Year three.

Pathfinder build, third year.

As is my way I felt that it was a good time to do a review and recap of what I did on the Pathfinder build this year , year three of the project – having done it at the end of years one and two. As I write, the Pathfinder is on it’s trailer but out from under the build shelter because constructionally it is finished except for one main job which will have to be done when the budget tank has refilled quite a bit ; enough to buy a pair of deep cycle batteries and some electrical doohicky’s.

The battery compartment (to be) and the central dry stowage compartment emptied out for cleaning out and drying out – the battery compartment is usually packed tight with granite blocks, from the garden, as ballast : for reference I used about the same weight in ballast as I intend to have in deep cycle batteries.

Years one and two recap.

Talking about my winter work and future projects is jumping ahead a bit so I thought that I should write a quick recap of years one and two (while I still remember them !). In year one then, I basically ‘built the boat’ from a set of flat parts that I marked and cut from a stack of plywood and some nice Douglas fir strips. Year one ended with a complete boat shaped structure, upside down on the build bench and work came to halt because most days it was too cold to work with epoxy resin – that and I felt it was good time to take a break. This showed me that in terms of building a ply and epoxy boat my effective season could only be from late February to late October but the trick was to work in as concentrated a way as possible during that time.

In year two I started with tidying up and glass/epoxy taping the joints between hull planks and carefully finishing the plank edges to create a fair hull. Not strictly to plans, and a non standard technique, but I eventually glass and epoxy coated all of the outside of the hull and also not to plan gave the hull a pair of external skegs to allow the hull to sit level on any hard surface. Just as a side note in year three I did think that having skegs under where the ballast would eventually go, plus a couple of layers of glass cloth there, would increase the strength of the boat and give it some protection in a grounding situation.

Year two ended with the hull having side and end decks and a non standard cuddy, the main event, in my mind is that my partner helped me with buying a trailer and it was a couple of days work lifting the boat onto it and slowly bringing it more into balance to make it tow well with enough weight over the drawbar, At some point I built the mast and then made an appalling measurement error in ordering the sails. Year two finished with me writing up a long list of jobs on the inside of the shed door and I was way too confident in believing I would be on the water and sailing by midsummer the next year.

Year three and the first level of completion.

In my mind year three,of the project, splits between what was going on in the project itself and then what was going on in the UK at the same time : given that this is mostly about being a backyard boatbuilder I feel I should focus on that and not the dire state of the UK. In year three I was trying to get to the point of completion that would allow me to sail and row the boat because that’s how I defined my potential sailing project with this boat as in ‘around England by sail and oar’. While it seemed that every potential launch date came and went because of an important detail not finished, or just a weather and tides problem, I did eventually take the boat down to a boatyard and launch it on a bit of a wind and a prayer…..and of course my unprepared state did catch me out and I had a difficult first trip in a brisk and wet Southerly airstream that ‘pinned’ me into the downwind corner. My 3 main failures being : not being ready to sail, not having an engine and not having adequate dry shelter finished ; in effect I was testing a big rowing boat and even that function wasn’t quite right,

As trips go it wasn’t a disaster (although it could have been) and once we got the boat home the project ground to a halt while I sulked a bit and decided what to do next – one of my main thoughts at that time was to give up sailing and a second thought was to only have a much smaller and simpler boat and jut sail locally.

I wrote one post about the trip and another post just kicking around my ideas for a much smaller, lighter and simpler boat that could be kept near to the river (I found a potential venue) and which I could walk to from home and with which some of the purpose would be to have simple trips out and camp out in a bushcraft style rather than say as a cruising boat.

My eventual decision was to complete the boat but to do in a more relaxed way, in three distinct stages that would start with getting the boat to a simple ‘sailaway’ standard as stage one, improve on that in stage two by converting it from daysailing sloop to ‘coastal’ standard as a Yawl and then only in stage three taking it to full expedition standard. One of the main jobs in stage two will be to make a pair of lighter masts and to do that I need a lathe to make the mast end plugs and to have a lathe here I really need to build a new shed roof.

As I write (December 2023) the boat has an engine and most of it’s sailing gear, in fact it could go for sailing trials except that it’s rained most days and the boat isn’t set up properly for living aboard with dry shelter so taking it to water would need some dry days. As it is I worked through a whole door list of correction jobs and on a rare dry day heaved the boat out from under the shelter so that I could set the shelter and it’s bench ready to start making roof beams for the shed.

That is all obviously a very hasty recap of a peculiar few months but the project is complete to a basic standard and i’m in the process of finishing year three (over the winter) by pushing forward with one major job – that of making a complete sailing and camping shelter. This might be in the shape of 2 separate structures as one will be a simple ridgeline tent only to be rigged at anchor while the main project would be more like a conventional yacht’s sprayhood ; this of course needs a whole new skillset from me as my first task is to bend up a stainless steel frame for the sprayhood. Writing this post finds me in a very reflective mood so I took a bit of a break to try and make a few notes of everything I wanted to say – I had several posts all about the same kind of subjects so iv’e stowed most of them in the trash file and condensed a few into the end of this one, here goes…..

