Good-bye Easter

Every conceivable corner of the garden, where the Invisible Workshop is now all too visible, has been buzzing with inquisitive swarms of eager holiday makers whose uninformed prying has made progress impossible. I can handle a few on a good day, Vitalstatistix most of the time, Unhygenix occasionally but the hordes were more than I could manage and I retreated indoors in a fit of humbug.

There aren’t many boat jobs that can be done inside but I did manage to do the braiding on the oars and the turks heads which I found out how to do on this site, linked from intheboatshed.net. All the oars need now is another coat of epoxy.

Today the business men and women are back in Barcelona and the boat builder is back in the workshop. The first job was to cut the skeg out of some ply that I laminated a while ago. But the laminate had warped or had set with a curve. I bent it this way and that to see if there was a possibility of straightening it and snapped it in two before I could find out. So I drew out a new shape using the hull as a template then made a new laminate.

Then I had a long, hard look at the taped seams and decided that they had to be filled and faired if I’m to get anything like a smooth finish. And that took up all the afternoon.

Onawind Blue has received lots of praise over the last few days, a couple of friends have been round specifically to view the boat and each time I have pulled the cover off a small crowd has gathered and both Onawind Blue and I have soaked up the ooohs and ahhhs. Unfortunately praise isn’t the only thing she’s been soaking up recently. She has been thoroughly drenched several times as I played a losing game of ‘catch me if you can’ with the spring showers. Every time the cover was off so that the hull could dry out it rained, then I’d put the cover back on and the sun would come out and so on and so on. However, it did at least establish that Mr Mushroom had sold me bona fide marine ply—anything else would have delaminated. It was no doubt unjust to question Mr Mushroom’s integrity, albeit silently, but having been a sucker for years now, bringing home everything from out of date cement to wine glasses that spontaneously shatter, I’m wary of being sold ‘cat for hare’ as they say out here.