keel of the boat). I bought Meranti, a SE Asian timber used in boat building around the globe, from Bunnings. We will be able to shape the next keelson/hog without using filler battens as we did on the first hog. The Hoop pine we have for this hog won’t go to waste, it will now become contrasting blocks along the gunwale of one of the skiffs.
As with the last plank we got everything ready for glueing by morning tea time and enjoyed an Anzac biscuit or two that JB had baked for us and then got on with glueing. I had added more clamping blocks to the moulds but the end ones proved useless because of the angle of the plank towards the front and back was too much for the clamps to hold on. The clamping up was a little stressful because of that fact. In the end though all the moulds were flush with the last plank so the shape of the boat is as planned.
This is a significant milestone in building any wooden boat and deserves a celebration. On Saturday between 10am and 12noon we have invited all interested to come and have a wee dram of whisky as we anoint the Whisky plank. There will, of course, be tea and biscuits too and possibly a cake or two if someone would like to bring one along. The ceremony will be at 11am. See you there.
Cheers Dave