23 How I kept losing my wet edge, Missus

As today progressed the temperature went slowly up, the wind dropped and the sun came out. As this was the appointed day for applying the first coat of waterproof primer on the stripped and repaired hull it was interesting, to say the least. Keeping a wet edge on the paint was all but impossible, and it was touch dry in about 25 minutes instead of the three hours it said on the tin. And this is what it now looks like.



Two days ago I tack-ragged the hull to get any dust off and then primed all the rough patches with pink primer. Then today I sanded all those patches with a detail sander (triangular head) until I'd levelled all the imperfections (well, nearly all - I kept on finding fresh ones). When you start to sand the pink primer off paint is left in all the depressions, so you have a very good idea of the size and shape of the mini-dings you need to get rid of with the detail sander. Once this was done and the hull was pretty smooth, I applied the Grey Metallic Waterproof Primer (Blake's Marine Paints). There'll have to be a bit more sanding tomorrow to get rid of the remaining imperfections that this coat has revealed (and a couple of runs) and then two more coats of primer before we proceed.



While I was watching the paint dry (who said my life isn't full of excitement?) I pulled the centreplate up (down really, but the boat's the wrong way up remember) to have a look at it. It'll have to be replaced as it's made of ply which is starting to delaminate. Another job, but at least I've got the ply sitting in the garage.

Launch date in four weeks time?

Chapter 3 To Infinity And Beyond - well, Potter Heigham anyway

Later that same year - Whitsun half term of our Lower 6th, I believe, when we should probably have been revising for exams - we (Ian, Charlie and myself) set off for Martham, on the Norfolk Broads, to pick up the sailing cruiser we had hired for a week. Here’s a photo of us just before we left Stevenage outside Ian's family home; reading from left to right there’s Ian, Ian’s Mum Dallas (actually Mildred but she changed it), Charlie, and myself with fag on the go. (I smoked Players Number Six, Ian smoked Rothman's, Charlie was slightly asthmatic and choked quietly.) The Standard 8 has been polished to within an inch of its life and is loaded with (mostly unsuitable) clothes, bedding and food. And cider, which was the officially sanctioned alcoholic drink for the trip. Dallas is holding Ming the Siamese.



The photo was taken by Ian’s father George who worked for ICL in Stevenage and was well off but who strangely refused to stand guarantor for the hire of the boat. We though this was mean, but fortunately my Dad (who probably earned half of what George pulled in) signed on the dotted line and we were off.

Ian drove most of the way at 50mph, which wasn’t far short of flat-out. It took about four hours to get there, an average speed of about 23mph. He was very careful.

The boat we hired was called the Vagabond, and was the oldest hire yacht on the Broads. Also the only one without an inboard motor (apart from the Hunter fleet at Ludham who probably wouldn’t have rented to us three). It was a terrifying 32 feet long including the bowsprit, and had three berths, one of which was very adjacent to the leaky and smelly marine toilet.

On the first afternoon, as I remember, we loaded up our stuff, Ian paid the extra money to have his car garaged for the week at the boatyard (Charlie and I thought this was very funny), we told them we could sail competently, and clamped the one-and-a-half horse power British Seagull outboard to the transom bracket. We had bottled out and rented the outboard for an extra fifteen shillings a week (75 pence - ah, dear dead days!). We motored to Hickling Broad and tied up for the night at (I presume, though I can’t remember) The Ferryboat Inn. All the evenings descend into an alcoholic blur from this point on. I couldn’t remember them at the time and I certainly can’t now.

The next morning we were brave and got the sails up for the first time on Hickling. It was immediately apparent that this was no amateur's boat. By the standard of most Broads hire yachts she was vastly overcanvassed (I believe there was even a topsail hidden away in a locker somewhere) and we scared ourselves pretty thoroughly. We decided to motor down to Potter Heigham and lower the mast to go under the bridge and reach the rest of the Broads system. Our immediate target was Barton Broad where both Charlie and I had attended our School Sailing Camp and learned to sail. At least, I had learned how to coax a British Seagull into life there. This is us at Potter before we dropped the mast for the first time, Charlie on the left, me on the right.



