Hello! I'm back.

Back home after a 3-month family-visiting/camping/cycling/canoeing/hiking trip.  12,000 miles which took us to Colorado, down to Dallas, up to Michigan, clockwise around the Great Lakes, E. to the Saguenay Fjord in Quebec, and S. back to Florida.  Just a great trip.  Maybe the Canadian Maritimes to Nfld. and Labrador next time.

After a few days of unpacking and making notes for our next overland trip, I took the wrapper off Tugga Bugga and began to get organized to resume building her.  All the plans and many of the materials are there, but it is taking time to get my head around the project.  Frames, deck, coaming, thwarts and centerboard trunk all must go in; and then the hardware, rigging and finishing, and they all have to be done in the right order.  Planning is part of the fun of building, but I have also learned on previous projects that you can think too much: when I can't think how to do a particular step, sometimes the solution becomes clear when I just do it.

While I get organized, one stand-alone job is to make the mast.  The timber has been sitting inside since last December.  In the spring I planed the rough cut 4x4 down to 3 3/4 square.  I weighed it yesterday and found that, allowing for what was planed off, the wood has actually gained weight since February.  I guess that is conclusive evidence that it is thoroughly air-dried.  I calculate that the finished mast will weigh 35# before finish is applied.  Let's see how close it works out.

The douglas fir timber was straight when I bought it and set it up to dry 9 months ago, but I began today by streching a string on two adjacent faces of the timber to check if it is still straight.  Nope.  It has a good 1/4" of warp in one plane, and a significant twist through its entire length.  The twist is no problem, since the mast will end up round anyway, and there is enough wood to cut away that I can make it straight even if the rough timber is not.

Chapelle's plans specify the mast diameter at the heel, at the height of the sprit, at 2/3 thirds its height, and at the head.  It will taper from 3 1/4" at the thwart to a very slender 1 1/4" at the head. On two opposite faces of the timber I marked those measurements and struck straightlines connecting them.  After I cut to those lines with a circular saw and electric hand plane, I'll mark the cut faces with the same measurements and cut them the same way.  Then I'll have a 4-sided piece with the correct taper.  I'll trim the corners to make it 8-sided (there's a neat trick to doing that- will explain when I get to it), then on to 16-side, then plane and sand to make it a round spar.  First I have to get help to heft the timber outside where I can work on it.  There's a tropical storm in the area, so no rush on that.

On our trip I had an opportunity to visit several maritime museums along the St. Lawrence and piece together the history of boats used to haul lumber in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I learned that I had seen firsthand one of the last of those boats.  On a trip with my family in 1970 I saw pulpwood loaded by hand into the hold and onto the deck of a beamy wooden motor vessel about 100' long, with a high deckhouse aft and a small cargo mast forward.  I think it was at Trois Pistoles, on the south shore of the river.  After the boat was loaded, the weight of the wood had pinned the boat to the bottom, and the workers had to unload about half the wood to get it free.  Though their comments were in French, I could understood they weren't happy. 

In the late 19th century, lumber and pulpwood was carried up the St. Lawrence by two-masted schooners similar to coasting schooners which used to haul bulk cargoes all over the Atlantic seaboard until trucks, not railroads, made them obsolete.  Steam engines may have provided power for winches and windlasses, but not for propulsion.  When gasoline engines became available, they began to be used for auxiliary power on these lumber schooners, but the hull and rig were still those of sailing schooners.  The next step in the evolution was greater dependence on the engine, and the sailing rig was changed by making the foremast larger and farther forward, and the mainmast farther aft and smaller.  That made it easier to load lumber amidships, but the "schooner" was now actually a ketch.  Later boats eliminated the small after mast altogether and reduced the size of the forward mast, though it still carried a gaff sail.  The next step was to do away with the sail entirely, and remove the bowsprit.  At some point, diesel power replaced gasoline engines.  Finally, since the hull shape of a sailing vessel was no longer needed, they began to build the boats with a strange flat bottom. Afloat they looked like normal round bottomed boats, but below the waterline they were effectively sliced off horizontally.  That way they had almost as much carrying capacity, but could operate closer to shore, and could also sit upright on the bottom at low tide- the St. Lawrence has as much as a 20' tide.  Through it all, they called them "schooners".  The boat I saw in 1970 was that last version, and the last of that type went out of service within two years after that.  I was lucky to see one in operation. To the end, the watermen called them "schooners".

They won't be building any more wooden lumber "schooners", but the Chesapeake Bay crabbing skiff will live again!

I have learned that two of my disrespectful sons had been betting whether I could write a whole entry on this blog without using the word "expoxy".  Well boys, there it is.