Priorities

I’ve spent a few days away from the workshop. Maintaining the single-mindedness necessary to keep the build at the top of my list of priorities is hard work in itself. Especially when the larder is bare. I’m fortunate not to be so tied to the train of modern living that I can’t disembark now and again to pursue other interests. But it’s about time I hopped on again.

To get the Trow into the top three of my priorities I’ve had to let a few things fall by the wayside. A visitor to my house would be quick to see that there’s a quantity of everyday household DIY that somebody’s obviously shirking. And I’ve seen my neighbours (Chief Vitalstatistix et al) pointing out that the plastic sheet stapled over the broken bathroom window—a temporary repair, which has been in place for two years—is somewhat lowering the tone. My churlish reply to these gossipy folk would be, “Will fixing the window get me on the water any earlier?”

I would also like to excuse myself from other responsibilities towards the upkeep of the house by mentioning that it is a building dominated by children. My case is that there’s not much point fixing things that will almost certainly get re-broken or painting walls that will soon be scribbled on or enforcing the kind of discipline that would make children quake in their shoes at the thought of defacing a door. I’m happy to give the house over to them while they’re young even if it does mean that hordes of the blighters might blow through at the weekend like a rampant marauding army. Defiling biscuit packets, spilling milk, working crumbs and other indescribable grot into unlikely places. Charging up and down stairs, upending toy boxes and uncapping felt-tip pens. Then thundering out again leaving disturbing smells and unflushed lavatories.

It’s fine by me so long as I can get on with my boat.

These pictures are from last Saturday. A centreboard case cheek with 3 coats of epoxy. I’ve taken this shot to highlight the appalling finish I’ve achieved even sanding between coats. I'll have to try with a roller. Here’s the taper being worked into the centreboard. The ply looks pretty dodgy to me but Mr Mushroom assures me that all ply is like that, I say that I thought marine ply was different and he tells me I’m mistaken—I’m as unlikely to find ply without voids, as I am to find knot-less pine.

There's Bertie the belt-sander sitting smugly in the background quietly digesting the chunk he’s just taken out of the centreboard. I can’t believe the name’s stuck, it’s getting like Thomas the Tank Engine round this workshop. Soon I’ll be animating the tools on the bench and making up stories for them. Actually I think Priscilla Plane and Stuart Surform have got a little tool-box romance going on…

I won’t continue.

Pulga

Pulga is Spanish for flea. The pulga in this story is a boat and its story is a short one. In the gloomy post-civil war days, this spirited craft must have been a little beacon of optimism. Built in 1944 by Sebastian Roch from lines drawn by a local engineer, Lluis Ferrer, the Pulga is an 11ft 4in carvel dinghy. 75 were made in total and some, the notice in the museum will tell you with pride, were exported to the US. The plucky little boat wore 6 square metres of canvas which propelled her at a fair clip—she was reported as doing 48 miles in 16 hours and, for a few short years the class enjoyed popularity and the future looked bright, not just for the Pulga but for small boat sailing on the Spanish coast in general. But, in 1948, the son of the builder, also called Sebastian, pushing his Pulga hard in a regatta, capsized and drowned. Narrow beam and a low righting moment were the trade-off to the Pulga’s speed.

Sebastian Roch senior was so distraught that he ceased production of the boat and nobody else, it seems, stepped into the breech. Sebastian junior’s sailing companion Mariano Mallol survived the capsize and, in memory of Sebastian and the Pulga, had a model of the boat built, which was carried to the chapel of Sant Magi in Tarragona. The model is still there today.

Of the 75 boats built only one example is known still to exist--this one called Bruja, (witch) on display in El Museu del Port de Tarragona.

The Pulga is an attractive boat with lines that would look good on a much larger boat. She also has a hidden beauty in her materials, there’s no oak, spruce or mahogany, but Mediterranean white pine, wide grained, knotty and resinous and olive wood, materials that clearly state her nationality, making her an authentic piece of Catalan history.

Authentic but obscure, a google search for pulga reveals thousands of pages detailing the habits of wingless blood-sucking insects of the order siphonaptera but nothing about this brave little craft.

El Port d'Alfacs

This is one of the bodies of water on which I’d like to float my Trow. It’s El Port d’Alfacs on the south side of the river Ebro Delta at the southern tip of Catalonia. Several square kilometres of flat, shallow water, sheltered from the prevailing swells of the Mediterranean by 4 km of sandy spit called El Trabucador.

Though protected from the sea, it receives the full force of the north westerly Mestral wind that comes howling down the Ebro valley from the Atlantic, scattering lenticular clouds like so many piles of plates as it goes. The river valley tightens as it cuts through the coastal mountain range of the Sierra del Cardò, accelerating the wind to the sort of speed that turns caravans over on the motorway. Then, fully wound up, the Mestral bursts on to the Delta where it screams across the distinctive paddy fields lifting the water in great swirls and driving the local population half mad with it’s relentless onslaught.