1, Reflections on being a backyard boatbuilder.

The first and last thing I would say about building a boat at home is that it’s been a great project for me especially during the time when we basically had our civil liberties taken away (never forget and never forgive !). It was continually engaging as the day to day problems got incrementally harder and one slightly odd outcome is that I finished years one and two with a huge desire to get on with other work. Given where I am with the project right now I fear that this winter could be a problem because I don’t have much to be getting on with. Coming into the end of year three one of the main desires I have is to learn new skills and have a go at doing things that I haven’t done before, I’m less sure about building a second boat even though i’m much better set up for it and one of my first posts in 2024 will be about one of the projects I have in mind.

2, Reflection (and question 2) Have I built the right boat for what I want to do ?

The answer, at this point, is that I simply don’t know because I haven’t sailed the boat yet or had it under motor : my only valid experience as of Dec 2023 is in using the boat as a rowing boat and it fails a bit because it’s moderately heavy and has more beam and surface area than is good for being effective under oars. I originally set my project Idea as being for sail and oar and I think now that is unrealistic for a Pathfinder except for rowing in easy wind and tide conditions – I think now that a better boat to have built would have been John Welsford’s later design (Long Steps) but I had some doubts about being able to accommodate the longer boat here.

3, Reflections on a second boat.

I like the idea of a smaller, lighter and much simpler boat that I could keep near the water more and more – a boat that wouldn’t need to be towed every time I want to sail. I have several things that I have to get on with next but the boat based idea for a project that I still have now begins to coalesce around the Micheal Storer design, the Goat Island Skiff which appeals because of it’s radical, Sharpie-like simplicity and from many accounts it’s speed under sail. To build a GIS looks like being a simpler and faster project if I find the time and money to get around to it – before considering that though I have to get past the job of re roofing the workshop and then building a second rig for the Pathfinder and also going forward with my land transport project.

My current thinking is that I could start the build of a GIS without much outlay as I could start with a set of plans, a few sheets of plywood and some epoxy but only needing the tools and space I have already. I won’t ‘pull the trigger’ on this one until I have a new roof on the workshop although the boat would be built under the outside shelter although I might build a simple inside tent out of tanking membrane or similar as a space to warm up easily to allow work with plywood and epoxy during a winter in the UK. That would be essential I feel because it’s the winter when I most need a build project.

4. Reflections on being an ‘old git’.

My first trip out in the Pathfinder failed due to my inadequate preparation, not being ready to sail and with not having an engine. What also happened is that I suffered a bit with what I can only call reduced fitness and endurance – what should have been quite easy conditions to deal with felt exceptionally hard. We always used to say, in medicine and nursing, that there is something that happens, round about the age I am now, where strength, fitness and endurance all decline and I feel it particularly as a reduction in my exercise tolerance coupled with less ‘coping’ with harder conditions. That combination of reduced fitness and endurance made me rethink my planned project, especially in a mostly open boat and for a while I regretted selling my little Liberty because in that boat I could quickly escape into a cabin with a charcoal heater.

As well as me simply aging and not quite catching up with myself the time of the project also coincided with us losing three of our ‘oldies’ as one of the surviving relatives call them and just recently we helped one of the aging survivors move out of a decrepit farmhouse. For me it’s obvious that I have less physical capacity with age and I wouldn’t now, for example, take on a long hiking route as we once did or even feel able to take on a long ocean voyage in hard conditions. I feel that it is just as well that I have already done the major sailing that I will ever do….after all 3 times around the Horn is enough for anyone !.

5, On being a blogger and sometime YouTuber.

With my fail trip I also had a sudden loss of wanting to write and film and I thought for a while that my blog is past it’s prime (just as I am). I also felt an enormous sense of withdrawl from any desire to communicate with others, especially (mostly in fact) with the internet. I left several groups that I had been active with and that shows up in my site statistics except that visits to my written posts slowly drop while views of my fledgling YouTube channel have risen slightly ; even there though I notice that many viewers don’t stick around for very long.

Slowly I think that I am moving away from trying to produce a regular written blog and have put more effort recently into producing video – at the same time though I feel the need to spend much less time on the internet as I have been doing recently and much more time simply making stuff out in the workshop. It seems that a lot stuff I end up watching on the internet is designed to manipulate us and most of it only serves to make me deeply angry. This is, I feel, part of why I would like to have a simpler boat and just go off and land somewhere, away from people, where I can sit at a camp fire and not have the continuous adrenal overload that the internet provides.

The list goes on but only because I am thinking about stages 2 and 3……….