Paying the Devil

Yar! For you landlubbers, paying the devil is a seaman's way of saying caulking between the keel and the garboard strake, and that's just what I was doing today. And while you may caulk with some chemical mastic, I was paying out my seams with cotton wick, a home made mallet and my caulking irons. Larger seams would require oakum, but my seams are as tight as a... well no need for that kind of salty language.

Here are the pictures I promised yesterday. I had them but was too busy to post them.
This is the port side looking aft. Its a terrible picture but it shows the dead straight sides. This is perhaps the oddest feature of the boat but it was a design necessity. I needed the full width at the chine for adequite displacement but I couldn't cant the side out any because the deck needs to extend another 1-1/2 feet out from the sheerline to accomodate the paddle wheels and if the sides did come out any, the boat would never fit out of the back yard. Then I'd have to install a bathtub and fireplace like Landsailor Dave at Traders Cove.

This one is from the starboard quarter looking forward. For some reason it looks a lot bigger from this perspective. Maybe because you can't really see the tapered bow. You can also see the leading edge of the skeg I finally got around to making the other day. You can kind of see that it matches the height of the bow. This is actually a design feature I put in to protect the wheels from grounding. The wheels will reach down to the bottom of the keel amidships. The bow and skeg are both 2-1/2 in. higher (or deeper) than that so even if both are grounded most of the weight will be carried by the keel and not the wheels. Why not just shorten the wheels? It's that whole displacement problem again, except this time it had to do with the height of the boat and where the center of the weight of the boiler would be. Suffice to say, everything is where it is for a reason.

This one is of the skeg. That the piece that is standing proud of the keel back there. Its designed as a sacrificial piece that can be replaced if need be. You can also get a good look at how the stern curves up. It's actually a fairly tight radius and took quite a bit of steaming to get the planks to lay in like that. Its designed like this to make the boat a bit "sucky" in the rear in order to put more water over the rudder, which is fairly small. The idea is that ole bernoulli will pull the stern down a bit into the water while she's in motion and pull the water up a bit as well, giving me an artificially high waterline over the rudder. I don't know if this is sound naval architecture but that's how it plays out in my head. It will eat up some power, but we're not looking to set speed records here.

This last pic is the false stem I installed the other day. I should have taken it further up the bow so that you could see how it bends over the keel. Those bums are the plugs that haven't been sawn off yet. This is one of the few pieces that have gone on exactly as I imagined it would. It's main purpose is to hide the end of the side planks as you can see here, but its also a sacrificial piece for the stem so that if there's ever a collision with something harder than the boat, that piece is a lot easier to replace than the stem and fore keel.

That's it for today. Tomorrow I'll finish paying the seams and then it's painting time. We should be ready to flip this weekend. Keep your finger's crossed.