It’s a fantastic wind that brings Technicolor clear blue skies and cold clean air, but the local fishing fleet of Sant Carles de la Ràpita are obliged to keep to port and the only people you’ll find on the water are a hardcore knot of weather beaten windsurfers. And sometimes it’s too much even for them.

Fortunately there’s also a pleasant south westerly thermal breeze that blows between force 2 and 3 throughout the summer. Making the tepid waters of El Port d’Alfacs the perfect play ground for more pedestrian craft like my Trow.

The warm water breeds plenty of weed, fish, crabs and cockles and round the shallow edges I’ll have to unship this large centre board and row but out in the deeper water I should be able to make good ground to windward.

The Fleet Trow, from which the design for Gavin Atkin’s Light Trow is derived, belongs to similar but colder waters—the Fleet, snuggled behind Chisel beach in Dorset. Coincidently the Fleet Trow bears a resemblance to the traditional craft of the Port d’Alfacs, they are both narrow, flat-bottomed, heavily built boats, propelled by oars or a quant in the weeds, and they are both pretty, purposeful and, judging by the state of the few remaining specimens, on the verge of extinction.

It’s wishful thinking but it would be nice if this modern, ply and epoxy Trow were to inspire a new generation of craft for these waters.

Moitessier.

"I am a citizen of the most beautiful nation on earth. A nation whose laws are harsh yet simple, a nation that never cheats, which is immense and without borders, where life is lived in the present. In this limitless nation, this nation of wind, light, and peace, there is no other ruler besides the sea." Bernard Moitessier.

Standing shipwrecked and distraught on a beach in Trinidad having just lost his entire possessions except for his sea chest Bernard Moitessier decided to build a paper boat with which to cross the Atlantic to France.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been shipwrecked, his first boat, the dilapidated junk Marie Thérèse had run aground on a reef off Diego Garcia in 1952 after an 85 day passage from Indo-China into the teeth of the monsoon. Moitessier had had no way of measuring his longitude and the state of his boat was such that he’d had to dive over the side to plug the leaks.

Well educated and resourceful he got a lift to Mauritius on a British Corvette and soon found work on the island. It wasn’t long before he was earning good money and began thinking about another boat.

Marie Thérèse II was designed and built by Moitessier and after 3 years on Mauritius he left for Cape Town then, after a long stay he moved on to St Helena and then the Caribbean. It was while on a passage from St Lucia to Grenada that Bernard, pushing himself hard on a mammoth watch, fell at asleep at the helm. The boat sailed on in the warm tropical breeze and ran aground.

Moitesser felt that he had committed a crime against his boat by ignoring the laws of the sea. “The first of which is to keep watch, and the second never to relax ones efforts.” Bernard thought of Jacques Yves Le Toumelin sailing amongst the treacherous reefs of the Torres straits repeatedly pricking his leg with a sharp knife so that the pain would keep him awake. “I should have done the same.” He reflected, “Or chosen another profession.”

Bernard had $60 in his pocket and Trinidad wasn’t the sort of place where you could find a high paid job. He wanted to get to France, “Where money flowed like water and where the ghost of Marie Thérèse II might fade.” He would be able to earn well and build a new boat, but first he had to get there.

Basing his ideas on the bamboo framed cargo boats of the coast of Annam he would build a boat of paper. He spent $15 on wood for the frames, he planned to buy jerry cans for storing water and, for food, would take advantage of the cheap price of rice. He hoped the fishing would be good.

Bernard approached the local newspaper for material with which to sheath the boat. The editor, seeing a good story, offered all the old copies of the local rag that might be needed and gave $100 in return for a 20 page letter about the trip, to be sent when Bernard arrived in France.

After 8 days on the island he started on the build but a friend came running, there was a place as crew on an oil tanker bound for Europe. It would leave in two hours. Much to the relief of his concerned friends Bernard went for his sea chest.

Moitessier is one of the most loved and respected of long distance single-handed adventurers. In the double-ended 38ft steel ketch Joshua, which he eventually built in France, he twice rounded Cape Horn. He famously cocked a snook at the world of competition, renown, fame and wealth by failing to complete the Sunday Times’ Golden Globe round the world race of 1969, when he was clearly going to win, and sailing on to Tahiti instead. He died in 1994.

Halving joints

The work is getting noticeably easier and quicker, it’s just practice but all the same, satisfying to notice the change. Though not readily tangible it’s progress.

I set up a little production line to make halving joints, nothing flash just a system. The centreboard case goes through the middle of frame 3 and to build the case in such a way that it slots into the frame when assembled and adds to overall structural integrity, required not a few halving joints. Along with the now customary umming and arring, chin scratching, huffing, puffing, grumbling and cursing that accompany most boat building decisions in the Invisible Workshop.

The halving joint was the first piece of carpentry we were taught at school. Chippy, the unimaginatively named teacher, was a domineering presence in the woodworking class, so much so that I couldn’t concentrate on the work for fear of a clip round the ear and consequently my joints were shoddy. One thing that got Chippy’s goat more than anything was a plane left face down. Quite why planes were on the bench when we were doing halving joints I don’t know, but woe betide the boy who had a face-down plane in front of him. Chippy clipped ears with a wooden ruler and planes had to be left on their sides.

