Very Skerry…..

Lining up for a second boatbuilding project.

Several weeks ago, in terms of writing blog posts, we drove out into the wild hinterland of rural Devon to go see ‘a man about a dog’ – a boat in other words. A week or so later the vendor brought it over to our place, which was a huge help because at that time I didn’t own a suitable trailer and there weren’t any immediately for sale. That little dingy, the CLC Passagemaker, I decided had to be a quick,cheap and dirty project – certainly compared to the Pathfinder build, which, as with most boatbuilding projects is late and over budget. For me the Pathfinder build was a maximum project and took up all of my time and money for several years while so far the little Passagemaker has cost me what ? a small amount of cash for the hull and foils, about the same again to procure a trailer and about double that to buy some tubes for the mast and have a sail made.

One of the great things about the project is that both my partner and our good neighbor say that it is obviously good for me to have a project to work on – it’s something positive in itself and means that my mind has some simple problems to solve. This morning, as I write, the little CLC is finished except for a small amount of work on the spars and I am waiting for the one sail. After that I have to ‘marry’ the dinghy to it’s trailer and do a bit of admin to find it a regular home next to the river. Then I hope it will be the start of getting out and sailing/rowing the local rivers and having simple, bushcraft style, camps on the foreshore and the other side of the whole project is that it is turning into a writing project as well ; I checked this morning and found that I have the basis of 28 book sections already written.

The whole idea got my mind really going and just one of the things that came out of that creative burst was the line “we’re gonna need a bigger boat” (Jaws of course) as in the project I might be tempted and encouraged to go further afield than the rivers and creeks upstream of Plymouth sound and I think that for that Idea I would want a longer and more slippery hull. The volume and carrying capacity of the Passagemaker is about right but that volume might work better if it was stretched lengthways by a few feet – thinking 14 feet rather than 12.

It made me revisit an older and slightly non ideal project idea – that of finding a retired racing dinghy hull of about 14 feet and converting that into a more seamanlike cruising boat. That not very good base idea kept me awake and thinking into the small hours – when I got to the point of working out how to design, make and fit twin asymetric daggerboards to create a sleeping space in the middle I knew I was a ways off piste with the basic idea of producing a slightly more capable boat for local cruising. As I said in the previous post though, the great thing about being an ideas generator is that there’s always a better one lurking in the dusty recessses of my over active mind.

Where everything changed was the realization that whatever I did next would take an amount of time, effort and money – such that I may as well use that time to produce something that is a much more suitable fit for the project. In other words, to at least try and get it right first time around – that would be a first in itself for me !. I went back to the idea of wondering whether it would be possible to have a second boat that normally used some of the same gear ; the mast and sail for instance and then I remembered that Daryl, the bloke who had sold me the little CLC dinghy had done exactly that in that he’d bought the Passagemaker just for it’s rig and sail.

On the day we went to see the Passagemaker Daryl tried to sell me his CLC Skerry too – that being the boat he bought the Pasagemaker as a rig donor for. I couldn’t justify the cost to myself at the time but just recently the idea of a next build project came up so I started to look into building a CLC Skerry from a kit myself rather than starting out by lofting and marking panels.

Someone once told me that the boat you should buy is the one you would like to be seen turning up in ; this one, being a sweet double ender would hit my happy spot.

Having just completed one project – actually two because I am kicking the garden back into shape, I did think to jump straight into another boatbuilding project but it’s gone cool to cold and autumnal here so I would be trying to do the principal work just as it goes into winter. With the long Pathfinder project each year started at the beginning of March and ended with me struggling with my epoxy cure at the end of October. Better I thought to do some actual sailing and camping with the Passagemaker now (I like being out and about in the Autumn) do my preparation this winter and then have at it in the spring. As you can tell, I have pretty well set my mind on building a CLC Skerry and I find the idea a good one unless something comes along to sway my mind – the idea of a sailing Dory is waiting in the wings.