12-24 The Moaning Chair:

In every amateur boatbuilder’s shop there should be a “moaning chair”; this should be a comfortable seat from which the boat can be easily seen and in which the builder can sit, smoke, chew, drink, or swear as the moment demands.

Howard I. Chapelle, Boatbuilding

I needed the moaning chair early and often this Christmas Eve. During the night before, it occurred to me I had set up two of the molds wrong. They were too far aft by the thickness of the plywood. So the first project of the day was to take those molds apart and put them up right. The one remaining station mold (#6) went up smoothly, but getting the transom pattern in the right place took the rest of the day. It needed to be centered, straight up and down, straight across, and at the right height and angle, all at the same time. Adjusting any one thing threw everything else off. None of my books suggested how to control the pattern in all three dimensions at the same time, but I finally did figure out how, and it was satisfying to get that job done.

Eyeballing what I thought were the completed molds revealed a problem which took me back to the moaning chair. The #6 mold just forward of the transom will clearly not give a fair curve to the side or the bottom. At first I assumed I measured, cut or mounted the mold wrong, since the only other possibility is that the boat's designer quoted above, Howard Chapelle, despite his iconic reputation as a marine architect and maritime historian, made a mistake on the offsets which specified the shape of the mold. Nevertheless, a careful remeasurement of the mold confirmed that he indeed had feet of clay. The photo from the stern shows the offending mold, with the fairing battens hanging out in the air. It also shows my moaning chair in the background. It will not be difficult to adjust the mold so the hull is shaped like the plan, even if it doesn't match the offsets at that point, but how the mistake might have been made remains a mystery.

I have to report one other incident which took me back to the moaning chair. While working on the transom, I stepped around the end of the strongback, grapped a timber for support, and realized too late it wasn’t attached to anything. The transom, a handful of tools, the power drill and I all went over the seawall into the bay. Fortunately it was only knee deep, and even more fortunately, no one saw.

Work will resume after a trip out of town for the New Year.

12-20 I Finished drawing the molds, cut out molds, except the stem and transom. Chine angles measured within 1 degree of plan. I’m not sure how I’m going to set up stem and transom.

12-21 Monday. I spent all day figuring out the proper shape of the transom pattern and cutting it out. Then spent a long time in the evening figuring out the right rake of the stem, which is not at all clear from the plans. In the end, I measured the angle with a protractor.

I suggested to Mrs. Sharpie that we name the skiff after her, but she thinks Naiad might be a good name. In Greek mythology, naiads were water nymphs. But it appears they were associated with fresh water. The salt water version was oceanid, which isn’t much of a name. But one of the oceanids was Calypso, a possibility. Mrs. Sharpie thinks Calypso should be a bigger boat.

12-23 A good day of work. I cut a pattern piece for the stem to the design breadth at the rabbet of 1 ¾”. Fitting the stem pattern in place was not as hard as I expected. I just cut it long, buried one end in the ground, adjusted it to the right angle, and screwed it to the strongback. Using its position as a reference point, I marked off the six mold locations on the strongback, and mounted five of the molds by day’s end. With a little imagination, I can see the shape of a boat.

Breaking Ground

12-6 I took delievery of a big (4x4x20’) stick of douglas fir which will become the mast. It is straight and close-grained, but is green wood. With help, I took it through the porch window and set it up level on the floor. It will stay there to dry as long as possible, and the mast will be the last job done.

The skiff will be built around plywood molds set up on a strongback of two parallel 2x6’s. I bought these materials and on December 18 I finally broke ground, literally, digging post holes for the strongback.

12-19 I placed posts, hung stringers and spacers for the strongback, cut up plywood into mold sized pieces, and drew most molds.

Getting Started

I have wanted to build a small day sailer for a couple of years, since admitting that our old FJ was too unforgiving for me to sail her alone in a breeze, and especially too unforgiving for any visiting grandchildren. In the end, I sold the FJ back to the good friend I bought it from 25 years ago, for the same $250 I paid him back then.

Initially, I was inclined to build a little catboat, the 12 ½’ Bolger designed Tiny Cat, based on the venerable Beetle Cat. In early 2009, however, a very pretty 14’ sharpie skiff caught my eye on Duckworth’s web site. It was designed by Howard Chapelle, based on a boat he measured in the early 1940’s, of a traditional type common from 1860 to early in the 20th century. This boat may not be quite as stiff as the catboat, but it should be well suited to protected bay waters. For a look at the boat, see htpp://www.duckworksmagazine.com/04/s/articles/chapelle/index.cfm%20.

The one boat I have built before, a Gloucester Light Dory, had wonderfully detailed plans by Phil Bolger and an exhaustive companion instruction book by Dynamite Payson. For this boat I am mostly on my own, and there will be several challenges besides my limited experience. Although a flat bottomed skiff is probably the simplest kind of hull to build, Chapelle’s plans are not as detailed. For example, there is no way to tell from the plans or to calculate the exact shape of the side panels, the transom, or the stem. My goal is to build the boat with modern materials and methods (like plywood and epoxy) and still stay faithful to the hull lines and sail plan as designed. Large scale plans of all Chapelle’s designs are available from the Smithsonian, and I ordered what I thought would be the plans for this boat. But what they sent was a plan for a similar sized outboard motor skiff, which I suspect was the boat Chapelle based his design on. I decided to rely on the plans as shown online, and waited for the weather to cool off before starting. One thing and another delayed the start of the project until December. But now, armed with Chapelle's plans and his 1941 book Boatbuilding, Reuel Parker's The Sharpie Book, and Peter Cook's Boatbuilding Methods, the project is underway.

For family and anyone else interested, I'll try to keep a log of progress. Comments and suggestions are welcome.