My next teacher, in a different school, was lax, wonderfully lax. Good-natured and genuinely interested in carpentry he also started us on the halving joint. He didn’t really fit in and he must have asked himself everyday what the hell he was doing in that school —a question that most of the alumni probably asked themselves too. He was smart enough to realize that no amount of cajoling and threats could make disinterested, apathetic children (we weren’t an inspiring bunch) wizards of the halving joint. And so he dedicated his attention to the keen boys and turned a blind eye to those dissolute few who sneaked out back for an illicit smoke.

And so I spent the woodworking hour developing a smoking habit that reached two packs a day at its height and left school having categorically failed to learn the halving joint or much of anything else.

So it was not without a little satisfaction that I witnessed these little fellows popping off my bench with more regularity than either of my teachers could ever have expected. Some of them don’t actually go together too well but its nothing that a liberal dose of epoxy won’t fix.

I see now that I forgot to take a photo of my plane. Face down.

Progress

Well here it is, the bare bones, the Trow’s skeleton, the rib cage.

I’ve been looking forward to this moment, the first time I get to see the form developing, the lines on the computer and the ideas in my head in 3D. Admittedly I didn’t spend much time setting it up right. The boat’s not square as it stands and the distances between the frames are only guessed at but it was a hurried job, done more to demonstrate to the various onlookers that it was a boat and not furniture than as an accurate dry run.

Kitchen units, I ask you… Actually Chief Vitalstatistix was there, along with Impedienta, saying that it looked very big and, said the Chief, “It wont go through the waves very well with that flat front.” Said I, “You’ll find the front at the other end.”

5 minutes later I dismantled it and noticed that the structure held together even without clamps, I don’t suppose this is significant but when I dislodged the inwale from frame 1 the whole thing sprang apart like Inspector Clouseau’s 2cv.

There’s still a lot to do before the sides go on, the central bulkhead needs to be framed and have a thwart added. I wanted to avoid framing it but have noticed that it’s 4mm shorter than drawn, how this has happened I don’t know, but the framing lumber will have to make up the missing length. The holes in the end bulkhead are hatches or rather urn holders, and a hatch still has to be cut on bulkhead 1. I’ve added bevels to the frame members on bulkheads 1 and 3. This took a lot more thought, worrying and emails than was warranted by their difficulty. The literature often refers to "tricky bevels" which had evidenty set me on a wave of bevel paranoia.

Heartened by the bevel experience I went on to experiment with scarf joints. Again everything I’ve read about these joints has put me off them, expect, of course that they’re effective and look better than a butt joint. But it turns out that my plywood sheets are 6cm longer than the standard 244, which means there’s an opportunity to scarf. I made a join, roughing out the ply taper with the plane, and then finishing with the belt sander. I clamped the two pieces to the bench, buttered up the faces with epoxy, put a heavy stone on it and walked away to let it cure overnight.

When given the boot test by a passing cowgirl the next morning, the join held up well, better than I expected. But later I couldn’t resist giving it that little bit more pressure and eventually it broke. Still, the ply was under far more stress than it will be on the boat. This is good news and bad news, good because I can use scarf joins instead of the slightly clumsier butt joint, bad because I now have to make them—and make them well.

Escape

My Mother-in-law’s been round to check out the bearer of her ashes: my Trow. Apparently she’s been talking to her friends in Barcelona about the plan, it sounds like its going to be along the lines of a Viking burial, I only hope I don’t have to burn my boat as well. Anyway, her friends think it’s a fantastic idea and, not only will they all be coming to the launch but some would also like their ashes taken out to sea when the time comes.

I can see a business opportunity developing here. See a need—fill a need. Book now for a Light Trow ash scattering cruise. Custom ash dispersal ceremonies. Boat fitted with luxury teak urn holders, maximum discretion.

Actually a few people stopped by today for a chat. One guy, who reminds me of chief Vitalstatistix from Asterix, watched me chipping away at something until his curiosity got the better of him and he came over to ask if it was kitchen units.

Kitchen units! …I ask you… It's a bloody boat you fool!

He reacted as if I’d said I was making a nuclear warhead, raised his arms to heaven, “It’s tremendous! A boat! He is making a boat! It is tremendous!” I heard him later, over the hedge, telling someone in the street, “It’s tremendous…etc.”

Then another acquaintance popped by the workshop. I should explain that when a Catalan tries to pronounce my surname it usually sounds like they’ve just breathed in a fly—they splutter and hack at my phonetics and generally discharge something that sounds quite but not entirely unlike Crawshaw, the sort of name you’d expect an alien floor cleaner to be called. This particular guy has got round the problem by calling me Robinson Crusoe, so when I told him what was afoot he obviously found it very fitting, “Ahh Crusoe, so you finally escape, you build your little boat and escape over the sea.”

What with one thing and another I didn’t get much done.