Sorry for the delay in posts, but there has been yet more changes. Shortly after the last post was due to be publish, I had to move the workshop.  From the wonderful Oasthouse, in the country, to a modern industrial unit.   Whilst the unit is closer to home, more practical etc, it’s doesn’t have the character and history of the previous building. Oh, and it’s more costly 😦 Hey ho, onwards and upwards.

Anyway, since then work has continued steadily, in amongst other work.  The wheelhouse is progressing slowly. Whoever designed it needs shooting! (It was me) The roof has been really tricky, as so much is happening in a small amount of space. I keep telling myself that it WILL look superb when finished. The bottom half has been infilled with bead & butt boards, and looks really pleasing. The roof sections, are nearly ready for a MASSIVE glue up session very soon. I just want to ensure I have done everything to them that needs doing before they are permanently attached.  A few pictures below to show what’s been happening.

This should have been posted a while back, in the heady days of summer (what summer)

Following our little trip away with www.canalvoyagers.com the work has now begun! 🙂 In the last few weeks we have constructed the forward sections of the main cabin sides, the base for the wheel house and now the wheelhouse itself is under construction. The following pictures are just a few to show that things ARE happening now 🙂

Following the sides. the next section to construct were “4 square posts, that will become supports and corner posts for the cabin when it’s fitted. This meant I had to go and buy some more timber, something I always enjoy! I went to my local timber yard looking for oak of big enough proportions, but sadly he didn’t have any. He did however have some lovely English Elm! I decided this would work very well indeed, so purchased more than enough for the current job!

Whilst I was there I spotted some wide 2” oak boards. When I say wide, I mean REALLY wide! the narrowest is over 4ft across! I was informed they came from a tree that was planted by Nelson to celebrate the battle of Trafalger in 1805! Whether this is true is up for some discussion, but it’s a fab tale regardless. Having counted the rings, the tree would be the right age, so who knows. I had no immediate use for the timber, although it will certainly all get used, but couldn’t leave such wonderful wood behind!

Anyway! Enough of the buying, it’s time to make something else.  With the sides made and put to on the stack of completed parts. It was time to start the wheelhouse.  This is by far the single most complicated section of the build.  There are lots of pieces, funny angles, and things to trip me up all the way through.

The way I designed the base means I can start from a flat surface and work up from there.  The lower cill section was first to be machined.  Followed by the uprights, and then the head section.  These were then all jointed together with mortice and tennon joints.  The bottom half of this will soon be infilled with oak bead and butt boards.  Above those will be an intermediate cill, with the windows above.

The design of the windows will be very similar to the old drop down railway carriage style, and they will all be opening. This makes a lot more work at this stage, but will be most worthwhile in the long run.

I will let you get on now, but will post another blog at the end of the week to show the progress.

Following on from everything that happened last year and all the sorting out since. We had the opportunity to spend a week away, aboard Snipe and Taurus.  They are hotel narrow boats run by www.canalvoyagers.com ,my good friends Corinne and Neil.

We had a fabulous time and enjoyed every moment afloat! If you are looking for a break away from life’s stresses and strains I can think of nothing better! No airports to deal with, just the odd lock or 30, and peace & quiet.  You will get looked after and fed exceedingly well during your stay.  Have a look at their site.

Now we are back, and things are nearly sorted it’s back to the boat 🙂 The next post will show some actual construction!!!!

Just a short post to say sorry for not updating the blog recently.  After the last post you could say that ‘life’ got in the way of progress! Although I say ‘life’ it was more of the ‘death’ side of things and all that that brings with it that has slowed the rebuild down.

Those that follow me on Twitter will know a lot more about it all than I shall post here.  Anyway, onwards and upwards from here. Expect to see more post in the coming months as things pick up pace again. The OP will be coming out the water in May to have her bottom ‘seen to’.  Before that the cabin sides will be fitted along with the foundation for the new wheelhouse. All that has been made for a while, but just too busy doing everything else to fit it!

Thanks for your patience

Matt…

Now that we had got everything covered up, it was time to start the removal of the wheelhouse, cabin and interior.  This was fairly straightforward as we didn’t want to keep any of it!

We started by tackling the interior. going from this:

To this:

And the for the removal of the cabin itself:

Everyone wanted a go! Just had to keep their enthusiasm in check 😉

Now then dear reader, as I said in the last post we needed a cover to keep out the worst of the weather.  This couldn’t be a normal tarpaulin or sheet as it needed to fit fairly well and be designed so that we could work inside of it.  I had a word with a local sheetmaker and he gave me a price, whilst this was reasonable for the amount of material and work involved I thought there may be a better option money wise.  I did a lot of research and found a Scottish company who could supply the Regentex canvas, a company in the north that would happily supply the webbing and a firm on the south coast that supplies decent brass toothed eyelets. 

