The Greenland Bug Cont. (Pt. 5)

Well it has been a loooong time since I posted anything about my boat's progress. I have been working on it in bursts. I will go a week or two working each day, and then get to a tough spot where I will simply stare at it for a week or two. That mixed with working or travelling on weekends has made for some irregular progress.

Let me tell you where the project stands. But first, I should mention that I have just come back from Qajaq USA's Delmarva 2007 event.

(Check out Qajaq USA...)

It was a blast! Three days hanging out with other people who want to practice Greenland Ropes exercises, rolling kayaks and building boats. I tried lots of other skin-on-frame boats and a couple wooden kayaks. Of the two favorite boats (one skin and one wood) that I tried rolls out in, I enjoyed the McNeil's boats the best. Joy owns a small skin boat and Dennis a self-designed wood with a stripper deck. I believe that they both built the boats for rolling, but seemed to add enough room into the boats to make them comfortable for paddling as well. The skin boat was a little too small for me, and the wood was a little more volume than I wanted in my boat. So to test their rolling capacity I did layback rolls, forward finishing hand rolls and balance braces in all the boats, including my Outer Island. Obviously the small skin boat did the best balance braces and laybacks. The wood was a little better at the two as well. But surprisingly, my ole Outer Island was still the best for forward finishing hand and Norsaq rolls. Perhaps it is simply the round hull that is providing that quality. Anyway, I still think I am on the right track with my boat, I am just excited to see if my new hard chine super-low-volume boat reacts the same for forward finishing rolls versus laybacks as I have just discovered with other boats.

I believe when I left of the last blog, I had just completed the interior of the hull. So shortly after that I spent a good day working on taking measurements of the bulkheads and deciding what to do for their size. During all the time that I was working on the open hull, I noticed that it was not always the same width at all times. During the day as the air heated up, the width of the hull would expand up to a quarter of an inch, and sometimes more. I am convinced that it was a combination of the heat and the humidity, although I am sure the the heat had more effect. As the hull sat, it would be a minimum of 19 inches wide in the morning, and somewhere about 19 and a quarter in the afternoon. Well, I like the idea of the narrower beam, so I was planning on trying to capture that. I also noticed how the hull had a natural 'pinched' shape as you ran your eye from bow to mid ships and then back to the stern. It was the natural shape of the side hull panels pulling inwards as much as they could against the outwards flare of the boat shape. Mark Roger's instructional book directed me to place spacers into the hull at this time to ensure that the hull flared out into an even arc along the beam of the hull. Silly me-I decided to ignore this. It seems to me that the hull was trying naturally to recreate the Greenland rolling boat form where more volume is removed from the boat by 'pinching' in the beam fore and aft of the cockpit. As I said before, I believe that this characteristic makes a Greenland rolling boat do two things better: first your body at the cockpit will lay lower in the water during a balance brace or completion of a roll, secondly, the greater flat surface created by the sides of the bow and stern flare will create more stability during the times just mentioned. Hopefully this is a correct assumption on my part for the characteristics of a Greenland rolling boat. But who knows!?

So I left the pinching effect stay, measured the hull in the morning and cut my fore and aft bulkheads out of cardboard, trimming as I went until they fit just right. Then glued final wood cutouts in place with epoxy, along with a strengthening strip along their upper edge. Perhaps I may not have mentioned a step before this, where I painstakingly glued on two layers of plywood as sheer strips along the gunwales from bow to stern, then planed then down so that their angles would match the deck yet to come as it will be flat behind the cockpit and curved in front of the cockpit. That step alone took me a week. After the two bulkheads were in, I sanded the interior of the hull one more time and then did a final smooth coat of epoxy inside. I slightly roughed it up with fine sandpaper and a scotchbrite pad afterwards for a satin sheen.

Next the deck!

Once again after staring at the boat for a week or more deciding what to do for putting the deck on, I finally got up enough nerve to continue. Since I had taken in the hull beam dimension significantly from the original plan, I knew there would be a huge amont of overhang once the deck had been installed. I figured out how to mark and remove this excess before continuing. I made a marking tool to mark the deck a quarter inch outside the exterior hull sheer edge and then ripped off all the excess with a jig saw. I now have lots of high grade firewood for the winter.

The next step was to make sure again that I could get into the boat alright. So I gingerly placed the hull on foam blocks and practiced getting in and measuring the height of the foredeck at what I believed to be the minimum clearance. Nelson even came over one weekend to share the fun of squeezing into the boat and seeing what minimal deck height he could tolerate. After much experimentation, I decided upon taking the deck height to eight inches instead of my previous design of seven and five eights inches. Next I took the provided deck riser piece which would hold the deck up at the desired height and curvature and started slowly cutting it down (actually I made a copy and cut this just in case I screwed up), until I got the eight inch height I wanted.

