Tuesday 26 July
The day started fine and bright and in the shed we had a quorum of boat builders including a couple who hadn’t been in for some time. Adrian had a bad bout of Covid which kept him away for weeks and he was still not at 100% but he took to my suggestion of belt sanding the tops of the gunwales on boat 1 while Veronica followed up by sanding the holes between the spacers by hand. Dr John went back to carving out a flat surface to land the keel on with the electric plane until he gave himself a minor (luckily) cut in the upper leg with the plane. Nick did a wonderful job sharpening all our plane blades and then planed the last plank ends. I used the router to bevel the outer edges of the outer gunwales. With sometimes three power tools going it was unusually noisy in the shed and a good thing that Kay and Harry were not in today. At one point Nick pointed out that Adrian’s sander was making a musical key as it vibrated in the boat. Perhaps St Ayles Skiff are musical instruments as well as boats.
I had my eye on the clock as we were expecting visitors at 10.30 for the whisky ceremony. Yesterday, as I didn’t have any whisky I brought in port but we never had time for it. Today Nick has again brought in his bottle of Scottish single malt whisky to toast the whisky plank, far more appropriate. People started to drift in and we had to shut down the noisy tools and boil the kettle. A select group assembled and I poured whisky for those who wanted a shot and we toasted boat 2.
We were expecting the Denmark School students to arrive at 11am but the heavens opened and they were delayed.
Three students and two teachers arrived apologising for the lack of students who had gone to Perth for a concert. The six of us set about sanding boat 2. It was great to get so much done in one shot and to keep warm with the exercise of hand sanding. Thanks lads.
After they had left I finished routing the outer gunwales and Veronica finished sanding the port gunwale of boat 1. I then had a good tidy up and called it a day.
We will be building and shaping the outer keel on Thursday, see you then.
Cheers Dave