I’m decided that onkudu.com needs some more organising. The site has way too much content now, and I think it should be easier for people who are interested in various bits to find the information they want.

As such, you may notice some changes in the site of the next few days. I intend to create a “home” page which will offer a quick glance at the overall purpose of the site, as well as quick links to popular/recent posts. I will also be giving the post categories a bit of a spring clean. They’re a bit of an irrelevant mess at the moment.

The current format of the site will still be available via a “latest posts” page, which will operate exactly as it does now.

I’ve had to remove yet more boat. The inside of the Cinder has a grp liner, almost like a double skin, and it was in the way of what I wanted to do, so I’ve started cutting it out, although only on the companionway bulkhead. I will be building it back up out of plywood in order to house a proper switch panel and instruments.

Other big news, is I now have two 1 meter strips of 5mm stainless steel sheet sat in my cockpit. The current chain plates are simply U bolts, attached to a backing plate under the deck. It is not at all substantial enough for my liking, so I’m making some proper chain plates. Three per side will be bolted through the hull on to a 3mm stainless backing plate.  I was going to leave the “outside” jobs till last, but since this involves bolts on the inside of the boat, it will have to be done while I’m building the forward berth/heater area.

I need something to write about. I miss doing it, but there’s not really much of interest happening at the moment. Sure, there’s a bit of work progressing on the boat, but I’m fairly certain that a blog about cutting wood would soon grow tiring, if indeed it could be anything else in the first place.

I must tell you about one wood work related thought though. It made me feel a bit ‘Joshua Slocum’, carving my dream from a few decades of natures finest accident; a tree.

My woodwork teacher in school wouldn’t remember me, because I was quite unremarkable at the craft. It has always escaped me, and rather like people pay me to develop websites for them, woodwork was just something I had to consult the employment of a third party for. Until recently anyway, faced with a total lack of money I’ve been forced into doing the job myself.

A kind fellow by the name of Neil knocked my chippy sense in to gear a few weeks ago when he showed me how to make a template to cut the bulkheads from. Until that point, I had only ever cut straight lines, but after a demonstration he left me to my own devices. “If you get stuck, I’ll show you, but I won’t do it for you or you won’t learn”. Oh, not the hard way, I thought.

Still, here I am now with all sorts of plywood shapes cut out and bonded to the hull. I am getting quite good at it, even if I say so myself. See, unlike the person who built this boat, I will not accept poor quality work, and so even if it takes me a few attempts, a plethora of questions around the boatyard, and a few hours of reading, I don’t care. I want it done properly, or there’s no point doing it at all.

Still, I took a step closer to understanding the mysterious art of wood working today. As I have mentioned, Vreli was poorly built, but what I have done so far has all been with marine ply, or at least it was until I removed a piece of hardwood trim on the companionway bulkhead. Behind it, and to which it was mounted, was some rough cut softwood, like the stuff you find on the frames in the loft of your house. It was untreated, and poorly attached to boot. The decision was instant, it’s coming out and being replaced by something more suitable.

A couple of days ago I jumped in the car, and drove to the local timber yard on a quest for Mahogany. I got taken to dark a store room where I picked out two planks of rough cut Sapele. Sapele is similar to Mahogany, indeed I believe it’s from the same family of trees, but it’s much more readily available. This wasn’t just going to the local DIY shop and picking up a couple of planks, this was raw strips of tree. I wasn’t exactly sure how on earth I was going to turn it into the shape of wood I needed, but where there’s a will (and an expert to consult) there’s a way, so back to the boatyard I ventured to proudly show the people building their own boats that I’d bought some real wood.

Anyway, today, Peter the wood expert kindly offered to show me how to prepare this tree for being useful, and so we fed the 11ft planks through his planing machine a couple of times until it was smooth. I now own two bits of lovely looking wood, and will be cutting them out on Wednesday, ready for fitting. The beauty of it is, I can slice up the spare wood in order to make bits of trimming. I can see the appeal in it all now. Taking a raw material and fashioning it into something useful is a wonderful feeling.

Just a little bit of knowledge to get you going opens up a whole world of possibilities. I don’t think I’d be quite so scared about the idea of owning a wooden boat now.

Anyway, no more wood stories, I promise. I am, however, still left with that minor problem of having nothing to write about. I really these adventures didn’t involve so much hard work to make happen.

Just a test, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

All will become clear. that’s where my engine should go by the way.

Edit: I added this bit after the test.

So what was this about then? Well, I’m being a bit technical, but I’m trying to take advantage of ‘geotagging’. When you take a picture on a GPS enabled camera (a modern mobile phone for example) it can record the GPS location. In all digital photographs there is hidden data contained in the file, this is known as exif data. The lat and long are included within that data, and so it’s possible to extract that and in theory automatically include a map of the location it was taken. Obviously this test seems to have failed, but that’s ok because I now know why.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to be turning this into a technical blog, I just thought I’d explain it for you.

Chart table seat, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

Getting there. I’ve just made a template, cut it out, and am just test fitting it before routing the edges. As you can see, it needs a little adjustment, but not far off.

Keep your distance, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

When glassing a bulkhead to the hull, the plywood bulkhead can’t actually touch the grp hull, or it can create a weak point. So i have been reading anyway. You only need a tiny gap, just enough to allow things to flex a little.

I was searching for something to pad the bulkheads while i glass it in place and came up with this idea. I’ve cut some not slip mate into strips and supeglued it at regular intervals along the bulkhead. It worked well for the smaller one’s, but i’m not sure if the weight of this next one will compress them a bit too much. We shall see.

