Monday 9 May
Covid is starting to bite in Denmark, Paul sent a text saying he had it and wouldn’t be in. Mark got to the shed before me and opened up and we spent most of the morning almost alone except for visitors. Mark worked away on the tabs on the frames while I got on with filleting the plank lands with filler. Harry came in for a cup of tea early before he had to go down to the Men’s Shed for a meeting. As I was on my second lot of filler (comprising 6 squirts of resin and 3 of hardener, followed by 6 heaped spoons of filler compound), an old work colleague Bob and his wife Cathy turned up to inspect the build. Bob talked about the similarities of St Ayles Skiffs to the boats he had seen in the Danish Maritime Museum at Helsinger and recommended visiting it if we were ever in that part of the world. Another worth a visit is the Museum of Ancient Shipbuilding in Mainz, Germany where Roman craft that plied the Rhine were originally built.
After tea break JP turned up and enlisted Mark’s help and our ute to go and pick up the sheoak table that we are hoping to make the thwarts out of. I continued filleting. Later JP helped mix up a new batch of filler and followed me cleaning up my excess goop. By 2pm we had finished the filleting and packed up. Hope to see you in tomorrow.
In other news, I snuck up on a seal sunning his/her fins in the middle of the inlet yesterday. Because I was sailing silently down on it from its tail end I got very close before it knew I was there. It got a huge fright. I saw it again later but kept my distance so it could enjoy the autumn rays of sunshine. This is the sort of experience that I want to share with skiff rowers on the inlet when we have built the skiffs.
