Month: February 2020

The Vancouver Maritime Museum’s annual fundraiser has just kicked off and tickets are $20 for one or $50 for three. The grand prize is a boat trip for two from Iceland to Greenland! (don’t worry – the boat is bigger than ours)  All information is at https://vanmaritime.com/
https://vanmaritime.com/2020/02/28/new-vmm-raffle/

Please consider supporting the museum, and good luck!

The museum has free admission tomorrow (Family Day), but I’d encourage you to become a member – it’s very affordable, and also gives you access to their talks and special exhibits.

Last week at the boat shed was more work on the stem and transom – this is painstaking work which we are willing to take slowly, to make sure to get it right!  We got the notch cut in the transom for the hog, and got the transom clamped into position.  We made a pattern for the stem, to help guide our shaping of that, and got the stem cleaned up.

Yesterday, we were lucky to get one of our members and neighbor at the dock (owner of Querencia) to take some video of our workday – nice to see action instead of photos for a change!  Thanks Duane!

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Last week after our work in the shed, a few of us took advantage of the beautiful sunshine, and got out in a couple of our boats.  There wasn’t much wind, but enough of a breeze to keep us moving for a while, and it was SO nice!

The wind died off at the end, and we had to take to the oars to get us home.  What a wonderful way to spend a sunny winter afternoon!

The last few weeks have been productive, with progress on the Auk’s keel, stem and transom.

The inner keel, or hog, has a fairly strong bend in the aft section – to cope with that, we did a partial rip cut to half the thickness, stopping the cut just forward of the tricky section.  It now bends into place, and we will apply glue in the cut, and clamp it into shape.

The gorgeous sapele transom got cleaned up after gluing, and looks spectacular!  The grain really comes alive as you move your head around, and the grain catches the light differently.  When it gets varnished, that should be even more dramatic!

After a bit of a tuneup of the bandsaw, the transom got cut to shape.  The edges will need to be beveled when the planking begins.

The stem is made up of strips of sapele, cut thin, and epoxy laminated on the form that we made.

Last week we formed the inner stem – yesterday we used that as the form for the outer stem.  The inner stem will take the planking, and after planking is complete, the outer stem will be fastened in place over the planking.

That beautiful transom was clamped into position, and has been marked for the hog – but nobody has yet been bold enough to cut into that nice chunk of wood!  We’ll measure a few more times, and THEN.

Over on Arnt & Valerie’s boat Anja, the new cabin is coming together nicely – Arnt brought the pieces down for a test fit, and his work with the templates sure paid off – a perfect fit!  Beautiful work!!

We have produced a video instructing how to rig our sailboat Ragna.  Benjamin has finished the video editing, and has posted it on Youtube:  https://youtu.be/QyndJBpjh0o   Be sure to take a look, and get familiar with it!  As a member of Oarlock & Sail Boat Users Group, you have access to this boat and the others in our small fleet – we’ll be doing some more instructional videos soon.