Our aim was to tie up at a pub every night, but we soon found that it was cheaper to buy booze from shops and souse quietly in the cabin at night. We saw no girls all week; the boat was fizzing with hormones. I seem to recall a copy of a dubious magazine called Fiesta (which was usually soggy with bilge water) was all the reading matter, except for a copy of Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of the Flowers” which I took, and Charlie’s guitar tutor book; he could strum a tune, but his sense of rhythm was awful. We didn’t encourage him to play. I think Ian may have had a copy of Autocar.



We topped up on food and alcohol whenever we could - at Potter, at Ludham Bridge where the above photo was taken, at the Hole In The Wall at Barton Turf (the back door of a grocery shop where we could buy cigarettes and alcohol - a place we learned about at the age of 12 when it had supplied all the illicit booze to the School Sailing Camp), and at every stop thereafter.

Actually the photo above is almost a historic document now. The far river bank, at the extreme left of the shot where the white hulled motor cruiser is moored, is now lined with mature trees which make sailing up to the bridge more difficult than it was in 1966.

We made it up to Barton Broad and had a good couple of days there; we went down as far as Acle Bridge and up as far as Ranworth; then we turned round and started back. The weather was a bit miserable - only a couple of sunny days - but I can't remember much more about our week, mainly due to a combination of alcohol in unaccustomed amounts, lack of sleep, and because I was going down with Glandular Fever at the time - I was in bed and delirious a couple of days after we got back to Stevenage. But I do remember putting that fearsome bowsprit through the side of a plywood hire dayboat - Ian was on the helm and we'd been trying to tack past St Benet's Abbey while this bloody dayboat had impeded us all the way along that straight bit of river. Ian had a stubborn streak; he shouted at the day boat for about the 5th time that it was his right of way and that he was going to carry on with his tack. They presumably didn't believe us and also carried on in our way. To our horror Ian was as good as his word and rammed the dayboat halfway down its length with the steel-tipped bowsprit. The bowsprit went into the plywood hull with a crunching sound and as it went deeper in - we had quite a lot of momentum behind us with full sail up and weighing about three tons - there was a sort of zizzz noise as the bobstay - a steel rope connecting the end of the bowsprit to the Vagabond's waterline, sliced a neat groove down from the point of inmpact. When we finally managed to kick ourselves clear from the dayboat it had quite a neat keyhole-shaped aperture in its side, about a foot deep with a four inch circle punched out at the top.

A great deal of shouting went on and Ian, incandescent with rage although we could no longer be said to be the injured party, was still making rude gestures at them as we cleared St Benet's Reach. They were tieing up at the Abbey, presumably to inspect the damage. (We didn't report the incident to the boatyard, we heard no more about it and, thank heavens, my Father didn't lose the deposit on the holiday.)

That was the high point really; I've never been a sailing vandal since. The rest of the week it rained, we got wet, Charlie moaned about us smoking in the cabin, we ran out of money, we took turns to cook awful meals (by the end of the week we were down to bread and jam and cheese), Charlie worried about his guitar getting damp, and I started to feel really quite peculiar as the Glandular Fever took hold. It was character-forming. I've been morose ever since.

22 Dealing with dings and holes

Here's Lugg upside down with the dings inked round with a Magic Marker to remind me where to excavate and where to put the filler. Some of the pits in his surface are just where years of badly applied paint have cracked and flaked - these disappear when the old paint is removed, a process I've nearly finished; and some are the result of past collisions and crunches - sometimes just cracks which need raking out, sometimes holes which go right through into the glass cloth in the laminate. This sort need a bit more preparation; rake out all the loose stuff, then drip in polyester resin to replace that which is missing; sand smooth when it's gone off, and fill and fair with car body filler. So far this process has taken me about six hours and I reckon I've got about another four hours to do before the first coat of waterproof primer is on and I can see all the minor imperfections that will need attention before the gloss is applied. You can see from the photo above that Lugg's had a hard life. More dings than you can shake a big stick at.



