Virtual cruising

It is February, or as we used to refer to it when I was teaching secondary school: “the F month”. When I am not shoveling snow, I do get a chance to get out into the backcountry on my skis from time to time. However, my thoughts have already begun to wander to next sailing season. I have started to drag rigging into the shop for overhauling, and I have already indulged in an activity that I refer to as Virtual cruising.
          Virtual cruising can take several forms. Sometimes I just read last season’s logbooks looking for trips to repeat. Sometimes virtual cruising is about researching places that you have never been, and dreaming about going there. I keep an old tattered chart-book and several editions of cruising guides in my bedroom. I read more about places to visit in the winter than I do in the summer. With any luck, I am too busy actually cruising to research cruising in the summer months.

          Sometimes virtual cruising takes the form of a navigational exercise: “If I depart Rockland with a true south wind, can I lay Greens Island in one tack? If my average speed is five knots, how long will the trip take? What kind of approach can I expect if I want to pass north of the island”?
          Several resources worth mentioning to anyone cruising Maine waters: A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast by Hank and Jan Taft and Curtis Rindlaub is the guide that I have found to be the most comprehensive (a new edition is supposed to come out this spring).
          As you might expect, no one guidebook will cover everything, and small boat sailors would be wise to join the Maine Island Trail Association (MITA). MITA members get an annual guidebook with detailed information about islands that are part of the trail system, anchorages, and which islands welcome visitors. It also includes information such as islands that might be closed part of the year due to birds nesting, and privately owned islands that welcome visitors under certain conditions, or at certain times of the year. The guide has changed over the years, formerly it focused on the needs of paddle driven craft, recently, more useful information for small boat sailors has been included.
          Another worthwhile resource is a column called Gunkholing with Gizmo by Ben Ellison that appears in the Magazine Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors. I have a three ring binder that I put copies of this column in, sort of a separate cruising guide.
          Yet another useful resource is the Maine Coast Heritage Trust. I became a member because of the number of times we stopped at some beautiful spot, and found a discrete sign stating that the island in question was in the care of the MCHT.
          So this morning, when I went downstairs and looked out the window and saw this:

And yes that is snow, I thought I might try to wrestle the chart book away from the cats tonight and go on a virtual cruise.
             

Boat Skylights

Related to the last post…When we bought our friendship sloop, one of the few areas that needed a major rebuild was the cabin roof. This created an opportunity to build any kind of skylight that we wanted. The skylight that most people think of when they think of a classic wooden boat is the traditional “butterfly” hatch. I have always loved the look of these, but know of few that do not leak. What we decided to do instead was to build a version of this hatch that, as far as I know, legendary builder Bud McIntosh developed. It looks like a traditional skylight, but actually functions more like a large “dorade” ventilator.

              This solution has proven to be a particularly good one for our boat because when the boat is at anchor or on a mooring, air is continually circulating in the main cabin because of the way the skylight works. The Skylight looks great, allows for a lot of natural light below, and does not leak.

             Another alternative to the more traditional butterfly skylight is to build a regular hatch opening and build the actual hatch in the shape of a butterfly skylight.
I took this picture of a hatch on a Jarvis Newman friendship sloop at one of our gatherings. It is fairly self explanatory.

Raised Panel Bulkheads

The interior layout of our friendship sloop is simple, and we feel, comfortable. The impression that many visitors get, however, is one of elegance and I think this impression is caused, largely, by the design of our bulkheads.
            As we set out to decide what kind of bulkheads to install below, we faced several interesting design problems. One was that some of the desired bulkheads would be too big to fit through the hatch if they were single pieces. This really only left us three choices: plywood with seams, tongue-and-groove and raised panel. We rejected the first two options, the plywood because it did not feel right to put a plywood interior into such an otherwise, traditional vessel (also I hate working with the stuff). Likewise, we rejected the painted tongue-and-groove because it requires a tremendous number of fastenings and if you ever need to remove a bulkhead for maintenance, the resulting unfastening is both expensive and very time consuming.
            At about the time that we were finalizing our decision to go with raised panel construction, I was able to lay my hands on a good-sized pile of recycled mahogany at a very reasonable price. There were two reasons for the reasonable price, one was that at least half of the pieces of wood in our acquisition were in short lengths; the other was that some of the pieces had worm or ant holes. Cutting these out would result in even more short lengths. Normally, working with many short lengths of wood is problematic, but since the panels are all basically short lengths, this turned out to not be a drawback, and another reason to go with raised panels.
            A couple of other contributing factors were that the bulkheads could be built in sections that could be taken apart so that they could fit through the hatch. The resulting sections could be “set up” with fewer fastenings so that when they needed to be struck for maintenance to the hull or interior, the process is less problematic. Another contributing factor was that I had built this kind of bulkhead before so neither had to invest in tools or learn new skills.
            As there were benefits to choosing this kind of design and construction, there were negative aspects as well. The design of raised paneled bulkheads is one of those areas of interior boat design that looks complicated because it is complicated. There are many pieces, they all have to fit together snugly, and the layout has to account for every other part of the interior design that abuts the bulkheads.
            Two critical steps to ensure a high quality results are the making of templates or “mock ups”, and laying out everything on paper before picking up a single piece of wood.
            Since we had put in a temporary pine interior the first year we owned the boat, we already had templates with penciled notes already made on them. Using the templates as a starting point, I began the layout. I saved the layout drawings for several of the bulkheads and have posted them here:

              
            Even though they are freehand drawings, you can see that I have included a lot of detail specific to each. With drawings complete, I could now start going through the pile of wood and designate pieces of wood for each part of the bulkhead.

Rails and stiles:
            In a few places, I made these by hand, as I have done many times on other projects. Part of the attraction of this method was that I could dig out my plowing and combination planes.

              
            I do not have a shaper table (rails and stiles can be made using that method). I do have a router and a bit set, and router table. I built the router table more than a decade ago because I could not find one that had all of the features that I was looking for in an affordable combination. The table I built is adapted for a number of jigs and has storage drawers for all the bits and tools that go with the router and cost about $40 in materials.
            With our bulkheads, I decided to use the router table to do the rails and stiles because we wanted to produce a slightly more fancy joint and the router and router table made a good joint in the end-grain pieces much faster than I could by hand. After building a few jigs, the router table also cut beautifully on the rails and stiles that had one or more curved sides.

Making the panels:
            As with the rails and stiles, I had the option of making these by hand, or by using the router and router table. It is also possible to make panels with a table saw, but for some reason I have just never liked this method.
            In any event, whenever I could I used a set of panel planes that I built years ago, that have produced a multitude of panels over the years and are a joy to use. As with plow-and-molding planes, they need to be kept sharp. I would also point out that on some of the curved panels I used the router table and jigs rather than the planes to do the roughing out.

            When all of the pieces were made and dry fitted together, I broke down the pieces, did all of the finish sanding, and glued up the bulkheads in sections. The sections were then varnished and ready to install.

            If this kind of design problem interests you, I would recommend an article in the current issue (Issue#200) of WoodenBoat Magazine by Maynard Bray entitled Thinking about Interiors. While the interiors he discusses are quite a bit larger than I think most of us who work on our own boats will ever get to play with, the principles he lays out remain the same. I would also recommend a back issue of that same magazine (you will have to look it up in their index) where three designers are given the same wish list for a new interior for a Concordia 31 and the result is three very workable, but different interiors.