Outside, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

Finally, a pic of the entire boat

Back at it again, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

Just boshing the second template together. I aim to have all the bulkheads in place today.

As I mentioned in the first blog post I ever made on here (here), I have owned a couple of “project boats” in my time. These seem to be boats that are perpetually in a state of “one day, soon, I hope” as they are passed around from dreamer to dreamer, usually via ebay. Indeed, these boats serve well as an analogy for the recent banking crisis; dead assets being sold from one gullible person to the next until finally some unlucky soul is the owner at the particular point in time where this polygamous dream shatters and departs their grip.

I’ve had two of these real-life financially contorting dreams, and I’m determined to not have another. I have, by now, gained enough experience to realise when something is a non starter, or at least I thought so. I’m beginning to have some doubts over Vreli.

When I bought her she was complete with the exception of the engine. All I had to do was source a cheap Yanmar gm10, and away we went. Sadly it’s never that simple, is it, because I don’t want to just sail around the local lake, I want to really push this lovely long keel hull, and myself to whatever limits I find. Not only that, but this is my residence. It’s all very well to  pretend you can live on your dream minimalist boat, but I’ve done it for the last two years and I’m telling you it’s just not sustainable to spend the rest of my twenties camping on the water. I want something more like a home, if only slightly.

An oven, oh how I’d love an oven. I miss roasted food, and pizza. Baked potatoes… with cheese! A cool box would be nice. Not even a fridge, just a small cool box for a  pint of milk and some baked spud glorifying cheese. Running water too, hot if I can stretch to it. I know how, and I have room. It’s ok to judge me for this, you can sit in your armchair after a weekend sailing on your fast cruiser and tell me I don’t need it, but imagine for a moment living entirely without these things. It is possible as I’ve demonstrated, but nice? No,  not forever. To be able to heat the boat without relying on shore power would be marvellous too. It would open up a whole world of destinations, and an extended cruising season.

On the foundation of these ideas, I set about redesigning the boat. The first important decision was the sea berths. Vreli had two quarter berths, one to Port and Starboard, and although it would be nice to have the option of either depending on the tack we were on, I couldn’t waste all that space for such a petty luxury. One of them had to go, and it turned out to be the Port side. I didn’t think it through beyond a mental check that I was still sane, I started ripping it all out. Feet first, that’s the way to do these things. As my friend at the marina says, “you’ll get nothing done by standing and looking at it.”

I’m glad I did start pulling bits apart, because I found a few problems. Namely, this boat appears to have been home finished, and it wasn’t done to the standard that I’m prepared to entrust my life too. I somewhat enthusiastically decided that I must replace ALL of the interior, and so I began to demolish more interior.

I have hacked, beaten, unscrewed, and snapped the interior joinery which now lays on the boatyard’s  scrap wood pile. A lot of it was poorly fitted and causing a good deal of wear to the inside of the GRP hull, and other bits seemed to be bonded with Hubba Bubba. My decision to replace the guts of the boat is sound, of that I’m sure, but I’m left with a numbing worry that the effort and expense required to complete this task may not be worth it. For now, the vee berth is still intact (I need somewhere to sleep), but everything aft of the main bulkhead is either unserviceable, or simply no longer there.

The first job is to build the port side, aft of the main bulkhead (under the mast). This consists of a seat, a chart table, and a space for a heater. Ignoring the cost of the marine ply (and I am using marine ply, not WBP), this is going to consist of (rough figures) £600 for a Sigmar 100 heater, £70 for a plinth fan heater, £210 for the 210ah battery under the chart table seat, and then a bit on top for finishing materials (paint, insulation, heat proofing etc). That’s one corner of the boat. On the other side, there’s the smev sink (£200), the Origo 6000 oven (£900), the starter battery, and plenty of other bits.

Forward of this lot is the vee berth, and while there’s no great expense there, it still needs rebuilding from bare hull. During all this I’m supposed to be staying on the boat, but after a bout of angle grinding in preparation to bond the bulkheads at the weekend, I’ve had to retreat citing dust storms on board.

Then there’s the starboard quarter berth, that needs replacing to in order to complete the woodwork since it is also causing abrasion to the hull. Then the electrics, I’ve got to wire the entire boat from scratch. Oh, and the engine. That’s going to cost between £1,000, and £3,000… and the calorifier, the water pump, the water tank, the instruments. I really may as well be built the boat from a bare hull. Indeed, I am, I’ve just got to make it bare first.

Once I’ve completed all that, I’m still only half way. The exterior needs tidying up, painting, some filling, new deck gear, sails, roller reefing, standing rigging, running rigging… the list again goes on, and I’m not sure if this will include spares yet. The boom at least is badly corroded in places. Good enough for day sailing, but not for where I’m going.

So I’m wondering, if I had a choice, and I don’t because I’m homeless without it, would this be the dream shattering moment of the fabled project boat, or maybe this is the fork in the road, the moment that defines the dreamers and the doers.

Thankfully, I suppose, I can’t give up. Mentally I think I’m just going to have to forget the finished project for now; it’s simply too far away to bear thinking about. Instead I’ll just concentrate on one job at a time. If I break the tasks down far enough then nothing will take more than a day to complete. I can deal with that sort of progress, because the alternative is getting a proper job, renting a house, and returning to the tedium from whence I came.

I think the biggest hurdle is getting past the ‘dirty’ jobs. The jobs that make living on here absolutely disgusting. The angle grinding of fibreglass and paint, the sawing of wood, the laying up of fresh GRP. The dust, the fumes, the general squalor in which I live. Once that’s gone, I’ll be much happier.

Bulkheads, originally uploaded by nathanleefloats.

Just about to cut the second, main bulkhead too!