And here's the repair I had to make to the back end of the hull after I discovered there was a crack which led straight through the bottom of the skeg from underwater into the aft buoyancy tank. I had to enlarge the crack when removing all the loose material before I could repair it. You can see the resulting cavity under the layers of GRP I applied - it's the two black bits in the middle of the upper surface. No wonder the boatyard drilled a drainhole from the aft buoyancy tank into the cockpit!

It seemed immoderately to please Jack, my 87 year-old retired farmer neighbour, to see the hole. He said: "You need one of them so you don't have to bail, Boy!" Then he laughed quite a lot. I didn't - I was up to my ears in polyester resin and chopped strand mat fixing it. Anyway. there are three layers of one ounce cloth over the hole - about the same thickness as the original hull minus the white gelcoat. There will also be a wooden rubbing strip glued to the bottom of the skeg - in fact all along the keel - so there will be plenty of material between the water and me.

The weather's forecast to be lousy tomorrow, so I feel a trip to Wroxham coming on to buy rowlocks and their sockets. And some waterproof primer. And anything else that comes to mind. Just like Tom Dudgeon at the beginning of Coot Club - except older and fatter; much older.

Chapter 2 - Shipwreck

The next major episode in my sailing career involved nearly drowning on the Great Ouse near Bedford. First I will have to introduce the other characters. Ian Roberts was my best mate in school and out from the age of about fourteen to eighteen when we slowly lost touch (me to college, him to become a Chartered Accountant). He was tall, thin, gentle and seemed slightly effeminate; he passed his driving test two weeks after his 17th birthday, and his parents gave him a car - a 12 year old Standard Eight, possibly the slowest vehicle in the road by 1966 when he acquired it. And yes, his parents were well off; they seemed fabulously wealthy compared to everyone where I lived. They had two new cars on their driveway as well as the Standard.

Ian had a sister, Sally, two years younger, who I fancied; Sally had a friend, Carole, who I also fancied, as did Ian (well, we were 17). Ian and I and another school friend, Charlie Legg (now Prof. Of Psychology Charles Legg somewhere in the University of London, I believe) decided to book a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads, of which more later. Ian’s father owned a Heron sailing dinghy - an eleven foot, plywood, gunter rigged, Jack Holt design - which he kept at Tempsford Sailing Club on the Great Ouse. Ian and I decided to practise our boat-craft before the holiday and, at the same time, to impress both Sally and Carole by taking them sailing. Fortunately Charlie couldn't come. Fortunately there were four life jackets. Sally and Carole prepared for the trip by each buying a pair of jeans and applying extra make-up for the occasion; Ian and I wore older clothes but didn’t stint on the hair-spray.

We drove in the Standard to Tempsford and launched the dinghy down the club slipway. The sun went in and the wind seemed to increase. Ian insisted I take the tiller; I felt suitably heroic. The river was about forty feet wide. We hoisted the sails, all climbed in, and cast off. I hadn’t sailed this boat before. In the first twenty yards, while I was trying to sort out the mainsheet, I managed to sail very badly by the lee, the boom went over in a standing gybe with an almighty crack, banging Carole on the head, the dinghy capsized and we all went in to the very cold water (did I mention that it was April?).

I came up under the sail. There was no air to breathe, just wet terylene sailcloth above my head. This was not a situation I had ever been in before. Purely by instinct I clawed my way to the edge of the sail and emerged choking and coughing. It felt as if I’d been under for minutes, but I guess it was seconds really. Sally and Carole had, very sensibly, swum to the bank where some cows decided to investigate the newcomers to their field; the girls suddenly found that they weren’t very fond of cows en masse, and stayed half in the water, shivering and swearing vilely. Ian and I decided to tow the dinghy to the bank before trying to right it, as the wind felt too strong and we were too demoralised to do the thing properly. The river took us about a quarter of a mile downstream before we managed to get the dinghy to the bank. At one stage we managed to stick the mast-head into the mud at the bottom of the river.