Measurements taken, sketches done and orders placed I awaited everything required to arrive.  All we then needed was a sewing machine on which to stitch it together.  A constant watch on eBay soon lead me to a Sailrite LSZ1 portable machine.  It just so happened that it was being sold by another lugger owner, (he owns Veracity) a few emails back and forth had it winging its way to us. 😉 With everything in one place it was time to start cutting and sewing the canvas into a cover.  This developed into a HUGE job, needing three of us just to pass the canvass through the sewing machine each time!  Each seam had to be sewn twice so it was backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.  With each pass it got heavier and more bulky to handle.  After a LOT of work it was done and taken to the boat a bit at a time to check the fit and make any adjustments needed. 

It’s not quite a perfect fit, but not bad for a first go!

(Just as a side note the Sailrite sewing machine is a fantastic bit of kit!)

I also need to say a huge thank you to my mother, without her help (and livingroom floor) It wood have been very difficult indeed to make 😉

Let the demolition commence ;-)…

The following few days passed in a bit of a blurry state due to lack of sleep and suchlike.  We moved the OP to another berth the following day and she thankfully sat much better indeed.

I then had to come up with a list of jobs and some sort of vaguely logical order for them to be tackled in.  This took many sheets of paper untill I had a rough plan.  It had already been decided that the cabin and wheelhouse had to be removed as they were both rotten to such an extent as being beyond repair.  The wheelhouse was also ‘not spoilt by its beauty’.  It was too low to be able to steer from and had one exit to the starboard side that claimed more than it’s fair share of my scalp en-route back from Penzance!

We also were going to strip the interior as this in no way suited our needs and was also rotten in many places.  But first, we needed a cover to keep things dry (ish) whilst there was no lid on the boat…

Having arrived and had a modest celebration we wnt home to get cleaned up and then Trish and I returned to the OP to watch her down on the tide. This is where the problems started.  As she took the ground there wasn’t enough mud on the outside of her and she started to lean out.  She ended up at about 45-50 degrees list to port! This was not ‘ideal’ as we ended up having to sleep across the boat and were almost standing up!  At this point I think Trish was even less impressed than on her first viewing.  Here she was the proud new owner of a stinking, dirty, uncomfortable boat that didn’t even have the ability to be level to sleep on! I’m sure the phrase ‘not impressed’ would suffice at this point! In some ways it was good that Trish couldn’t even get off as it was a good 10ft to the ladder so she had to stay aboard.  The morning did seem a long time comming though…

All round, not a happy situation.  It odes get better though so keep reading 😉

Well dear reader, this is where it all starts and we see if we had done enough preparation before setting off.

I was joined by my good friend and ex merchant seaman Steve and my aunt and experienced sailor Sue, both willing volunteers/victims (I get those two words easily confused).  Once they were aboard I left my friend to drive home and we chucked the ropes off and left Penzance heading east, we were coming home!!! 🙂

We soon got settled into the motion of the boat and the rhythm of the engine.  Out across Mounts Bay, so named because of the St’ Micheals Mount monastery on an island in the middle of it. A beautiful afternoon with a gentle westerly breeze changed into an even more glorious evening as we passed by the Lizzard Point and turned up towards Falmouth as I wanted to give everyone a decent night after their long days of travel earlier. We arrived in Falmouth at about 10 in the evening, by which time it was dark and the mass of dockside lights made it very difficult to see the correct channel buoys and even harder to find the moorings!  We eventually got alongside another boat, but were the third boat out from the pontoon. Not the best place to be, but it did us for the night.  We planned to be away early in the hope of missing the dues man ;-), sadly he must know our trick and still managed to charge us £25 for the night. I did point out we had only been there 7 hours and were nowhere near a pontoon let alone any facilities.  This made no difference to him so I paid up but will never return!

On our run up from Penzance we had been taking a bit of water through the stern and a couple of other weeps, although the pump had been dealing with this very well.  It is not uncommon for a wooden boat  to do this especially when she hasn’t been to sea for a while.  As we left Falmouth Steve commented on the leak from the stern saying it was a bit worse although as the pump was more than keeping up with it we weren’t very concerned and decided to monitor it and stay a bit more inshore than going much further out to sea.  We continued up the Channel and had all the sails up. she looked and felt fantastic and all was well with our world until I went below to check the chart plotter! The screen was very dark indeed, it had turned itself off.  Now before you say we should have proper paper charts etc etc, WE DID and had been plotting our position regularly 😉 I wasn’t concerned about losing the plotter but did delve further into the electrical supply and discovered that we had a collection of batteries that hadn’t been being re-charged by the engine at all and so were flat.  They made good ballast but that was it!  This left us with a more pressing issue, we were nearly at the western approaches to the Solent, it was starting to go dark and we had no navigation lights.  Do we go into somewhere like Yarmouth on the Isle of wight and pay through the nose for everything or do we keep going, staying south of the island and keeping a bloody good look out.  We decided on the latter and sneaked past the island under a starlight sky. No one came near to us during the night although I was extremely pleased to see the sky lighten in the east as the dawn came.

