Miss Babe of the Day

Thursday, July 23

Today we worked on parts. My task was to build one of the spars. Most spars are tapered. You take a square piece of wood and cut it to shape on two sides and plane those sides smooth. Then you cut the shape on the other two sides and plane them. That gives you a square tapered stick. From there you start and you plane off the four corners and make it eight sides. Then you cut off the corners and make it 16 sides. You continue the process until you get 1024 sides and you call it round. Actually about 16 sides you can start sanding and get it rounded out. I must admit that I love to plane boards. With a very sharp plane and some nice wood, you get this curl of paper thin wood that shoots out of the top of the plane. It is a very “Zen” thing to do. After about 5 hours, I had this really cool pile of shavings about ankle deep and an aching back. We are starting to add the parts to the boat. The centerboard trunk is installed. The inside rails are installed and we are starting to make bulkheads. The centerboard and rudder are finished but it takes some special hardware to install them so I doubt they will get installed. Today if the weather will permit, we will pour the lead in the centerboard and rudder. This is the first boat I have ever seen with lead in the rudder.

We had the big drawing yesterday to see who gets to take the boat home. I was the only one who did not participate. Delta just doesn’t like to check thru a boat as baggage. The process is that any member of the class can enter the drawing. There are two requirements if you win. First of all, you have to pay for the materials used to build the boat. For this boat, that is about $2,000. The second requirement is you have to get the boat out of here. They have a lot of boats here that are used in classes. There are about twelve to fifteen in storage buildings. If every class left a boat here to pick up for a couple of weeks the place would be total overrun with boats. Will was the big winner. He is in the process of moving to Baltimore and starting his first job. He has visions of lazy summer afternoons in the inter harbor with “Miss Babe of the Day” sailing around.