25 days
I was surprised to see, when I logged in, that it has been 25 days since I last wrote anything. How remiss of me! The fact is that I don't seem to have had the time to sit down and write. I did have a bit of time off. Emuna and I went to Llandudno for a couple of days for her birthday. Stuart has been away too. He had a weeks work in Belgium.
When I returned from Llandudno on 13th October I found that Stuart and Ryan had spread the oak boards out on the ground as a sort of flat pack boat. Stuart started laying out the spiling boards and selecting the timber for the new planks. It turned out that the logs that I had bought were rather too straight and this restricted the amount of planks that we could get out of them. "Hazel"s planks are curvier than I thought.
Meanwhile, the sides of the boat were steadily being removed until there was virtually nothing left of them. Just the new bottom with the 1951 conversion propped up on sticks. We decided to get the knees shotblasted, so they went off to a shotblasters, then to another as the first one nearly tripled the quoted price after they had done one knee. The idiots also removed the identifying marker that Stuart had put on the knee, despite being firmly told not to. It's a good job they only did the one, or we would have been totally unable to work out which knee went where.
Stuart thinks we need timber for 5 more planks. I heard of some trees being felled in Cumbria and so had a day out looking at them. They're mostly too thin, but there are a couple of useful ones. I just have to arrange transport now.
With the stempost in place I started work on the sternpost. Now that is nearly ready.
We have a few new volunteers. Jake is travelling regularly from Lincoln to help. Bernard has started taking care of the tools. Nick is coming for a day each week and Rita joins us when she has a day off from social working. At the moment Reg is up from Rugby, carefully planing bevels on the edges of the bottom strakes. What we need now are some fundraising volunteers to magic up the rest of the money that we need. Any offers?