Paint it Black – and Cream

The CLC Passagemaker dinghy as a Bushcraft boat

Ok so, it’s actually grey at the moment but that’s just the primer.

Blog time, late August 2024. My Pathfinder Dinghy is clean inside and out and is now packed and ready for a new potential owner to inspect and hopefully to tow away and have a good life with her. Today, as I write, my second new venture arrived in the form of a secondhand CLC Passagemaker design which, in it’s current form, is almost immediately usable as a rowing dinghy but which I am going to complete as a sailing dinghy ; what I have in mind is something that I often wrote about in this blog and that is a ‘bushcraft’ boat which is something that I will explain in this post.

With work on 2 boats now ongoing I will split this post into two sections – one for each boat.

Pathfinder

Almost the very last job I did on the Pathfinder, before we took her for sea trials was to repaint the top strake (plank) in a contrast color – in my case a hand mixed light blue/grey. For a sneaky bit of post foreshadowing the very first thing I did with the Passagemaker was to spend the afternoon sanding down, or at least trying to sand down, the rather horrible red of it’s current top coat. If you’re wondering about the color I intend to paint it the post title is a hint !

The first thing I have to do with the Pathfinder this week is an admin job – with the boat for sale and the word only spreading around slowly my job is to start tom advertise it if only on the various internet based buy/sell sites. I suspect all that will get is a few tire-kickers who will only keep asking for more and more photographs ; it’s slightly tempting to send anyone like that the whole damn Pathfinder project file. Anyway, I suspect I have several weeks before anyone remotely serious turns up to view the boat so right now I am carrying on with snagging and remedial jobs as best I can.

This week for example i’m just about to turn over a new page – to paint over the old list of jobs on the inside of my workshop door and write up the next batch. First up this week is the simple job of clearing the build bench now that I have finished the spar jobs for now as I need it for the CLC Passagemaker dinghy project. What I am working on this week is making the 2 base end terminal holders for the boom gallows project ; later in the week I may go up to the timber store and see if I can find a suitable board to use to cut the actual gallows out of. The stainless steel tube arrived and I spent some time carefully easing the holes through the side bearer blocks that I made and fitted.

Passagemaker.

The dinghy is currently perched atop a pair of upturned planters to the side of our access drive so that I can start to work on the underside. Thus far this week I have spent several hours just sanding down the hull as the current paint seems to be not only 2 pack but largely inspired by orange peel. As soon as the build bench is free I will recruit our neighbors and 4 of us should easily carry the dinghy over to the bench where I will continue with it’s new paint job, fitting some new Bronze keel band and then turning her over to start on the inside.

Iv’e made a tentative inquiry about a sail for the boat, hoping in this case that the sailmaker might have access to the sailplan drawings. Once the dinghy is right way up I will get on and build a mast for it ; as far as I can tell it’s a rounded off square section so I might end up with laminating a couple of clean boards together and using my big router to finish the edges with.

Stroke

The third element (the bonus one) that I would like to talk about today is stroke and not specifically the two I have had recently.

The first thing I would like to say is a big thankyou, especially everyone who has taken the time to leave comments on this blog and the Facebook pages that I use – in this case mainly the site where we talk about John Welsford‘s various designs. The second thing I have to add though is a few comments about what readers have posted even when they basically mean well – what am I talking about here ? – please allow me to explain.

Several readers have commented that they know of people whom have experienced strokes, or stroke-like events and gone on to have very good recoveries : i’m sure that is the case because I know of one in my own clinical background – one girlfriend who I was with many moons past was a Physiotherapist involved with treating a man (retired pilot) of similar age to me who’d experienced a significant stroke (CVE) and was in hospital or rehab for most of a year but who eventually got home in a mostly functional state.

The opposite side, is in my experience, the more common one. What is more common is for people to have multiple small CVE’S without even knowing it except for some problem that is investigated, and then die many years later with a small history of minor events that have been cumulative and eventually added up to cause that person clinically significant problems. My immediate examples are both of my late parents who both had multiple ‘minor’ events and yet both ultimately died due to other causes. My late mother, as an example, was being investigated for years by a hospital neurology team for a persistent balance problem and only years later was put through an MRI scanner when that technology became available and what it revealed was several small areas of brain damage from ‘minor’ CVE’s .

Unfortunately for him my late father we know had a whole series of ‘minor’ CVE’s that were cumulative to the extent that although he died mainly of old age and other health problems towards the end he was mostly deaf and blind, hugely withdrawn and the last time I saw them both he didn’t even recognize me. So…..with that kind of medical/genetic history i’m not exactly positive about my own future so anything I say about boat related stuff today does have to be based on my own limits – and I can feel those limits slowly closing in on me.

The bushcraft boat idea

Several years ago I posted a piece in this blog that was basically a sea story, the story of me sheltering (cowering more like) from a whole series of gales which swept across the south west : in fact, from memory it was the only time that I have ever heard the shipping forecast start with “gales all areas”. It was early spring and achingly cold aboard the little Liberty as this was just before I bought and fitted the charcoal fired Pansy stove.

Even in as much of a lee as I could find under the high ground behind the anchorage at Dandy Hole in the river Lynher the boat was still dancing about madly at anchor and it was all I could do to try and stay warm while maintaining an almost continuous anchor watch. Eventually I just gave up after several days of gales, I used the one weather window, where the forecast only predicted a Force 6 for a few hours, to up anchor and run back up the Tamar to my regular mooring…..I was mostly out of food and achingly cold even under my heavy sleeping bag

It was on the second night, if I remember it well enough, that I had the experience that led me to the idea for what I call the Bushcraft boat.

Just after dusk that evening I was waiting for the next shipping forecast and something caught my eye, I think it was the reflection and movement of an oar on a small pram dinghy that came out of Wacker lake just behind Warren point to my south. There’s an old quay there and nowadays a small parking area where, in the past, iv’e taken an open canoe and paddled up the various rivers and creeks in that area.

The dinghy looked to me to be similar to a Mirror dinghy, something about 10 or 12 feet and with a pram bow and a small stumpy mast up forward – maybe a lug conversion although when I saw it it was being rowed rather than sailed. The little dinghy came past where I was swinging at anchor and made for the spit of mud and land at the bottom of the farmer’s field where dinghies and canoes sometimes beach – Redshank point for those familiar with that end of the Lynher. I remember seeing the little dinghy beach and it’s owner walk up the muddy foreshore humping a big old military style Bergen (Rucksack). Later, in the dark I saw the light of a torch playing over his improvised bivouac and later still the flames of a small open fire : I remember wishing that I was there rather than stuck inside a cold and humid boat.

The last thing I saw of the little pram dinghy when I went on deck to hoist my anchor lantern was the glow and sparks from his fire in the blustery wind. By the time I upped and left in the grey and damp air the next morning the boat was already gone so maybe they had come past me even earlier although my intuition had it that they’d gone up the Lynher towards St Germans. Even then I thought what a valid choice it was to have an ultimately small and simple dinghy and to combine short passages under sail and oar with minimal camps ashore.

Today, nearly 10 years later and I am revisiting the idea with a small pram dinghy of my own and having practiced, and even taught, various bushcraft skills I now look forward to the combination being my next, and maybe last venture with both disciplines.

Best wishes Y’awl

First coat of primer goes on.