Hey y’all, take a look at my yawl.

Completion work on the Pathfinder – only 2 years late !

Not actually finished but when are boats actually finished ?.

In blog time (writing time) it’s late May thus early summer in wet old England ; I know it’s summer because the rain is warmer and i’m sneezing with early hayfever due to the long wet spring and therefore a huge amount of green growth here. I woke up this morning with the first thing in my view line being the Pathfinder at the top end of the yard – it’s ok as that’s where I left it when I finished my jobs for the week last night. I was notably exhausted and bleeding from several new shin grazes, the result of my poor balance and meeting sharp edges while lurching around like a drunk sailor on Cowes high street.

As you can see from the photographs the Pathfinder is now a yawl although the mizzen mast is only a bare tube without end plugs – only there as a placeholder to see what the whole thing looks like with 2 masts in place. This week was a really big push ending with me getting the mainmast in (for now) and taking down my temporary sheerlegs . That job alone took about an extra hour in tidying up time after which we hitched the trailer and boat to the car and hauled it out of the corner where it’s been sat for the last month. It was good, finally, to step back from the boat and see it ‘in the round’ and not buried under a tree and behind the shelter space.

This morning, as I write, I spent most of the time heaving the build bench out from under the shelter, giving the whole space a sweep out and then finished off with a dozen or so buckets of rainwater sloshed around to get rid of all of the dust and sanding debris. The boat is now three quarters of the way back under the shelter and right now – just having a break – i’m setting up tackles all round as i’m going to lift the boat off it’s trailer and move the trailer back a bit/boat forward a bit due to now not having a huge long prod out front and instead just having the anchoring ‘stump’ ; it potentially shortens the whole rig by about 14 inches. Given that the whole length of the boat and trailer has always been a problem here it’s a positive move to shorten the whole rig by at least a foot – after all it’s only about 3 days extra workload !.

I started this whole month’s work with one day of destruction derby to get all of the slightly depressing side of destroying good work all in one go – anyway, today I mostly completed the backwards steps by taking off the cast bronze chainplates, cutting their Iroko bearers off of the hull and then sanding off as much of the epoxy and wood waste as wood go in one session. As you would expect it looks awful right now but it does ply into my hands because of a second job which I will talk about in the next section. The boat doesn’t need chainplates because in it’s new iteration it’s a Lugs’l yawl rather than a gaff sloop ; the only reason I left them initially is because I had some fancy ideas about using them for a double halyard arrangement – as it is the whole rig is becoming simpler as I go along and it will now be just a single halyard running through a foot-block attached to the mast.

Next….set aside jobs.

This month just gone – iv’e been working mostly towards an end point at which time I would have the masts in and be just about ready for a temporary yard and boom ; that’s the point at which I can measure up for the 2 new sails and then sit and twiddle my thumbs for the next 6 weeks. What iv’e done though I slowly amass a shed door’s worth of set aside jobs to work on during that time.

The first job, as iv’e already mentioned, will be to lift the boat off the trailer, loosen about 30 nuts that hold all of the trailer cross bars and uprights in place and then move the trailer back about 14 inches. After that of course I will have to re balance the whole rig and as I did first time around to rest the amount of weight on the drawbar.

I had been thinking about the job above for some time as the boat’s top plank has got a bit scratched and ding’d over time ; in short I was thinking about flatting the existing paint on the top plank and then maybe smartening the whole boat by painting that plank a different color. As it happens the job of removing the chainplate bearers has made the repaint a necessity but also a good opportunity to do a bit of judicious filling and fairing.

Today would have been a great day to be in the workshop, maybe building a switch panel box or experimenting with my new lathe which is finally here……next day delivery my ar*e !. Right now though there is an intense thunder and rainstorm directly over my shed, it’s so loud in there under the metal roof that I can’t even contemplate working in there. So, there’s some electrical project jobs still to do and one main project still to start on : that’s the camping/sailing cover/shelter to make a final decision about and have a first go at making.