Now comes the hard part. I placed the deck riser in place, painted the underside of the large fore deck panel, evenly spread epoxy on the sheer strips already on the hull, and carefully placed the deck on top of the hull. Then I used every cam-strap and prepared string to tighten the deck piece down to the hull so that an even contact was made all around. Just for good measure that day, I placed the small bow end on as well and tied it down too. Whew! I felt like I had finished doing a project about which I had no clue of what I was doing. I only hoped it would hold.

Gluing down the first of the four deck panels.

Lots of straps, string and weights are needed to get the deck panels to lay down clean.

The fore deck support which is holding the shape of the deck while glued and fiber glassed.

A good shot of the fore bulkhead/foot brace.

Well it held, and the next day I epoxied down the two stern panels. They were actually harder to keep flat against the hull edges than were the two front panels. The following day I started planing down the overhang still sticking off the deck. For all the planing I have spoke about I found it immensely easier to use a spoke shave rather than a block plane. There was just too much curvature in the pieces to be planed to use a block. Once the planing was complete, it was amazing how good it looked, except for all the epoxy fingerprints and old duct tape marks on the hull. It was now officially a boat! Well almost...

Planing and sanding down the deck overhang.

The next job was to sand and sand and sand some more. First I sanded off all the fingerprints, globs of epoxy and old duct tape scars and tape sticky backing. At this point, may I make a suggestion. If you or anyone else you know believes it is a great idea to use duct tape on a plywood boat to hold it in shape while the epoxy is drying, tell them they are nuts!! I will always have scars in the wood where the duct tape pulled fibers out of the wood when it was removed. It was NOT worth the effort. Stick to copper wire stitches or use rope and straps.

After I completely sanded the hull, then I added more epoxy along the chines and the keel to fill any gaps. The pretty sanded hull looked nasty again after this. Well, more sanding then. Next I added epoxy onto the keel edges of the bow and stern sheer as well as about three feet back along the keel line from both bow and stern. This is supposed to make for a hard keel strip on the delicate edges. And it looks cool. Of course then there was lots more sanding. I sanded and sanded and sanded for at least a week. Finally I was down to 220 grit paper, the wood was getting smooth and shiny and I had even over sanded in a couple of places right through the first layer of the wood. Nothing vital. It will be a memory of all the sanding to see on the completed boat.

Epoxy stern (and bow) sheer strips.

Epoxy keel strip built into the stern (and bow.).

You can see the 'pinching' from this angle.

The profile of the boat while upside down on the horses.

Now it sits, ready to have the fiberglass and epoxy laid on the exterior of the boat. First the hull, then the deck, then the hull and sides once again. And I am back to staring at the boat waiting to get up enough nerve to continue.

Finished deck awaiting glass and a coaming.

What I plan to do yet before I finish the glassing of the deck is to play with my fit. I noticed that after I attached the fore deck to the hull and took out the fore deck riser, the deck sagged back down from a height of eight inches to about seven and five eights again just fore of where the cockpit rim should be. So now that the deck is on, I need to revisit that option of lowering the deck just that little bit more. Should I do it? Probably.

Lastly, I have already been giving thought to what the next boat should be like. How could I make an even better rolling boat, has been going through my mind all week. The next boat would lower the stern deck still more, keeping it flat in the traditional East Greenland style. The fore deck will be rounded as the C.L.C. design evolved using a single tortured panel of wood. The hull shape will be as rounded as possible in a shallow smooth arc from beam edge to edge, and with a smooth transition from hull to deck. Over all length would be from 16 to 17 feet and beam about 18 inches. Beam enough to prevent too much lateral slop while capsizing and returning upright, and cockpit opening as small as possible to obtain as much contact as possible since so much other contact has been lost in the overall deck height. And the overall weight would have to be less. Of course this is all just wishful thinking yet. I still have not even had the one in progress on the water.

Then I wondered if I would make that next boat, still only going on what I know, how would I do it? Wood, stripper, skin on frame? It would be all up to how to make that hull a smooth curve. Plywood would be crazy. It would have to be a dozen or more thin strips that all join effectively into a curved hull. A stripper would be possible, but hard to imagine, and heavy. A skin on frame would be the easiest method and even the lightest. It would have to be a super-low-volume Greenland style back deck, curved fore deck, and Badarka-like hull with many chine strips.

So I started thinking about this fictional boat, and then it occurred to me that I already have one just like it on the boat rack. Almost like it. It has the low flat back deck. It has the low curved fore deck. It has the low curved hull. Although it is probably still twenty or more inches wide and only four meters long. Know what it is? My old-school slalom boat. Hmm......