What's Next?

There's been some rumbling and grumbling from the masses about my lack of new posts in this log.

In my defense (me? Defensive? Never!), there has been little or nothing to report. Both boys had baseball this past weekend - Charlie at 1:00 on Saturday and Henry at 12:30 on Sunday - so the middle of both days was completely taken up with baseball. Check that: Charlie's game was rained out, but that same rain prevented me from pulling the Duck out to continue working. Sunday was beautiful for Henry's game, but showers came in in the afternoon, scuttling my half-hearted attempt to continue progress.

It's a beautiful day out today, but rain is due to roll in tomorrow, and the weekend looks iffy at best. When I can next get out, here's the plan:

I had had some problem with the last layer of epoxy I had used to line the inside seams never drying. I'm going to have to get in there and get out as much of that as I can, sand things smooth and try to re-coat the whole interior with a good coat.

Then I'm going to "deck" the first 30 inches or so on each end of the boat: I'll put in one cross-brace (using the leftover oak from the rubrails) and then cover it with a piece of either the scrap 1/4" maple ply or maybe the oak beadboard I got and never used for the faux clinker. It's just getting in the way, a big 4x8 sheet.

I also need to figure out how I'm going to manage the sail rig.
As I may have mentioned, Fred got me the beautiful book , which I have been poring over.

It's an interesting prospect, adding a sail to a vessel not originally designed to use one. This book has entire sections, very scientifically explaining how to calculate the center of effort of various differently-shaped sails, but then passages expounding on how there is no final set way to do things, you have to just kind of get a feel for it.

Most of the book (in fact, most everything I can find about adding sail to canoe) is lateen- or lugsail-oriented. (A refresher on different sail types, if you're interested in following along at home, is here.)

While I defintely see the merits of a fore-and-aft sail (briefly, a triangular sail, like you typically see on small sailboats, which can take a sideways-bearing wind and use it to push you forward), I am more and more drawn to a square sail (simply, a big square (or rectangular) bed sheet which is hung from a "curtain rod" positioned across the ship, to catch the wind blowing from behind; picture a Viking ship.)

Actually, that is the best way to envision the difference between the two basic sail plans: sailboat versus Viking ship.
Fore-and-aft rig.
(Note: this is a "Sunflower" sailboat, the type of boat I first learned to sail, 30 years ago at Washington Park in Denver.)

Square rig
Clearly, much more majestic
While fore-and-aft, as I said, has many, many things going for it (among other things, you can sail at times and in directions other than when the wind is directly behind you, and blowing in the direction you want to sail), it also has some inconveniences (the sail, being blown on from the side, will tend to want to flip your boat over, unless you have a large keel down in the water to prevent such things. Note: my boat does not have a large keel down in the water to prevent such things.)

But, mostly, I want a square sail because nobody else has a square sail.

Its very . . . it-ness, its being will make it, and therefore me, unique.

I'm excited about this now. I have to say (as I have in the last two posts), the launch was so dissatisfactory and anticlimactic that I had lost all of my mojo for The Boat Project, and this had me quite discouraged.

But all of this musing on the sail plan has my juices flowing again. There is some clean-up work that I'm not looking forward to, but I'm excited about moving forward with the sail rig. Hopefully Sunday will be sunny.