What if ?.

What if……..there was some way that I could reprise my Pathfinder project ? – or is really the end of that idea.

Ok, I admit that is a very big what if ? but what if I could find a way, any way, that would allow me to use that boat after having put so much work into it?.

In a recent post I talked about one of my post stroke problems – that of being physically tired and weak much of the time while at the same time having an over active and fizzy mind. This post is the result of the morning after the night before kind of situation in which iv’e been awake for most of the night, finally fallen asleep around sparrowfart (dawn) very groggy but with the odd sense that the night’s thinking has left me with distinct no to one project I was very excited about but also with a sense that I should instead spend some time thinking about my own boat project, in this case the stalled Pathfinder project and using my newfound mental freedom to try and find a way forward.

Blog time : it’s almost into October 2024 and it’s gone smack into a wet and cold autumn and I think we saw off the last days of late summer while at camp in Dorset. Both my partner and I are both involved in the sale of high cost items, in my partners case it is the sale of the farmhouse that she grew up in – it gets a mention in the Doomsday book, while in my case it’s the much smaller sale of my almost complete Pathfinder : neither of us have had any success. In both cases (Jackie and I) we think that a big part of our failure is directly due to most people being extremely cautious about any major spending because of the dire political situation in the UK right now.

In other blog news I have just completed my first week at school – school now being the beginning of my time with the Peterson Academy and as with my time with Dr Peterson’s psychology lectures a few years ago I follow along as best I can except nowadays my attention span seems to be another casualty of my recent strokes. For anyone reading this whom is also interested in the Peterson academy I am following 2 lecture subjects under 2 separate lecturers thus in the first case I have gone back to the roots of the subject I was following under Dr Peterson (the roots of psychology with Keith Campbell Phd) and in the other I am with Bishop Robert Barron – often a guest speaker and interview subject of Peterson’s. It’s perhaps no surprise that my head is more than a bit busy right now although I did often have that problem and used to counter it by working with my hands : that’s one of the main reasons I keep coming up with new projects.

Another thing that I am doing, alongside being an online student, is that I have a book project on the go and it’s largely about the central idea of the Passagemaker project ; basically a combination of ‘camp‘ cruising and bushcraft. While my previous book attempts have failed early on as my enthusiasm waned this one is at around 30 early draft versions of book sections. With this attempt I am quickly heading towards a first complete draft and might soon need to put everything together and have it seen and corrected by a copy editor ; at the moment I’m thinking about self publication as it’s not the kind of subject I can imagine being taken on by a publisher.

Back to the Pathfinder though and is there any way that I could get to sea in it and maybe have at least one voyage with her ?

It’s been several weeks now since I did any work whatsoever on the Pathfinder because so many other things have floated to the top of my must do list, first it was the garden which I have neglected this last four years, then it was the little CLC Passagemaker and last week what floated to the top of the list was dusting off my recumbent trike and seeing if I could still get some use out of that. Today, in terms of writing, I started some practical work on the Pathfinder even though that was only a matter of slowly taking off the outboard motor mount and reorganizing the spars for the next potential job – it’s a start at least.

I was all night thinking about the Pathfinder project – as I said earlier it was so late when my mind finally gave up that it was getting light !. What I was left with though was 2 lists of things I would have to do to make the Pathfinder project viable but also the realization that I should shift my attention entirely to the Skerry project as that one has more chance of success in getting me back on the water while the Pathfinder always has the problem of being difficult to move around at home – it’s almost beyond our limits to handle.

I’m left with 2 main threads of thought about the Pathfinder – first that I should correct the snagging list that I came back from sea trials with and secondly that the main work I would have to do at home is modify things such that we can manage the boat on our sloped driveway – we lose control of the whole rig when we bring boat and trailer home because it basically runs away from us on the slope. I did get as far as maybe having the boat on a local mooring although it was never intended for that or even to have it kept at a boatyard and maybe even launched/retrieved there for me.

The latter idea would only be a seasonal approach and the boat would still have to come home for the winter and the physical problems would still be there. The intelligent solutions are all quite expensive, my first idea is the obvious one which is to have an electric winch which I can rig to ‘lower’ the boat and trailer down the yard as it has to go down facing forward and then be turned 180 degrees. Ideally, to turn the boat easily I have to take down one mature tree and dig out the root of another and at the opposite side make a break in our fence such that we can swing the stern across.

As for the boat itself I really have to make it into a better expedition boat, that would have to start with altering it’s balance (too much weight aft), altering it’s spars (making a new mizzen mast and new main boom), finishing the central boom gallows as a ‘me’ support and doing a lot more work on it’s camping shelter. Ideally I would do as much of the boat work as I am capable of and then sell it to a new owner ; at the moment that looks unlikely and I guess that most potential buyers are put off by the price tag, especially with the difficult political situation in the UK right now.

Postscript, third try

It’s now at least a month since I wrote and edited the original post and my third revision of a postscript based on the month’s new post stroke experience.

This month I put the outstanding Pathfinder jobs back on the active jobs list and slotted those in between hard physical sessions bashing the garden into shape. As iv’e said in other posts recently I tried to settle down at night hoping that the sheer physical exhaustion would get me to sleep but all that happened was that my brain seemed to go PING and off it went for a fizzy wander around any problem that I was working on.

Some of the work went as well as I could reasonably expect – I moved the motor mount and one product of my fizzy mind was a new solution to my spars problem. The other side didn’t work as well and I found increasingly difficult as I worked into the job : thin stuff I know but I found myself limited by mt lack of core strength and stability while working inside the cuddy and that also amplified by my lack of dexterity with fine work.

My answer to my own question ‘what if’ was mostly answered right there as ‘probably not’ and a better way forward now seems to be to concentrate on the other project that I have in mind and where the physical work problems I would have to solve seem mostly do-able.

My final thoughts about this are to transfer all of my effort to the upcoming Skerry project and then next spring to have another try at selling the Pathfinder at a much reduced price : I would much rather see it go to someone else and be sailed rather than for it to sit here for the next few years while I try to work around it.

CLC Guider, owners photograph