Eventually the four of us and the dinghy were all together again. We bailed the dinghy out, and decided that we wouldn’t try to sail it back upriver to the clubhouse, so we lowered the sails . We walked along the bank shivering and swearing at each other between chattering teeth; well, actually, most of the swearing was directed at me, to be fair.

No-one had a change of clothes; we had two small hand towels between us, and the roller towel from the loo in the clubhouse (fortunately we had Ian’s father’s clubhouse key - the only piece of foresight anyone exhibited during the whole day). We sent Ian out to run his engine until it was really hot in the car - he didn’t want to do this because of the waste of petrol, but we threatened him with violence if he didn’t. We got home about four hours after we set out, still very damp, barely speaking (except for me - I apologised all the way), having sailed about 20 yards, swum about 100 yards (or 10 in the case of the girls) and walked a good quarter of a mile towing the wretched Heron.

It took me a long time and a lot of Vodka and Tonics before Sally and Carole forgave me, but I never quite regained the heroic stature in their eyes that I fancy I had before.

Ian and I went to the Broads determined never to fall in again.

21 The World Turned Upside Down

Yes, after about 45 minutes of thinking how to do it, Lugg is now upside down on his trailer. This is because all that's left to do on the inside is to finish everything with the oak trim, and I don't want to do that while I'm still slopping about with paint and resins.

I lifted one end of the boat (about as much as I can manage these days!), and Linda very kindly manoeuvred the trailer underneath it. It's resting on a wood strongback which I lashed across the two side hull supports on the trailer.

Given good weather I'll be getting on with fixing the dings in the outside of the hull now. Then oak keel strip and bilge strips; then paint, lovely green paint..

20 More woodwork

Not a lot of progress in the past couple of days, mostly due to the continuing miserable weather. It’s perked up for a day or two now, though, and I’ve done two small jobs.


The first job was to start on the breasthook - the horizontal knee that joins the two gunwales just abaft of the stem head. This is a strengthening member, but I decided to make it decorative as well by fabricating it from a few offcuts of both white and brown oak. It won’t be finished until the final decorative oak strip is applied to the inside of the gunwale, but it’s a start.



The second job really was one of those “two steps forward and one back” efforts because I changed my mind and decided to give the rear thwart a wooden surface. I bought some quite reasonable WBP ply from B&Q with a good veneer face and cut it to fit on top of the rear thwart/buoyancy tank. Before I could epoxy it onto the GRP I had to remove all the paint - including that which I put on a week ago! I suppose I’d painted it without really thinking how it would look when finished - I just wanted the boat to look as if I was making real progress after weeks of taking it apart. But now it’s going to look much better.



'Sgonna look good when the oak trim hides the raw edge of the plywood.

19 Thwarted at last

Yes, it's in. And here's a photo to prove it. The excess glue needs cleaning up, and the whole thing will need to be sanded to a well-worn smoothness, as if caressed by the sea for a hundred years - oh, all right, slightly eroded is more the look I'm going for. But it's there, in place, done. The thwart hangs from the gunwales on each side and rests on the centreplate case (actually, is glued to the centreplate case). This has been the most difficult task so far, and it seems to have worked. In the words of Hugh Laurie in Blackadder 3 - "Well, huzzah for that!"



Oh, and here's a detail photo to follow on from the last entry about knees. Here they are in all their glory:



Now for the rowlocks and rudder, then we turn the hull over for keel and bilge bands, and painting. I could have a boat by the end of the month at this rate!

18 British Knees

A tutorial on knees - not the thing halfway between your foot and your naughty bits, but the wooden boat variety. Basically a knee is a wooden triangle which supports or reinforces two other bits of structural woodwork which meet (at approximately a right angle) in a wooden boat. Think of it as a bracket. Now, because wood has a grain and because wood is normally stronger along the grain rather than across it, knees need to be thought about. In fixing the main thwart in Lugg I will be using hanging knees, which is to say that the knees will be above the thwart, hanging it from the gunwale. To avoid the wood splitting under stress I have used oak instead of softwood - much tougher - and I’ve cut the knees so that the grain runs diagonally.

