Great Florida Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival

Slow progress on the Goat. Took me a lot longer than expected to loft the hull sides. There is a slight hollow in the bottom just in front of the transom which I did not expect so I held off on cutting the sides out and checked in with Michael Storer and the helpful crew on the forum. Turns out I was doing it right but better ask than waste a lot of ply. I'm a relatively new iPhone owner and that little device never ceases to amaze me. I was in the workshop browsing the forums and posted a question. An answer, from Michael, was waiting for me when I got home, amazing. Did not have a whole lot of time to build anyway as there were lots of interesting things going on like:

The Great Florida Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival at Cortez.

From Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival

What a fantastic little harbor and a perfect setting for small boat messing about. Just in front of the docks is a large shoal which is exposed at low tide. It makes for a perfect beaching area for numerous shallow draft boats.

From Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival

Cortez is a unique fishing community with a working waterfront including a fish house and all of it's associated salty charm. Let's hope this little spot never succumbs to the condo-locust hordes. Click on the photos to go to the photo album of the event. Most of the pictures were taken with my iPhone 'cause the trusty old Canon PS finally gave up the ghost with one last spectacularly distorted image.

From Gulf Coast Small Craft Festival

The iPhone images are horribly low quality but considering it is a phone, not too bad. They remind me of aged Kodacolor 400 prints. Oh and since the iPhone pictures are geotagged with the photo location they automatically show up on the map in Picasa. Yes I know, nothing new but it always impresses me when this stuff just works.

Time spent: 4 hours
Total time: 13 hours 30min

Table saw setup for ripping kayak strips

This worked amazingly well. Absolutely perfect strips every time. Two horizontal featherboards and one vertical kept the very flexible 16 and 20 foot strips completely under control. Faster and easier with two people but even single handed it is remarkably low drama, as Dave demonstrates below.

Dave's stripping

cedar that is.....
No progress on the GIS but Dave has been busy making cedar and redwood strips for the kayak. He's managed to cut 16 and 20 foot lumber down to 1/4" strips, all by himself. A very thin kerf 7-1/4" blade mounted on the table saw and a couple good feather-boards did the trick. Next step is to saw each strip in half yielding the 1/4 x 3/4 strips, then it's on to beading and coveing.



All of the stations are now mounted and aligned on the strong-back, ready for the first strip.

No building this weekend

Bulkheads, seat tops and centerboard case are cut

All that's left to cut are the hull sides and bottom. Amazing how few
ply parts there are to this boat. The work frame is worth it's weight
in gold!

Time spent: 3 hours 30 min
Total time: 9 hours 30 min

First cut

Chesapeake Light Craft demo day

No boat building today since CLC was in town with their trailer full of boats. We spent several hours test paddling all sorts of lovely wooden craft. A pair of nice wooden kayaks are on the builder's list. Both Kristi and I really liked the 18ft CLC Night Heron. It's #1 on our short list.