The day continued without further problems. The stern leak got no worse and whilst we daren’t stop the engine as we could not have started it again she kept chugging along nicely We passed Brighton and Newhaven, then came to Beachy Head which slowly went astern of us as we progressed across Eastbourne bay.  We had spotted a dark gray boat some distance off and we watched them as they watched us.  It was a small naval vessel, probably customs or fisheries.  We were the only ‘different’ boat in the bay as all the rest were white plastic yachts with white triangular sails, whereas we are big, black and have brown four-sided sails.  Talk about conspicuous! Fortunately their interest waned and we were left to go on our way. Much relief all round aboard the good ship OP! 

We had made very good time since leaving the Isle of Wight behind and were very early arriving in Rye Bay.  We then spent a few hours just gilling up and down, up and down waiting for the tide to rise high enough for entry into the harbour.  Steve is one of the Rye Harbour pilots for the commercial side of the port and so I left it to his discretion and expertise as to when we could safely enter between the pier-heads.  We entered much earlier and by a different route in than I have ever been before and shot past the pier-head lights like a cork from a bottle!  When you come into Rye Harbour the Harbour office is on the starboard side and you are normally required to stop.  Stopping was not an option as we went past at about 10 knots and continued up the river towards the town.  We turned hard to port into rock channel and ‘nearly’ missed the channel marker buoys.  Rock channel is very narrow, especially when only half full of water so we progressed as slowly as we could dragging our keel on the bottom all the way to our mooring.  There was,of course the grand welcoming committee all awaiting our arrival with great interest and once we had got the ropes ashore, there was much jollity to be had! We eventually got to put the boat put to bed and retired home Knackered, but very very satisfied!

Then the work begins…

Having purchased her, the next task was to get her back to Rye, a distance of about 300 miles. This was due to be an interesting if fairly long sea trial!

I collected enough tools, equipment, spare parts and odds n sodds to sink a battleship and headed off to Penzance with a mate driving for a third time.  Someone had to bring the vehicle back of course.  We arrived late that day, only had a brief look over the boat and retired to the pub for a well-earned Spingo 😉 For those not up on west country ales Spingo is where it’s at!  Easily drinkable and every pint tastes as good as the first 😉 The following morning we were up with the lark (almost) and down to the boat in good time to get her sorted and ready for sea.  There were 101 things that ‘needed’ to be done and only limited time before my two crew would arrive and expect to be able to chuck the ropes off and come back to Rye.  We set to and the work proceeded at a good pace, checking this and fixing that. Making sure the lights worked (more on this later dear reader) Checking the engine over and all the other things you would expect before going to sea. At the end of day one of operations we were suitably happy and confident to retreat to the hostelry and partake of a glass or two 😉

Day two started on a less than ideal footing.  Not because we’d had too much the previous evening, but when we stepped aboard and I went below I could hear DRIPPING!  This is a bad thing to hear on any boat, but especially one that we are soon to be taking to sea.  We spent some time trying to locate the source only to discover that it was the raw water cooling pipe for the engine.  This presented a few issues as we couldn’t completely turn off the seacock and therefore whatever repair we made had to be pretty quick as all the time the pipework was disconnected there was water coming into the boat.  It is amazing how fast water will flow through an inch and a half pipe. I had visions of having to ask for assistance from the lifeboat without even clearing the pier-head, a most embarrassing thing to do!  In time though we managed with a few trips to the local chandlers/marine engineers shop to solve the leak. Much to my relief.  I will let you dear reader guess how the evening was spent…

Day three and indeed Departure day dawned bright and sunny.  This was to be a good omen for the trip.  We had only a few jobs to do today before leaving which included getting diesel etc.  I had two options for fuel and they both involved me moving the OP for the first time under my ownership and more importantly my insurance 😉 For those that aren’t familiar with Penzance dock, it’s not by any means the largest and is usually full or thereabouts with craft of all sorts, so not much room for manoeuvre!  We were alongside the wall and acting as a pontoon for three boats moored outside of us.  These we had to slip out astern of before turning her head towards the open dock gate and the sea beyond.  With the help of the harbour staff this went extremely well (even if I do say so myself) and I was relieved to leave the gate astern and head off to get fuel.  Having discussed the options with the local fishermen it was decided to go across Mounts Bay to Newlyn to take on fuel as it would work out much cheaper than purchasing it in Penzance.  On arrival in Newlyn we caused a bit of a stir because she’s a very well-known local boat and hadn’t moved much for a while so we had an audience to either welcome us in or watch when things went badly.  fortunately for us I managed to put her alongside the end of the ‘New Pier’ (it’s been there for years but names stick down west) and we were made very welcome, with lots of questions as to what my plans were with her and I’m sure some checking to make sure I was a suitable purchaser of one of ‘their’ boats!  Whilst waiting for the fuel bowser an old boy walked along the pier and I was introduced to him.  He is the grandson of the man who built her! I was honoured to meet him and spoke for all to short a time about her before the bowser arrived and I had to attend to the fueling.  I really must get back West and buy him a pie and a pint whilst he tells all! 

Anyway with the fueling completed we returned to Penzance to await the crews arrival outside the dock gate as the tide was away and we needed to leave as soon as they arrived…