You can see from the diagram that when the grain runs vertically, if the wood splits, the thwart would detach from the gunwale; whereas if the grain runs diagonally the thwart will not become detached even if the wood splits.

In the photo you can see at top right the triangle of oak I cut for each knee, then the paper template I made up for the actual shape required and at bottom left the knee cut to (more or less) its final shape.



In this photo you can see the knee roughly in place (I’ve doctored this pic a bit to remove all the props and wedges I used to hold the knee temporarily in place). You can also see the direction of the grain. QED.



Today we have mostly shampooed all the carpets in the house and mowed the grass - not much boat time - and I'm tired now, so cheap epoxy putty (special recipe) next time. A bientot.

17 Working in the sunshine again

Yes, the weather's improved and the epoxy is going off in reasonable time again.



Yesterday I spent about two hours fitting watertight screw hatches to the fore and aft buoyancy compartments - basically I wanted to get inside them to have a look for any nasties, and it's always handy to have somwhere to stow small, light items safely when you're sailing. (Yes, I promise not to compromise the reserve buoyancy!)

The difficulty with these hatches was that they were bought as four inch diameter - handy, because I have a four inch hole cutter. Unfortunately they were actually four and a quarter inch diameter, which meant I spent a long time filing out the holes to fit after I'd used the tank cutter. Still, they look good, and seem pretty watertight.

Inside the buoyancy tanks there was a very little damp right in the bottom, but as some idiot had drilled small holes in them at some stage this was not surprising. The holes may have been drilled because water seepage - possibly osmosis - led to the sound of water sloshing about in them, but I've seen no sign of any problem yet. I've decided to epoxy the hull on the outside anyway, so for daysailing it shouldn't be any problem. And I'll block up the little holes with epoxy putty.

Incidentally, the tops of the two buoyancy tanks are made from threequarter inch thick end-grain softwood with GRP on both sides - it took an age to cut through and even longer to shape. Fortunately the vertical faces of the tanks are just an eighth of an inch of GRP - that rear one was a lot quicker.



Now this is getting to be something like: today I started on the main thwart, using one of my nice pieces of oak. The pic shows the thwart wedged in place with a temporary strut and a couple of folding wedges, and you can also see the clamps securing the final laminations of the inner gunwale where it's thickened for the thwart supports and rowlocks. At the back you can see the hatch in the aft buoyancy tank.

Since I took the photo I've roughly shaped the hanging knees which will support the seat; I promised a diagram of them ages ago and I'll explain them in more detail in the next article; I must also mention my patent epoxy putty next time - it's very cheap and very strong. Tomorrow should see the main thwart in place: fingers crossed!

16 Oak and teeth (a minor hobbit character)

The front thwart - the mast support - is in place, and there really is nothing like oak. It looks so good. Of course, it needs sanding, not least to get rid of the pencil marks and gluey fingerprints, but I’m sorely tempted to leave it plain and unvarnished when the boat’s finished.

Two steps forward and one back this morning again: the air temperature has slumped in the last couple of days down to about 12 degrees C in the day and about 5 by night. This is a full 10 degrees colder than we had last week. So when I grasped the lovely new mast support thwart this morning the glue joints broke - the epoxy was still plastic and squishy after 18 hours. It takes three hours to start to harden at above 15 degrees - below that it takes forever. Still, I was able to remodel the supports for the thwart, and it looks a bit more elegant than it did last night. The weather hasn’t warmed up yet, so it’s going to stay clamped up until the sun returns.

The last couple of days have been dominated by the toothache - I haven’t had one for years and years, but it’s been an absolute stinker, and today I went into Norwich and had a wisdom tooth pulled by my South African dentist, Albertus Joubert (really). Now I feel like a spring lamb; well, a spring old goat anyway; a pretty knackered spring old goat, but I hope for many good nights’ sleep from now on. A demain, mes enfants.