The Interior work: Time for an update. It's been 3 weekends of working on the interior (about 25 hours total). I now have a wet locker built, and the settee well underway. The carbon/nomex panels I am using are both a joy and pain to work with.

The pain is the itch and the splinters: carbon fiber dust/shards are worst - worse than fiberglass dust, aluminum shavings in the skin, tiny bits of copper wire. I've had them all in my fingers and carbon hurts the most. There is also a "Tedlar" film coating on a lot of these panels. It's a plastic film that has to be sanded off before bonding anything. It eats sanding discs.

The joy is the results of working with this stuff. To make a rounded corner, you just cut off the inside skin (width depends on the angle you want); fill the exposed core with bog, and fold. It's like magic and makes the most beautfil little rounded corners that would otherwise take hours and hours of fairing to make. It's so stiff that only minimal clamps and jigs are required to hold stuff in place.

Here's a few pictures: The first one is the port settee back (and also the inside of Maia's bookcase which will have openings on the other side of the panel)




















Here is a very nice corner that will form the top of the seat back. Thin enough to grab onto as well. Beautiful isn't it?























The next picture is what I call"the holy grail". I admit it; I'm a wood butcher so real wood cabinetry is beyond me. But this stuff makes it so easy. Here's 3 rounded edges that meet in one corner. Just a tiny bit of bog on the very corner and it will be perfect....






And here's part of the seat in place. You can see the openings for Maia's bookshelf underneath. The above pictures represent 10 hours of work.

I haven't been out at the boat much lately - too busy writing about it to visit. I went out the other day to pace out the cabin with Evan. We worked out the dimensions of the wet locker, sorted out the settee arrangement, and decided how to arrange my office space. We even decided on some 'built-ins' - planning some integrated bookshelves and cubbies into the furniture.

It looks like the furniture will develop quickly. The carbon nomex panels are so easy to use; building furniture is more like an exercise in origami than cabinetry. Evan just makes slices on the inner skin and folds it into shape. The resulting curves look like they came out of a mould.

My goal of a summer sailing holiday may not be the pipe dream I initially thought it was.

I'm painting, I'm painting



Finally the inside cabin seam fairing is ended (for now). I've got a coat of primer and paint on most of the inside of the cabin bulkheads and sides. Looks pretty good but needs 1 more finish coat. I wasn't trying for a smmmmooooth inside finish. I believe in honesty in my materials or "you can see the fiberglass weave". It's not that I'm lazy, nope, it's a design philosophy.

You can still see the foam core because there is no outside paint on the deck. The places that are missing paint are where other things will be bonded to them. No sense in painting something just to sand it all off...

I've been getting a lot of suggestions for the construction of the interior furniture. I'm using surplus carbon skin/Nomex honeycomb cored panels. My mistake was thinking of them as the same as bits of plywood - but they're not. If you think about removing the inside skin at corners you can bend them into all sorts of nice shapes in one go. Eliminates a ton of work (I hope). I just have to figure out how to do a few of the other joints. Suggestions are welcome - see the pictures below.

Fairing, fairing, and more fairing. Just about done though. Probably I'll paint the roof this weekend with at least 1 coat of primer.

Here's a picture of our new dinghy that I am designing for the http://boatplans-online.com/ website. It's also going to be our dinghy - 10' long, 15 HP, room for 4 real adults (and 1 Maia)

New GV10 dinghy (G V means "Garvey style , V-bottom)

Another mini-milestone reached. Last of the interior cabin lamination. Today my buddy Leighton and I completed a nice transverse foam/glass/carbon beam across the cabin roof. Nothing like working with 5.8m of wet out carbon fiber all at once. Thankfully, the strips were only 3" wide.

Then this evening it was hiking through the forest in the snow for 1/2 hr. to Hollyburn Lodge for dinner, music, and near death toboganning back to the car.

Next weekend - more bogging / sanding of the interior seams. Should be done that by end of February. Then build the cabin furniture in March / April, deck hardware end of April, and paint exterior in May or June.

Thinking of Richard Woods and Jetti Mantzke

UK. Falmouth Coastguard co-ordinates international rescue mission off Mexico  
Thursday, 19 January 2006
Coastguard news:

Two people aboard a 33 foot catamaran off the coast of Mexico requested urgent
assistance in extreme weather conditions of Force 10 - 11. They battened
themselves down in the boat whilst the waves washed over their boat. The
alarm was raised at 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday evening by a transferred '999'
call from a friend who had been contacted by the crew of the British
registered catamaran 'Eclipse', informing Falmouth Coastguard that the vessel
was 90 miles from Haultuclo, in force 10. The vessel had no life raft other
than a hard dinghy, a handheld radio and flares and the EPIRB had been set
off. The two crew on board the vessel were a male from the UK and a female
from the USA. Falmouth Coastguard contacted its counterparts in America and
Mexico in order to pass co-ordination of search and rescue onto the Mexican
Coast Guard. The vessel by this time had issued a 'Mayday'.
Martin Bidmead, Falmouth Coastguard Watch Manager, says: "Rescue authorities
in Mexico were contacted through a link call with United States Coast Guard
NORFOLK and a Mexican interpreter. Mexican authorities assumed coordination.
We continued to get positional updates from the vessel. The Mexican Coast
Guard sent two 100 foot patrol boats and a helicopter to search for the
catamaran, but was unable to locate them. Fortunately an American war ship
was in the area and was able to launch a helicopter to continue the search.
The crew was told to be prepared to abandon their vessel and listen to
channel 16 and put the vessel lights on. Communications were made via
Falmouth Coastguard throughout the incident.
I am pleased to confirm that the two crew have now been air lifted by the
United States Navy and will be taken to the warship and will hopefully be
landed safely ashore in the next few days. This incident demonstrates the
international role played by Falmouth Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre,
working with foreign search and rescue authorities to bring about a
successful conclusion to a serious situation."

For Evan - for the days when he wonders why...

Up in the bridgedeck cabin. Visualize if you will comfortable seating for 6, a chart table, and a wet locker/closet.

Looking down from the bridgedeck cabin into the port hull. The head is through the arched doorway and Maia's cabin is aft of Evan. The area he is working in will be Maia's school area.

From the galley looking forward in the starboard hull - currently the settee area/rubbish heap but imagine it as a future cabin for Ev and I. Aft of the future gourmet galley is the starboard guest cabin.

The view from the port hull, across the cabin, looking to the starboard hull. Spacious, modern, carbon-nomex comfort to come.

The view from the starboard hull looking across to the port hull.

Some day we will call all this home...

Absolutely nothing to do with the boat, but I liked this photo I took of a foggy Vancouver from midway up Cypress Mt.

Not much to report on the boat building side of things - I was in Baltimore last weekend and this past weekend we went to Port Townsend, WA to buy some materials. A long day of driving and ferry lineups but it was worth it.

Another multihull boat builder had a shipping container full of surplus aircraft carbon fiber/Nomex cored panels. These were "scrap" in the aircraft industry but fine for boats. His boat is a work of art but it's taken him 9 long years to get to where it is nearing completion. Anyway, he had a bunch more panels than he needed and I kindly offered to take them off his hands for what seems like not enough money. He was super generous and was glad to see them go to a good home; and I gave him all the cash we had brought.

Now if I can just convince Di that an all black carbon fiber saloon seating would look really cool....