Cuddy-Cuddly !

Pathfinder project build – October blog.

Blog time – it’s the end of October 2022 and the boat is up on it’s original building frame and well covered by tarps and the build shelter because the year has flipped it’s Autumn switch – it’s gone from warm and very dry to very wet and windy. This week for instance we had a south-easterly gale and that’s the wind direction that comes straight up the valley and even drives in under the shelter and somehow gets in one corner of the workshop.

Iv’e just had the last two weeks away from the project completely , I should have been down in the city courthouse acting as a juror but was excused from service due to a lack of criminals to try – whatever, not my problem. Instead, I didn’t have anything planned for the build and neither did I have the next parts, tools and materials I need to start playing around with basic metalwork ; what I did have was an urgent need to do the heavy garden work which included taking down one medium sized tree and heavily trimming the developing beech hedge. The problem with all of that is that it also entailed grubbing out some ferocious and invasive Brambles.

I hope that it’s going to be an autumn and winter of learning new skills – as I said above I am setting up the workshop with some new tools to make a start on basic metalwork skills – soon i’ll also be moving into the kitchen with my work table and setting up to start some canvaswork projects. The thing that I really wanted to have another try at is filming, producing and editing video segments as a different way of telling the story of the build and I hope it’s eventual launch and the voyages it goes on.

I had intended to shoot video clips right from the get-go but it never worked out to have my mind trying to master the new skills involved in just building the boat and film at the same time – also something happened with my camera that I never got around to sorting out at the time. I did however take lots of stills shots , some of which I have used in the build posts ; this week though I decided to set up and film some boat chat in the workshop and then use the video format to talk about and answer some questions about the cuddy design, construction and function.

In the past I had the ambitious idea of combining written and photographed blog posts with video posts but the video side never worked and that was mainly down to getting all tongue-tied frustrated in front of the camera or running into a weird sound problem when recording off camera. Today I won’t say any more about that because I largely worked around the problem by just filming in the workshop and recording everything with the camera and then by using a sequence of stills photographs which show the story of the build far better than I can describe it in a written post.

Anyway , and without further ado here’s the cuddly-cuddy video.